Before the Bears and Eagles kicked off on Monday Night Football, Mariachi Herencia de México performed at Soldier Field and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on trumpets, violins, and vihuela, while ESPN showed a flag stretched across the field. According to the Latin Times, it was the first time a mariachi group had performed the anthem at Soldier Field, and in the ESPN booth, Joe Buck said it gave him “chills.”

Online, the reaction ran, well, hotter. “Last time I checked, Mexicans have their own country and national anthem,” one post read, among the replies OutKick collected. At the same time, the Chicago Young Republicans settled on “This is not the Chicago I know! NFL IS WOKE.” By Tuesday, Alonso Orozco Jr., a member of the band, wrote on X that after performing the anthem “with love and respect for a great nation,” the group was facing “a huge wave of racist criticism.”

The outrage echoed what we saw in February, when Bad Bunny’s halftime show drew President Donald Trump’s criticism as “an affront to the greatness of America.” It also signals the high antagonism that seems the norm now among MAGA fans.

From Chicago’s Public Schools to the Field

Mariachi Herencia de México grew out of the Mariachi Heritage Foundation, which brought music instruction into Chicago’s public schools. Its 2017 debut album, Nuestra Herencia, was recorded by students from the city’s immigrant neighborhoods before earning a Latin Grammy nomination. Founder César Maldonado said back then that mariachi was “completely relevant to Chicago’s growing Mexican and Mexican American communities.” Nine years, two Latin Grammy nominations and a 2025 album called Viva La Música later, the group’s website describes its musicians as representatives of a bicultural generation in the United States.

They weren’t strangers to Soldier Field either, having played halftime at the Bears’ 2024 Latino Heritage Month game. This time they opened “Vamos Bears” night, which also brought Chicago singer and actor Sandra Delgado to halftime and two local high school athletes out as honorary captains for the coin toss. “(We were) very proud, very happy, very honored to be playing last night,” Cristian Paez, a 25-year-old violinist, told the Tribune.

So What Exactly Was Offensive About the Mariachi National Anthem?

Nobody touched the lyrics. Marca noted that the debate was about how the anthem was performed, and some viewers kept their complaint to that. “Maybe it’s just me, but hearing the American national anthem played mariachi-style on Monday Night Football feels weird,” one wrote in reply to ESPN, according to Sportsnaut. “I understand putting your own spin on music, but the national anthem is one of those things that just hits harder when it’s kept traditional.”

Others went straight past the arrangement. “Why they got a mariachi band playing on my TV, f***s going on?” one viewer wrote. At the same time, another post collected by OutKick insisted the musicians’ “full Mariachi regalia” was “100% symbolism dedicated to Mexico.” Sportsnaut described the critics as “only a small portion of the room,” and the Latin Times cautioned that a selection of social media posts can’t tell us how the audience as a whole felt. Still, “Mexicans have their own country” is not a note about brass sections.

Under ESPN’s Facebook post, a man who said he was born in Mexico, immigrated to the United States, and served in the military wrote, “This gives me the chills,” according to the Latin Times. Pat McAfee, who had the band on his show earlier that day, said he was “pumped up” to see them take the field, and one fan posted that “whoever decided on the mariachi band national anthem needs a raise immediately,” Sportsnaut reported.

For his part, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, a Chicago native, told the band: “I am sorry you are going through this. You did a beautiful job. America is proud of you and loves you,” he wrote, according to the Tribune.

Latinos Have Been Catching Heat for This Anthem Since at Least 1968

On Oct. 7, 1968, before Game 5 of the World Series at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, a 23-year-old blind Puerto Rican singer named José Feliciano performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” his own way. At the time, fans called it a “disgrace” and “unpatriotic,” according to MLB.com. The backlash hurt his radio airplay and record sales in the U.S., even as his recording became the first anthem to reach the Billboard charts, peaking at No. 50. “When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said later. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot.”

In 2013, an 11-year-old in a charro outfit did it. Sebastien de la Cruz, known as San Antonio’s Little Mariachi, sang the anthem before Game 3 of the NBA Finals and was hit with racist remarks questioning why a young Latino boy in a charro outfit should be singing it, NPR reported. The Spurs invited him back for Game 4, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro introduced him, and President Barack Obama previewed the performance on Twitter. “My father and my mama told me you should never judge people by how they look,” the boy said.

In June 2025, as anger over ICE raids grew in Los Angeles, the singer Nezza sang the anthem in Spanish at a Dodgers game.

She used “El Pendón Estrellado,” the translation Clotilde Arias wrote after the State Department called for Spanish and Portuguese versions in 1945. Nezza told CNN that a team employee had asked her not to, and a video she shared on TikTok, which passed 12 million views, captures a person she identified as that employee saying, “We are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t relayed.” Nezza said the employee later called her manager to say she wasn’t welcome back, while the Dodgers said in a statement that there were “no consequences or hard feelings.” “The lyrics are the same; I was still singing that I’m a proud American,” she said.

Then in February, Bad Bunny delivered the first all-Spanish Super Bowl halftime show, and Trump took to Truth Social to call it “absolutely terrible,” adding that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” according to Time, while Turning Point USA counterprogrammed with an “All American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock. On Monday night, the band played the same words every NFL crowd hears before kickoff, and it made no difference.

“People See Themselves in These Performances”

Asked about the political commentary, Maldonado told the Tribune that it “has nothing to do with us.” “It’s more what the heated political environment, you know, decides to do with narratives,” he said. The day after the game, that environment produced a Supreme Court order letting the Trump administration resume deporting migrants to countries that aren’t their own, Reuters reported.

Fifty-eight years after Feliciano, the argument over who gets to sound like America hasn’t moved much, and neither has the answer from the people holding the instruments. Maldonado said the performance was about “respecting and honoring ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with the highest level of musicianship as possible.” “People see themselves in these performances,” he said, calling it “the most amazing thing for me.”

Tags: Mariachi, National Anthem