Michael Kent Smith

Mexico City and Paracho Trip

September 7th, 2008

After finally getting paid by the museum and deciding to skip the Xalapa portion of the trip I took off for Mexico City. I wanted to visit my friends from the Africa tour and Javier, the drummer in the group, and his wife Ale had invited me to stay with them. We ate some good Mexican cuisine and drank some good tequila and spent a peaceful day in Cuernavaca, a city about an hour and a half from Mexcio City that is famous for it’s beautiful climate. On Monday Javier and I recorded several tracks and Edgar Sanchez the bassist will record some bass parts to complete a trio recording. I can’t wait to hear the finished product - I’ll post some stuff on my site.

Then it was off to Paracho. It’s a six-hour bus trip from Mexico City to Paracho so it pretty well chewed up a day. Paracho is in the mountains of Michoacan about 2 1/2 hours from Morelia, the state capital. In a lot of ways it’s Mexico as people like to think of it. The older women still dress in traditional clothes and wear their hair in braids. 75% of the residents make their living off of the instrument building trade and the main street is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Three out of every four shops is a guitar store! No joke. Paracho has to be the only place in the world where you can buy a guitar and a coffin in the same store (see the photo below). My mission was to find a mandolin for my brother and a guitarrón (the big bass guitar that the mariachis use) for my friend Jack McAuliffe. I found several mandolins, two of them were quite nice for around $200. I chose one because of it’s nice wood, it stayed in tune and the builder was a cool old fellow of 86 years (see photo below). I also found two nice guitarrons but eventually discovered that they were both by the same builder and the second one was merely more expensive because the reseller was tacking on some profit for himself. So I bought the one direct from the builder and saved Jack same cash. Unfortunately, he said he couldn’t ship it to the US, so I had to haul it back to Guanajuato with me to ship it from there since Paracho has no DHL office nor any other way to ship internationally.

During my time there I was the only non-Mexican in Paracho and after a couple days started feeling perhaps non unwelcome but certainly out of place so I headed back to Guanajuato a day early.