“Hay Unos Ojos” is a small song with a big glow—praise sung so tenderly it feels like a blessing, as if the heart could be steadied just by looking into the right pair of eyes.
Placed early on Linda Ronstadt’s landmark mariachi album Canciones de Mi Padre (released November 24, 1987), “Hay Unos Ojos” arrives as Track 3, lasting about 2:47—not long enough to make a speech, just long enough to leave a scent in the air. The album itself tells the “ranking at launch” story more than any single: it reached No. 42 on the Billboard 200, and in 1989 Ronstadt won the GRAMMY for Best Mexican-American Performance for the project.
But awards and chart peaks only explain how far the record traveled—not why it feels so intimate. The intimacy comes from intent. Canciones de Mi Padre was produced by Peter Asher and Rubén Fuentes, recorded at The Complex in Los Angeles, and built around the sound and authority of top-tier mariachi ensembles (with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán central to the tradition Ronstadt wanted to honor). In her GRAMMY acceptance, Ronstadt explicitly framed the album as music passed down “from father to son,” master to student—an inheritance, not a trend.
That inheritance is exactly what “Hay Unos Ojos” feels like: an old, well-worn phrase spoken with fresh sincerity.
In the UCLA Frontera Collection’s catalog entry for Ronstadt’s recording, “Hay Unos Ojos” is credited to composer Rubén Fuentes, and its themes are tagged with words that read like the emotional palette of the performance: praise, woman, beauty, love, lament, reflection, complaint. Even without pulling the lyric apart line by line, you can sense that blend: this is admiration with a shadow behind it, devotion that knows it may not be fully returned, affection that becomes ache precisely because it is so sincere.
The title itself—“Hay Unos Ojos” (“There are some eyes…”)—works like the beginning of a story told at night. It doesn’t say which eyes, or whose eyes, at least not immediately. It simply declares that such eyes exist: eyes that undo your certainty, that brighten the room, that make you remember what tenderness feels like. In older song traditions, eyes are never just physical detail—they’re fate. Eyes are the place love first enters, and sometimes the place heartbreak refuses to leave.
Ronstadt sings this kind of material with a particular kind of discipline: she doesn’t treat Spanish as costume, and she doesn’t treat mariachi as exotic color. She treats it as home music—the kind of music that has lived in kitchens, weddings, and family gatherings long before it ever lived on a stage. That’s why her voice on “Hay Unos Ojos” feels so steady. It doesn’t “perform” nostalgia. It inhabits it—like someone opening a wooden box of old photographs, not to show them off, but to remember the faces properly.
And the mariachi setting makes the emotion physical. The violins don’t merely decorate— they carry the sigh, drawing long lines that feel like longing stretched across time. The trumpets don’t merely announce— they crown the melody, giving praise a ceremonial shine. Underneath, the rhythm holds everything upright, as if to say: yes, the heart is soft, but it will stand.
There’s a lovely paradox here. “Hay Unos Ojos” is, on the surface, a song of admiration—almost a serenade. Yet it also carries the hush of vulnerability: praise is never risk-free. To praise someone is to admit they matter. To admit they matter is to admit they could hurt you. That’s why this song lingers after it ends. It doesn’t just describe beauty; it describes what beauty does to a person who can’t quite protect themselves from feeling.
In the larger arc of Canciones de Mi Padre, “Hay Unos Ojos” is one of the album’s quiet proofs: Ronstadt wasn’t stepping away from her artistry to make a heritage statement—she was stepping deeper into artistry, letting tradition sharpen her emotional truth. And decades later, the album’s ongoing recognition—induction into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame (announced in 2021) and selection for the National Recording Registry (2022)—only underlines what listeners already knew: this wasn’t a side project. It was a lasting homecoming.