Mexico: Guitar Central

It is a mild day in the mountains of middle Mexico, a fine day for chasing butterflies or lingering on cobbled side streets, neither of which I’ll be doing. I am here to sniff sawdust and engage in arcane conversations with old men in dim, cluttered rooms.

I step down onto the runway of the Morelia airport--the old colonial state capital of Michoacan, midway between Mexico City and Guadalajara--with one less piece of luggage than I expect to take home. In a hidden compartment beneath my belt, I carry a large amount of cash. In my wallet, I carry an address given to me by a guy who knows a guy.

I rent a car and head southwest. As darkness falls on the colonial buildings of Patzcuaro’s main plaza, I corner a wizened man named Raul, who in a few moments will be singing and playing “Guadalajara” to a restaurant full of Mexican and American tourists. I nod at his guitar, and in my Spanish, which has been compared with President Bush’s English, I say something like: The guitar you are playing, is Paracho from it, that town of guitars in the mountains? Um, yes, says Raul in Spanish, half-surprised.

I am going to Paracho this week, to see the festival, and to buy a guitar. Is there a guitar player, no, a guitar-maker, whom you can recommend? The man from your guitar? “Amezcua,” says Raul. But he adds that he couldn’t afford an Amezcua himself. He’s been playing this Velazquez for about eight years now. Anyway, Raul says, I can find both on the main street. . . .

Now it’s a Sunday afternoon. the big cities and colonial scenery are behind me, and under a sky full of dramatic clouds, I’m racing along a two-lane highway, passing cornfields, crawling up pine-stubbled slopes, rolling at last into Paracho, guitar-making capital of North America.

Above the town looms a jagged mountain peak, Tare Tzuruan, which in the indigenous Purepecha language might mean Big Hill or Eagle Mountain, depending on whom you ask. But I can’t take my eyes off the shop windows: Taller de Guitarras. Barajas Guitarras. Jesus H. Fuerte Guitarras. Casa Amezcua Guitarras . . .

Inside I see guitars large and small, whole and half-built, hung on hooks, strangled in twine (to hold the wood in place while the glue dries) and cradled in the arms of makers wielding files and hammers and saws and rags and other tools whose purposes I can only guess.

The Morelia airport is about a three-hour drive, perhaps 100 miles, but it seems much farther. Down the street my rental car creeps, past shops advertising guitars, produce, guitars, wooden curiosities (including guitars), gifts (including guitars), food, guitars, toys (including guitars), guitar-making tools, an Internet cafe (hey, this is rural Mexico, not the dark side of the moon), an auto repair garage and more guitars.

Although it’s a town whose population wouldn’t quite fill Staples Center, Paracho in early August practically seethes. Its annual fair has just begun. In search of a parking spot, I crawl south to north the length of the main drag, which changes names twice in its eight blocks. The buildings are one or two stories, except for the church tower, which looks over the main plaza and a cultural center. At the north end of town, perhaps a five-minute walk from the central plaza, the raw countryside resumes.

“This not just a guitar festival. This is the whole town throwing its summer festival--people all over the streets doing all sorts of stuff,” a Paracho veteran named Kenny Hill told me before I headed south.

Hill, a professional guitar-maker and player who spends most of the year in Santa Cruz, is the only American with a workshop in Paracho. He’s been a regular visitor or part-time resident for two decades, and he estimates that there are more guitar-makers in Paracho than in the entire United States. Guesses range from 1,200 to 3,000.

Paracho’s population, including neighboring settlements, was put at 31,003 in the 1999 Mexican census. By some estimates, it produces as many as 80,000 guitars a year.

