Linda Ronstadt, Los Cenzontles go home together in new movie

Linda Ronstadt had yet another trick up her sleeve.

While grudgingly agreeing to cooperate on the hit 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” she quietly set a different plan in motion. Shifting the focus from her extraordinary career, Ronstadt brought together the key players for a companion film celebrating Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, the scrappy San Pablo cultural beehive that has trained hundreds of young people in traditional Mexican music and dance.

Veteran documentary producer James Keach needed to nail down the crucial interview with Ronstadt for “The Sound of My Voice” and she kept putting it off. “Eventually she said, ‘I’m going to Mexico, why don’t we do the interview there?’” Keach recalled. That trip led directly to “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” a new documentary available for streaming by Shout! Studios and other platforms on Oct. 20.

Keach didn’t realize it when he agreed to the interview in Mexico, but Ronstadt’s trip back to her family’s hometown in Sonora wasn’t a casual visit. She had chartered a bus and invited a 22-member contingent from Los Cenzontles, including guitarist Eugene Rodriguez, the cultural center’s founder and director, and vocalists Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez (no relation to Eugene). Oh yeah, Jackson Browne was coming, too.

Keach not only got an interview with Ronstadt covering her entire life, he shot gorgeous footage of Los Cenzontles musicians and dancers performing in the town square of her familial village, Banámichi. The first people on screen after “The Sound of My Voice” title appears are Trujillo and Rodriguez, decked out in brightly-hued traditional dresses designed and sown by Eugene Rodriguez’s wife, Marie-Astrid Dô-Rodriguez (work she talks about in “Linda and the Mockingbirds”).

Once Keach started hearing the voices and stories of Los Cenzontles (which is Spanish for The Mockingbirds) he was smitten.

“Originally I was just going to go down and film the dancing and singing,” he said. “I started to get to know the stories, and I couldn’t help myself. I started shooting. There is a common denominator between the two films and that’s Linda.”

A pop superstar who reinvented herself again and again, Ronstadt first encountered Los Cenzontles in the early 1990s when she came across the company performing traditional dances from southern Mexico and singing in the indigenous language of Mixtec at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

“They were doing these traditional dances from Michoacán perfectly, little kids, 11- and 12-year-olds,” Ronstadt said. “I started talking to Eugene and he told me they were trying to get enough money to go to Oaxaca and Michoacán to study with the masters.”

She decided to help out. In the middle of a tour performing the mariachi standards from her platinum album “Canciones de Mi Padre,” Ronstadt added a concert to the end of her run. She donated the proceeds to Los Cenzontles, funding the first of many trips south to study with elder traditional Mexican artists.

“She’s been our guardian angel” ever since, Rodriguez said. “Linda found a way to leverage her position to help us. She’s always done that for us. That’s the kind of person she is. She introduced us to Ry Cooder and Jackson Browne not because we’re going to save the puppies in Richmond but because Linda’s real values are about learning music at home. That’s where the connections get made.”

While the bus trip to Sonora provides a narrative thread through “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” the documentary’s heart is the stories of the young people who have found a home at Los Cenzontles. Again and again they talk about the way that learning traditional Mexican art forms has instilled pride in their heritage, which in turn makes them more confident and comfortable Americans.

For Ronstadt, Los Cenzontles harkens back to her music-filled childhood, when family gatherings revolved around songs and unhurried, delectable meals prepared from food cultivated nearby. Rather than fostering an ethic of competition, the center cultivates community.

“First of all, you don’t have to audition or have any special musical ability,” she said. “You just learn and put in the work. I don’t like the idea of music being delegated to professionals. They’re learning the music properly and they’re dancing and singing for their own fun. What a concept! They have some wonderful performers, but they take music off the stage and bring it back to the living room where it belongs.”

The film arrives in the midst of a buzz of activity at Los Cenzontles. Classes have all moved online during the pandemic, and the center has produced a steady flow of videos featuring the students, including eight for the Front Porch Sessions and another recent batch for the Backyard Sessions (both directed by James Hall). Last month the San Francisco Symphony released a video of a collaboration with Los Cenzontles on YouTube.

For Keach, whose production company PCH Films has created Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning feature documentaries like “Glen Campbell … I’ll Be Me” and “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” deciding to make a film about Los Cenzontles meant a change of gears.

He covered Ronstadt’s Mexican background in “The Sound of Her Voice.” With “Linda and the Mockingbirds” he captured her fully in her element, surrounded by young people better equipped than many to understand how and why she insisted on singing and recording Spanish-language songs despite ardent resistance from her label.

“A lot of people who saw ‘The Sound of My Voice’ knew her as a rock star, not as a Latina,” Keach said. “They know her amazing voice, but not necessarily her background. Linda has inspired a whole new generation.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.

LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS

Documentary featuring Linda Ronstadt, Los Cenzontles, Jackson Browne and more, directed by James Keach

When & where: Available for streaming and purchase Oct. 20 on Shout Studios, Amazon Prime, iTunes and other platforms; $9.99-$19.99