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.
