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April 13, 2018
Alonzo Amador is The Man With the White Guitar
Hoping to learn more about the man with the white guitar, I returned to the McDonalds the next morning at 7:30 a.m. on my way to an 8:15 a.m. class. Again, there was little time to chat, but he is a regular at this location for his morning "Senior Discount" coffee. That's my usual coffee order too.
Between my not perfect Spanish and his more than adequate English, we spoke for a few minutes.
When I asked him about why he wrote the names of El Cartel on his guitar, he said that he writes corridos about the adventures of these drug bosses.
Corridos are stories told in song. What separates this song form from others is its Mexican origins and the subject matter common to the stories. With origins in the Mexican Revolution, the stories do not usually include tales of a broken heart. The stories serve a purpose -- to speak out against injustice or to share the ways people survive the harshness of life.
The verb correr in Spanish means "to run," indicating that the story is a running narrative which means a sequence of connected events.
My aim here is to honor this man's decades of hard, physical labor and to share his excitement about learning to play the guitar and his genesis as a songwriter now that he is nearly fully retired. While suffering from back pain caused his work, he still works part-time for a local government agency. His solace is his guitar.
You'll find him most weekday mornings, nursing his $1.00 coffee, and sharing stories with others at a McDonalds in South Tucson.
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