It’s been more than a decade since Kacey Musgraves first took the stage at Gruene Hall, the historic Central Texas venue where on Tuesday she closed out a three-night residency to celebrate the release of her latest album, Middle of Nowhere.
Back in 2014, Musgraves was on the come-up; she had a critically acclaimed debut album under her belt and a couple of Grammy Awards to show for it. But she was still three years out from the career-making breakthrough of Golden Hour and the arena tours, red-carpet appearances, and mainstream country stardom that would follow.
Gruene Hall is not a glamorous venue. It’s a squat, white clapboard dance hall erected in New Braunfels in 1878, with a pitched tin roof, wire-mesh windows, and no air conditioning in a state where the temperature can creep toward 90 degrees by the end of April. But it’s iconic—the place where George Strait found his sound; where artists like Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, Miranda Lambert, and Lyle Lovett cut their teeth. It’s where country stars are made, and it’s where they return once the rest of the world has noticed their shine too.
So it makes sense that with Middle of Nowhere, an album that is largely a love letter to Musgraves’s roots, the singer would come back to Gruene Hall. But this time she wouldn’t be performing solo. She would be joined by the Mariachi Brothers, a family group from McAllen, a city nearly 260 miles south of New Braunfels, on the Texas-Mexico border.
Just two months ago, the brothers—18-year-old Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, 15-year-old Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar, and 12-year-old Joshua Gámez-Cuéllar—were apprehended by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along with their parents, in nearby Edinburg. The detention of the family, who had been going through the asylum process since 2023, made national headlines and drew public outrage, leading to their release two weeks later. Musgraves asked them to join her in New Braunfels shortly afterward.
In Texas, Mexican culture is woven into the fabric of the state’s identity—from our names to our music, food, and history. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that listening to most of the country music Texas exports. At its core, country music is a quintessentially American genre. It deals in nostalgia and (whitewashed) cowboys rather than vaqueros, glossing over the country’s central sins and the Black, Mexican, and Native American contributions that built it.
Over the decades, Latinos have made forays into country; artists like Linda Ronstadt and Tejano crooners Freddy Fender and Johnny Rodriguez racked up hits on Billboard’s country charts. But to this day there are no Latino members of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Country music, like America itself, chooses to define itself by its borders. But reality has a funny way of creeping in.
For Musgraves’s own part, such boundaries are at odds with the world she grew up in. Her home state isn’t one of neat lines and concrete divisions; this is the only place in the world where bluegrass, zydeco, Tejano, western swing, and Mexican rancheras all coexist and sometimes even blend.
Like many of the state’s greatest musical exports—Selena, Willie Nelson, Beyoncé—Musgraves delights in pushing past invented perimeters to allow other sounds to inform her work. (And it’s easy to understand why she might feel drawn to Tejano, Norteño, and ranchera in particular: It’s melodramatic and earnest, music full of emotion, wit, humor, pain, and sorrow.)
That much is clear on Middle of Nowhere tracks like “Horses and Divorces,” “Uncertain, TX,” and the just-released, short-and-sweet bonus track “Caballero,” but Musgraves also doubled down on her admiration for Mexican culture by welcoming the Mariachi Brothers to perform with her.
On both sides of their family, the Gámez-Cuéllar brothers are surrounded by musicians, all of them mariachis. Their decision to pursue the genre is both a continuation of tradition and, in the current political climate, an act of protest. Though it’s not what they set out to do, in the aftermath of their detention, their art has become an affirmation that their culture and their family belong here. They are part of this state’s story.
As Musgraves said when she welcomed the brothers onstage on Tuesday night: “This is Texas at its best. This is not performance, this is generational wealth.”
In the hours before the show, as the brothers wrapped up soundcheck—their set would include covers of the classic rancheras “Volver, Volver,” and “El Rey,” and they would join Musgraves for her performance of “Tú Sólo Tú”—and returned to their dressing room, they spoke to Vogue about what the residency meant to them. Not too long ago, they were leaving mariachi practice in McAllen when their parents broke the news.
“I just feel so proud that all these stereotypes are breaking,” says Antonio, the eldest brother and the group’s trumpet player. “People might think we don’t deserve to be here, or they might have certain ideas about what we might be like, but at the end of the day, we get to show them with music that all of us are the same.”
A bit sheepishly, he admits that he didn’t use to listen to much country music. That’s changed now, thanks to Musgraves. “Mariachi, for us, that’s our music,” he explains. “But we’ve seen the way that people respond to country, and it’s the same thing. They both bring us closer together, they create connection and open up our emotions. Like Kacey says, ‘With music, language doesn’t matter.’ It’s true.”
With Middle of Nowhere operating as a kind of homecoming, it’s significant that Musgraves has been so vocal about the influence of Regional Mexican genres on country music. Toward the end of Tuesday’s show, Musgraves shouted out Arthur Jiménez, the son of legendary Tejano accordionist Flaco Jiménez, whom she had wanted to include on the track “Uncertain, TX” before his death last summer. “If I could have had Willie and Flaco [on the album], that would’ve been a Tex-Mex dream,” she said. “I tried my best to infuse just a little bit of that Flaco spirit into this song, so this goes out to you and your family tonight.”
Under one roof, Musgraves’s grandparents, childhood friends, a family of mariachis, Jiménez, and a packed house stomped on the wooden floorboards as Musgraves wound her way through Middle of Nowhere—800 people joined together by music as if to say, “This is Texas.”