Search for it on the Internet and you’ll find precious little; I only heard of it a few years ago, from a friend who’d wandered through on a backpacking trip in the ‘80s. But Paracho is not quite invisible. Last year, the National Geographic Society published a children’s book on Paracho and its guitars by Peter Laufer and Susan L. Roth. Titled “Made in Mexico” and filled with wildly colorful paper collages, it features a blurb by singer Linda Ronstadt. Years before she began exploring her Mexican heritage in her 1987 “Canciones de Mi Padre” recordings, Ronstadt recalls, she first learned to play guitar on an instrument from Paracho.

The town’s specialty goes back at least 80 years, but beyond that, the history gets hazy. Some local boosters (and some travel guidebooks) would have you believe that the craft of guitar-making was specifically assigned to Paracho by Michoacan’s beloved 16th century bishop, Don Vasco de Quiroga. In fact, many sources agree that the bishop did assign specialties to several towns near the banks of Lake Patzcuaro. But when it comes to Paracho in the mountains, the documentation gets thinner, and some locals take a more skeptical view.

“In the history book, Quiroga never came here,” says Francisco Navarro Garcia, whose workshop is on the north end of Calle Independencia. In those days, neither the town nor the guitar existed in anything like their current form. Though the term “guitar” apparently originated in 16th century Spain, it then described a four-string instrument with different tuning and shape than most modern guitars.

Either way, the reputation that Paracho developed through the 20th century was for the quantity, not quality, of its guitars. But since the mid-1990s, a handful of workshops have begun concentrating on high-quality instruments, which require more time and costlier materials. While the factories on the edge of town crank out 100 largely machine-made guitars or more a day, a fine craftsman might spend weeks on a single big-ticket instrument. Thus you can spend $50 on a Paracho guitar, or $3,000, and it behooves a buyer to visit several shops before making any commitments.

Navarro has been a guitar-maker for 18 of his 38 years. He speaks as bluntly about Paracho’s output as he does about its history. “About 10% of guitars here are of high quality,” he tells me. “Ten years ago, none were.”

Navarro aims for the high-end market, making about 70 instruments a year and selling most through a dealer in Houston, at prices around $1,800. I linger a long while in his workshop, listening to town gossip and guitar theory, and noodling on one of his instruments. Since we’ve cut out shipping and the middle man, he might be able to make me a deal.

I’m eager to buy; when I’m home I pick up a guitar nearly every day. But the truth is I don’t play particularly well--simple folk and blues songs, no classical compositions. So I hand the guitar back to Navarro and ask him to give it a workout.

He hesitates, picks a few notes, then declines.

“Guitarrero o guitarrista,” he says. “You either make guitars, or you play guitars. You don’t do both.”

A great pink cloud hovers before me: pink cotton candy, car-ried aloft by a tiny vendor. Like the vendor, everyone on the street seems to be 5-feet-6 or shorter, and a native of Mexico. And the later it gets, the busier the sidewalk becomes.

Campesinos converge from nearby towns--the men in white cowboy hats, the women in their traditional black-and-blue shawls--for their biggest spending binge of the year. Far-flung children, now grown, have come back from their jobs and new lives in el norte to renew their ties. Technicians are fiddling with a PA system in the plaza, and some of the streets are blocked.

Tonight, brass bands will march and the town pooh-bahs will burn a castle made of sticks. Tomorrow, all the town’s craft-makers will march around the plaza, then take the stage and toss special party favors to their neighbors, provoking a scramble no less raucous than the annual skirmishing over Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans.

While this goes on at street level, the town’s elite are staging a semi-separate second celebration: the National Guitar Festival. Now nearly 30 years old, it features master classes, competitions among guitar-makers and young guitar players, and free performances by classical guitarists from Cuba, Paraguay, Bosnia, the Czech Republic and Mexico, all in the 150-seat auditorium of the Center for the Investigation and Development of the Guitar (CIDEG, in local language), two blocks from the plaza.

But since the town is so small, the street fun and salon seriousness end up scrambled, so that the student guitarists, carefully coiffed and clad in black suits to help the judges focus on their performance, find themselves tiptoeing around tuba players and churro vendors on the way to their appointments with destiny in the recital hall. Somewhere amid all this, I know, a guitar waits for me.

