Professional singers in the Jalisco State Choir (Coro del Estado de Jalisco) say they are reeling from a sharp downturn in their working conditions and, since January, the loss of a third of their 41 singers, who have been pressured to leave or quit due to discouragement.
“You don’t know if you’ll have a job tomorrow,” said one singer with decades in the choir, which is based in Guadalajara. “Everyone was excited when we did ‘Madame Butterfly’ in November, but since then our contracts have been cut to a month. They used to be for a year. We got really upset when we read in the paper they don’t want to give us contracts at all. They want to pay us by event. There will be no more esprit de corps.”
The choir was founded in 1981 as an economical alternative to hiring a qualified choir from Mexico City every time an opera was produced in this city of extreme opera fans.
But salaries for the choir have never been as good as for the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra. Although both are run by the state Secretary of Culture (Secretaria de Cultura), Philharmonic musicians earn about twice what Choir singers do (about 15,000 pesos a month vs. 8,000) and enjoy much better benefits. Similarly, several professional choirs in Mexico City and Xalapa offer singers about 15,000 pesos a month.
“We used to have medical benefits, but those were cancelled a long time ago,” said the singer, who asked not to be named due to the delicacy of the situation and because state-employed musicians have suffered reprisals for speaking to lawyers, the press and unions.
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