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Mission Hill Music Club a magnet for neighborhood youths

E-mail | Print | Comments () Posted by Your Town February 14, 2011 10:19 AM

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(photo by Laura Finaldi)

By Laura Finaldi, Globe Correspondent

It’s 5 p.m. on a Monday. The music room at Sociedad Latina, at the corner of Tremont and Carmel Streets in the Mission Hill section of Roxbury, is deserted. Guitars hang on the walls next to paintings, which flank keyboards. It is totally silent until there is a knock on the door.

In walks Joshua, a seven-year-old neighborhood kid with a “Fast and the Furious” T-shirt and a huge smile.

“Is anyone here?” he asks.

At the sound of his voice, his teacher, 19-year-old Berklee College of Music student Dalton Harts, comes out of the back room and welcomes Joshua to his drum lesson.

Technically, the lesson does not start until 5:30, but Joshua ignores the clock.

“I come early, I get more time,” he says with a smirk.

Joshua is one of hundreds of children who frequent the music clubhouse at Sociedad
Latina, which offers lessons in guitar, piano, voice and drums, taught by Harts and other Berklee students through work-study programs. Workshops in beat making, lyric writing, music theory and reading are also offered in the club’s state-of-the-art recording studio.

“When I first walked through the door here, I had no idea how many things they had going on,” Harts said.

Sociedad Latina started as an after-school program offering homework help to area youth. Alexandra Oliver-Davila, executive director of Sociedad Latina, said that while the club focuses on creating the next generation of artists in the Latino community, children of all ethnicities are welcome.

She said some of the students had approached the administration and asked if the music offerings could be expanded to include a recording studio. The space was renovated four years ago to include a 1,400 square-foot structure that houses a recording studio, computer labs and instruments. Youth between the ages of 8 and 21 can join for a yearly fee of $125 and take advantage of the various programs.

Sociedad Latina is one of six music clubhouses in Boston spearheaded by a group called the Music and Youth Initiative, which partners with Berklee and community agencies to bring music education and mentoring to underserved areas. The Mission Hill program also receives funding from city foundations, corporations, and individual donors.

Oliver-Davila said all the youth who come to Sociedad Latina are from low-income backgrounds, since the program’s key mission is to expose youth to music and the arts in ways that they otherwise would not have.

“I think that art really plays a role in the lives of particularly low-income youth,” she said. “I feel really fortunate that we are able to have this clubhouse, to see the number of youth that come in.”

Sociedad Latina also brings music outside of the walls of the clubhouse. The organization works with three schools on Mission Hill that do not have their own formal music-education programs -- Maurice J. Tobin School, Newcomers Academy, and Mission Hill School -- by sending over music teachers. Although the teachers are not paid as much as regular staff would be, Oliver-Davila said, the instructors find it rewarding.

Some of the youths who frequent Sociedad Latina created a CD of music that they wrote themselves, with the help of their Berklee teachers and the staff of the clubhouse. Oliver-Davila said all of the songs on the CD have a positive message of social justice.

“Youth who are involved in the arts just perform better in school and in life,” Oliver-Davila said. “The whole creative process just opens up so much to young people and gets their creative juices flowing.”

This article was reported and written by Northeastern University journalism student Laura Finaldi, under the supervision of journalism instructor Lisa Chedekel, as part of collaboration between The Boston Globe and Northeastern.