Soon I stand before Jose de Jesus Reyes Alvarez, who is sanding the top of a guitar (the tapa, they say here) while a black-and-white Marilyn Monroe poster peers down over his shoulders. With an apprentice boy awaiting orders in the background, Reyes, a slight man of 45 with rolled-up sleeves, drops his tools, pulls up a stool, guides me to it, places an instrument in my hands. I begin the questioning.

You have how many years? When of those did you start the making of guitars? The business is how long?

The questions puzzle him, as if I’ve asked a dog how long it’s been barking.

“All my life,” he says.

The workshop is an oversized Picasso montage. Shaped wood is everywhere in suggestive, incomplete forms. The walls are papered with Marilyn and carniceria calendars. The air is heavy with sawdust. Against the walls lean stacks of wood from far-off lands. The guitar in my hands feels comfortable. The top and sides, Reyes says, are palo escrito, a handsome Mexican wood; the bridge, rosewood from India. This is one of his best, he says, and he’s hoping it will sell for 5,000 pesos--that is, around $525. I gulp and change the subject.

Then Reyes barks an order to the apprentice and leads me out of the shop, down the street and into the heart of guitardom: Paracho’s cultural center, where the courtyard is festooned with paper decorations cut in guitar shapes, where schoolchildren have made a 15-foot-high guitar out of plywood, cardboard and paint, where a grill full of carne asada smolders.

The courtyard teems with artisans from surrounding villages peddling pottery, textiles and woodwork. Farther back, the mountains jut up beyond the rooftops, and the pines stand in mist like an invading army at attention. Reyes leads me to a door and points inside. Arrayed on tabletop stands is this year’s batch of entrants in the guitar-building competition. Precisely joined wood, elaborate inlays. Most are for sale, at prices from $160 to $750.

Looking closely at a guitar is like trying to count all those bones in your inner ear. Most instruments involve more than 100 bits of wood, large and small, which may have come from four continents. To complicate matters, Americans and Mexicans have developed their own intimate terms for types of wood and principal parts.

Americans refer to the neck, where the frets (trastos) are, and head (where the strings are wrapped around the tuning keys). Mexicans refer to el brazo (the arm) and la palma (the palm). On the back of the guitar, where the neck/arm meets the main body, there’s a wooden brace that Americans call the heel, and Mexicans call the nariz (nose). Everybody uses “bridge” (puente) for the crucial strip of hard wood against which the strings are stretched. But while Americans call the opening next to it the “sound hole,” Mexicans stick with body language. That, they say, is la boca. The mouth.

In the Velazquez shop, I find a broad range of instruments and wooden souvenirs, all the way down to toy mini-guitars priced at about 90 cents each. But nothing speaks to me. In the Amezcua shop nearby, I find Geronimo Amezcua Gomez, 50 years old and a third-generation guitar-maker, gently pounding trastos into a brazo. Behind him, his late grandfather peers out from a 1923 photo, guitar in hand.

The living Amezcua before me, a gruff, dedicated fellow who could pass for Det. Sipowicz’s Mexican twin, made his first guitar at 13. He turns to point out a dusty old instrument mounted on the wall: his first guitar. Amezcua massages the new instrument in hand. “A guitar like this,” he says, “I make about four a week.” The price is about $200.

A few more doors down, Jose Luis Diaz Reyes retreats to a back room and returns with an odd steel-string guitar. Like most of his competitors, Diaz usually makes nylon-string guitars. But this is a one-of-a-kind innovation. The front and sides are bent so that the sound box, where the strings resonate, is extra large. Diaz, 62, says he started out to be a violin-maker but switched to guitars when he was 14.

“You hear the nice tone?” he asks, strumming the extra-large guitar. “This guitar exists in no other place in Paracho.”

