‘It’s in the Blood’ : Three Generations of Delgados Have Crafted Guitars for More Than a Quarter of a Century

From behind a battered storefront in an otherwise nondescript stretch of Avenida Cesar Chavez in East Los Angeles, the Delgado family has been helping some of the world’s most famous musicians perfect their craft for more than a quarter of a century. Since 1947, three generations of Delgados--Porfirio, Candelario and Tomas--have crafted handmade guitars for the likes of Los Lobos, Jose Feliciano, Arlo Guthrie, Los Romeros, Glen Campbell and Andres Segovia. Porfirio and his brother taught themselves how to make guitars through a long process of trial and error in their native Durango, Mexico. They later moved to Juarez, where they opened a shop and gained such wide acclaim that Mexican film star Cantinflas once dropped by to pick up an instrument. But it was in Los Angeles, where they opened Candelas Guitars, that Porfirio, 81, passed on his love and talent for guitar making to son Candelario. The son, now 50, did the same with his son Tomas, 24, who now manages the family business, handcrafting instruments that sell for as much as $4,500. Recently, Candelario Delgado talked about the passion and precision of his art with Times Staff Writer Kevin Baxter.

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Since I was a little kid--I mean real small--I always had either a ukulele or a mandolin or something to play with around the house. And I always hung around the shop. I was baptized at the guitar shop in Juarez. I grew up in it and it became part of me. I would hang around the shop and glue this little part and glue that. But I would also pick up the instrument and play a chord or two or something.

Being a guitar maker was not something that I was brought up to be. You just have it. It was in my blood. And once it gets into your blood, you can’t get rid of it. I had a very, very good job. I was gone for three years in the Army and when I came back I was working in electronics. But I kept going back to the shop, going back to the shop. Finally, I figured out I wanted to work making my own instruments, my own guitars.

This is an art, but it’s a dying art. I was really surprised when my son decided he wanted to do this. He actually came back to the shop when he was between jobs. He said he was going to spend some time here until he got this other thing lined up. And he surprised himself and he surprised me that he really liked it. He won’t quit now. About 80% of the people that buy instruments from us are not professionals. But they are artists. They love the art. They play the music with feeling. They sing. And in their own way, they’re artists. So we build the instruments for them. And it becomes so personal. You become very attached to the guitar.

You go and buy a factory-made instrument and you know very well it’s not something people put their heart and feeling into. But if it’s something that I built or that my son built, it’s in the blood. Then you got that feeling behind it. It becomes part of me, but I’m building it for another person. It feels like building a masterpiece for somebody else.

When I’m building an instrument, nobody touches it. I mean nobody touches my instruments when I’m working on one. Same thing with my son Tomas, same thing with my father. You have your own ideas and you know what you want to build, you know what kind of sound you want for the person who’s going to play the instrument. So you put a lot of yourself into it to build it that way.

If you don’t have the art, the love for the art, you’re just going to become another maker that’s making them all exactly the same. You just can’t build a guitar like everybody else because it would just be a guitar like everybody else’s. When you build this type of instrument, like we build, you have to know what you want. You have to know what kind of sound you want. You have to know what your goal is. Then you have to know what kind of wood to use and how to combine them. How thick to leave it. How much bracing do you put inside? What type of bracing you put inside. You only learn that with time and love for the art.

When you have all the feeling and the heart to make it, every guitar is a little different. Because with every guitar, you felt you were going to try something different and you were going to build something different. That’s where the art comes in. And the love, really.

Most of my life, I’ve been here (in Los Angeles). I know very little about Mexico. But I know the music, I love the music, I feel it when I play and when I sing. It was something that my father started and that he perfected so much.

Like guitar making, guitar playing and singing and all that has changed a lot. Now it’s very, very advanced. Like Los Lobos. Los Lobos play a big, big variation of instruments because they use different types of music. If they want to play musica romantica, they go to the requintos . If they want to play norteno, they go to the bajo sextos. If they want to play veracruzano, they go to the jarana, the requinto jarocho. Even Los Lobos guitarist Cesar (Rojas), for some kind of mariachi music, plays a guapanguera, a gitarra de golpe, that nowadays most people don’t even know what it is. But they had studied it so much, they actually use the traditional instrument. And we are the ones that know how to make them.