Guanajuato's mix of mines, mummies, music

Carrying guitars, mandolins, tambourines and an ungainly string bass, they led 35 of us away from the center of town, beyond the church of San Diego and the Jardín Unión, over stone bridges, up narrow, dark streets, centuries old, until somewhere near the Alley of the Kiss, in a plaza not much bigger than a family room, they stopped to play.

The pied pipers call themselves estudiantinas. They wander the city, playing traditional music, singing old favorites, making wisecracks, telling the city's stories and retelling its legends. They pass the hat and, sometimes, little ceramic carafes of wine.

"The satisfaction is to meet people, make them laugh," says Gerardo Leyva, 28, a violin student at the University of Guanajuato and head of the university's estudiantina group. "This is our job, to make people happy."

Jose Huerta, 48, a schoolteacher and founder of La Estudiantina de Guanajuato, adds, "It's something that makes you enjoy and feel life."

Guanajuato is filled with history -- bullet holes from the Mexican war of independence still pock city buildings -- and estudiantina groups have a lineage that stretches back before the Spanish conquest. Their crow-black, Renaissance-style costumes reflect their ancestry: poor Spanish university students who sang and performed street theater for money and to impress their girlfriends.

There are similar groups in Oaxaca and Guadalajara, for example, but Guanajuato is considered the birthplace of estudiantina in the Americas. Maybe that's why music is as fundamental to Guanajuato as movies are to Hollywood. Mariachi bands, folk groups, jazz combos, church choirs, lone guitarists -- their sounds seem to spill out into every plaza.

You might come to Guanajuato for a quick course in colonial history; not only is it one of Mexico's oldest cities, but it's also quite walkable. But it's theater and music that warm the cold colonial architecture. If you want a merry, living face to your history lesson -- and who couldn't use that about now? -- just show up almost any night at the Jardín Unión, the city's central square, and let the estudiantinas instruct you.

Mining and mummies

Guanajuato is Mexico's city of silver. The Spanish began mining it here in the 1520s, and mines are still open today. A couple of miles north of town, miners seek veins of silver, gold and more prosaic metals such as iron and zinc.