Between shop visits, I duck into the auditorium to hear the students play and wander among artisans under the arches of the cultural center.

The biggest risk in buying a Paracho guitar, I have been told, is making sure that it’s not made of newly cut wood. The best guitars are made from the oldest, driest wood, which is less prone to warping and cracking.

Also, certain types of wood, not all of them grown in Mexico, are most suited to certain parts of a guitar. So, as the quality of Paracho’s guitars improves, the local specialty takes on a global scope. Even the humdrum $50 guitars around Paracho are likely to feature foreign wood, and probably metal tuning keys from Asia.

In the unadvertised upstairs workshop of Kenny Hill, where a team of builders produces some guitars for his label and some for themselves as side projects, most of the wood arrives by way of the San Diego-Tijuana border. Most finished guitars leave the same way, and the best end up fetching $2,000 or more.

That’s beyond my budget. But Manuel Hernandez, who runs the Hill workshop, is happy to show me around all the same. The machines that dry the wood, the blueprints the makers follow, the rich tone that comes from the low E-string on a well-made instrument. The low notes, I tell Hernandez, they are sounding much pretty.

Most American visitors, if they find their way into Michoacan at all, head straight for the old architecture, craft vendors and lake vistas around the town of Patzcuaro, about an hour southwest of Morelia, or to Angangueo, at the state’s eastern edge, where monarch butterflies cluster in a mountain sanctuary each winter.

Paracho lies on neither path. As the crow flies, it’s about 30 miles west of Patzcuaro, about 20 miles north of Uruapan, on the Mesita Purepecha, a severe but beautiful plateau of forests, cornfields, free-ranging livestock and rugged little towns.

The Purepecha, also known as the Tarascan, are the indigenous people whose ancestors retreated farther and farther into these mountains once the Spanish began their advances here in the 16th century. They raise corn, zucchini, apples and lentils, manage livestock and make crafts for the markets. If Cortez and company had never arrived, the Mesita Purepecha might not look much different today.

Winters can be bitterly cold. Illiteracy is sufficiently widespread that municipal ballots in Paracho offer candidates’ photographs instead of names. Unemployment is severe enough that Michoacan rivals Jalisco and Guanajuato among the Mexican states that send the most immigrants to the U.S. In Paracho, skilled guitar-makers might earn as little as $40 per week, perhaps as much as $200.

But in summer, between cloudbursts, the freshly rinsed countryside is something to see. The plateau is more than 7,000 feet above sea level, hemmed in by jagged volcanic peaks. Round a corner on one of the roads up here and you may find a pair of Purepecha women ambling along the roadside, shoulders swaddled in black and blue, hands cradling scythes. Twin reapers, their faces and their chores straight out of the 16th century.

Out beyond Angahuan, no more than 20 miles from Paracho on a good blacktop road, you can hire a horse and guide to explore the low slopes of Paricutin, a volcano that rose from a cornfield in 1943, erupted and buried most of the nearest town in lava. On the three-hour horseback trek, you can reach the spot where a buried church tower protrudes like a giant tombstone from a stark black lavascape.

These are illuminating sights--especially for somebody who’s never seen beyond those “I love Michoacan” bumper stickers that turn up so frequently on the freeways of Southern California. (To add a soundtrack to that vision, you need only approach a mariachi guitarist in Los Angeles and ask for “Caminos de Michoacan.” Part love song, part anthem of homesickness, it tells of a narrator who searches for his lover from town to town throughout the state, from Zitacuaro to Huetamo and Apatzingan to Morelia.) In Paracho itself, there are about 55 hotel rooms, including 16 at the plain and central Hotel Hermelinda, where rates for singles are about $24.

But I want more creature comforts and a bit more distance between me and the revelry on the plaza. So I do my sleeping at the Hotel Mansion del Cupatitzio, a pleasant, river-side hacienda-style hotel at the northern end of Uruapan, right on the road that climbs and winds 20 miles to Paracho. (The hotel’s owners, the Monroy family, also control a major guitar factory in Paracho and have thrown their weight behind CIDEG and the guitar festival.)

