Hans Rivera, 12, says he visits family every year in the Mexican town his father came from, but like his fellow music students in Juneau hasn’t played a lot of mariachis before. They also didn’t know much about the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe taking place this week, but got a cultural immersion in both during an annual celebration of the Mexican national holiday Sunday at St. Paul’s Catholic Church.

Rivera was among about 10 students and instructors with Juneau Alaska Music Matters (JAMM) who joined a mariachi band visiting from Anchorage to perform before a packed parish hall audience being served tamales as part of the celebration. After playing “El Gatito” (“The Kitten”) on cello with the rest of the ensemble, he said there’s both more energy and more challenge playing such music from Mexico.

“Mexican music is more alive and festive, and other music is more classical,” he said. The challenge with “basically everything” on a cello is “we have to do it really fast-paced and the cello is used to slower.”

The holiday celebration was hosted at the church for a third straight year by the Juneau Hispanic Ministry, with about 100 people attending a Mass and subsequent play featuring the holiday story of a Mexican peasant who became a holy visionary in 1531 after encountering an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The play and most of the Mass — except for the sermon itself — were in Spanish as part of the gathering’s tribute to the local Hispanic community.

Rivera said his father moved from the western part of Mexico in 1990. The youth has heritage ties to the area through his mother who is an Alaska Native, but he said there are aspects of Juneau that offer a similar sense of how he feels visiting relatives in Mexico.

“The forest downtown and in Thane,” he said. While not matching the landscape far to the south “it just feels like home.”

Students with JAMM, a nonprofit program that states it has 600 participants at all grade levels, get plenty of immersion into different cultures and genres, including a few encounters with Mexican music in recent years. But Sunday’s performance was a largely new experience for students and instructors alike that began in October when, in observation of Hispanic Heritage Month, musicians from Texas band Mariachi Para Todos visited Juneau for a series of lessons and performances.

“Something that’s very important to JAMM is connecting with the cultures of our students,” said Meg Rosson, an instructor with the program. “We saw them in the play and so, yeah, it means a lot to us to ask to be able to perform.”

Different students found different challenges in playing the mariachi music.

“These songs are usually faster, more high-pitched,” said Bayne Cheney, 11, a guitar player who said the strum patterns are also a bit tricky to pick up.

Evie Parks, 11, another guitar player, said it’s fun music to play as long as you can keep up.

“I like to play upbeat songs,” she said. However, “some of the chord changes are hard.”

Students and instructors said they knew little or nothing about the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe holiday before Sunday’s celebration. Their lack of Spanish kept many of them from a full revelation of the narrative, which among other things involves the apparition of the Virgin Mary showing the peasant where to pick roses in December to show to a skeptical bishop as proof of her appearance, but the general concept of a commoner experiencing a holy miracle shone through.

Delores Cervantes, coordinator of the Juneau Hispanic Ministry event, said the Anchorage-based group Mariachi Agave Azul was invited to be the first mariachi musicians at the ministry’s observance of the Feast Day, performing during the Mass as well as the actual feast afterward in the parish hall. The mealtime music got a boost from the students when a JAMM instructor asked about participating in the Mexican celebration after the program’s experience with the music during the fall.

“Of course we are honored and we are happy to have them,” she said.

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.