Summer daytime temperatures hover around 70 degrees. Downpours come mostly in brief bursts, trapping the market vendors under blue tarps with their mangoes and avocados--although one afternoon the pelting continues so long and strong that as I sit outside on a sheltered bench alongside the plaza, I see a 55-gallon drum positioned beneath a faulty rain gutter fill to overflowing in less than an hour.

Monday night. Night of the parade of the torneros, or craft-makers. I stand amid a throng in the plaza, snapping pictures of merrymaking while a master of ceremonies intones the names of Paracho’s largest, oldest families. Onstage, the fair’s queen and princesses dance with their fathers.

Down in the mosh pit, as I snap away, a boy of about 8 approaches, shyly bearing a wooden toy. For me. A few minutes later, a little girl arrives with a similar trinket. Then a teen-age boy, whose hair is partly dyed blond, singles me out and hands over a handsome pair of maracas.

These gifts are the same party favors that celebrants have been tossing from the stage deep into a surging, hand-waving audience. I keep bowing and saying gracias and passing smaller gifts on to smaller children nearby. But what’s up?

Here’s what: I am the only readily identifiable foreign tourist. These families are sending their children to make me feel welcome. And now one of the parents approaches. “My family would like to invite you to join us dancing on the stage,” says Leticia Herrera Bentley, speaking perfect English. “We would like to show you Paracho’s hospitality.”

To the stage we go, and the crowd titters while I attempt to shift my weight rhythmically from foot to foot. Then our party, about 40 people, not counting the 20-piece brass band that will follow us through the evening, lurches to a corner of the plaza. Apparently, I am now an honorary Herrera.

Leticia Bentley, it develops, was born in Paracho, one of 11 children, the only one to leave Mexico. Now she lives in Moab, Utah, with an Irish American husband and three children. She teaches and does social work with Navajo families in connection with the public schools there. But every summer, she comes back for five weeks.

In the last two decades, “the population has doubled, and you see a lot more professionals,” she says. The week of the Paracho festival, with its reunions and celebrations of roots and community, is so gratifying for her that it’s excruciating. “I told my husband I felt like I wanted to rip up my [return] ticket and never go back,” she says.

Before long, I’m introduced to the rest of the extended family, beginning with Leticia’s niece, Carmen Herrera Padilla, a general-practice physician in Zitacuaro. Then more dancing. Then a bottle of tequila surfaces.

Then it’s off to the cultural center, where the bottle makes further rounds. One of my new relatives, in a touching gesture of fraternity, proposes to drink three tequila shots for every one of mine. Grinning loopily, he looks like Diego Rivera, drunk, at 20.

“No,” I tell him. “You are clearly a professional. I am just a tourist. It is better for me to watch and teach. And learn. To watch and learn. Also, I am working. Must take pictures. Look! Taking pictures now!”

So I have blurry snaps of the plastic cup looming, and my brethren guffawing as another new relative proposes, between shots, to discuss geopolitics. “El globalismo!” he hollers.

He’s in favor of it. I have to agree. From the cultural center, the Herreras and I migrate to a private home, where the wives and mothers serve posole, a hearty stew of pinto beans, hominy, ham hocks and peppers. Fathers and daughters dance, my new friends explain some subtleties of Paracho society, and the tequila is joined by a corn liquor known as charanda. I eat heavily, dance with the doctor and her son, dodge the alcohol and take great secret gulps of mineral water.

Midnight finds me strolling across the town to find my car. Now all the sensitive classical guitar types are gone. A band blares in the plaza, fireworks bloom overhead, and bodies lurch merrily on the streets and sidewalks.

But not me. Not only do I have a Herrera retinue to guide me--one social worker, one physician, five teenagers, one 6-year-old and one 3-year-old--I have sobriety on my side. Which is good, not only because of the drive down the hill, but because it wouldn’t do to choose a guitar while fighting a hangover.

Tuesday afternoon. Flight home tomorrow. Deal today.

Back in the Kenny Hill workshop, Manuel Hernandez and his guys have finished a side-project guitar that was nearly done when I showed up in town. Its sides and backs are made of gorgeous striped palo escrito. Its neck is cedar; the bridge, rosewood from India; the fingerboard, ebony from Brazil. And, of course, the elbow grease is all Paracho. This, I later learn, is the sort of instrument that Kenny Hill calls “a concert guitar for the student” and carries a $1,200 price tag in music shops. But that’s after Hill buys it from Paracho, and Paracho ships it to California, and Hill sells it to a retailer. “Listen,” says Hernandez in Spanish, leaning over the unlabeled instrument. “This is your guitar.”

He plucks the top and bottom strings, which fill the small room with twin E notes, two octaves apart. You can almost see the sawdust trembling in the air.

We agree on $400 in pesos--a tremendous discount, as long as I don’t dwell on the $600 cost of my plane ticket, not to mention hotels and meals. I close the case carefully, shake hands with Hernandez and step back out into downtown Paracho, where the rain has mercifully ceased. The fair continues in all its glory, guitarreros and guitarristas eyeing one another’s instruments and lazing in the shade.

Now all I have to do is get mine safely home, and then learn some new songs to do it justice. I believe I’ll start with “Caminos de Michoacan.”

Guidebook: Guitar Hunting in Mexico

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Mexico is 52; the regional code is 4. All prices are approximate and are computed at 9.5 pesos per dollar. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for two, food only.

Getting there: Mexicana has direct service to Morelia from Los Angeles. Though often pricier than in the U.S., rental cars give you flexibility in exploring the countryside, and they can be reserved at the Morelia or Uruapan airport.

Where to stay: In Morelia, Hotel & Suites Villa San Jose, Patzimba 77, Colonia Vista Bella, Morelia; telephone 315-1738, fax 324-4545, www.villasanjose.com.mx. Forty-three rooms on hillside overlooking the city. Great view from restaurant, with playfully arranged, well-tended grounds. Rate: $128.

In Uruapan, Hotel Mansion del Cupatitzio, Parque Nacional Eduardo Ruiz; tel. 523-2100, fax 524-6772, www.mansioncupatitzio.com. Fifty-seven rooms in a hacienda-style setting next to Cupatitzio National Park, a river that runs into the city. Courtyard pool popular with families. Rate: $96.

In Paracho, the Hotel Hermelinda, Ave. 20 de Noviembre, No. 239; tel. 525-0080. Hotel with 16 plain rooms is on the main drag near the center of town; rooms in back may be quieter. Rate: $24.

Where to eat: In Paracho, La Casona, Portal Jess D’az, No. 110; tel. 525-0830. A rambling restaurant next to the main square that serves great, hearty Tarascan soup; $20.

In Morelia, La Fonda Santa Maria restaurant at the Hotel & Suites Villa San Jose offers sweeping city views and a few Italian dishes along with a Mexican regional menu. My favorite dish: a cold avocado soup with tomato chunks and a hint of tequila; $25.

When to go: Because of their high-altitude settings, Paracho, Uruapan and environs are cool--and frequently wet--through the summer and chilly in winter. As for Paracho’s annual festival, discovering specific dates is like trying to hold water in your hands. But innkeeper Geronimo Villafan at Hotel Hermelinda says it’s always the first two weeks of August, with most festivities (including fireworks and bonfires) on Friday and Saturday nights.

For more information: Mexico Tourism Board, Mexican Consulate, 2401 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, Calif., 90057; tel. (213) 351-2069, fax (213) 351-2074, www.visitmexico.com. Also, Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism Office (Mexico City), (800) 482-9832, www.mexico-travel.com.