Makers

Carving Out a Musical Tradition

Modern makers look to old-school methods while reviving son jarocho culture.

By Joe Hart
November 6, 2025

Winter 2026

Craft Communities

Free To Read

Photo by Joe Brusky

Musicians, dancers, and onlookers gather at a Milwaukee event center for a fandango, at which son jarocho music is played.

Gilberto Gutiérrez started making instruments out of necessity.

In the late 1970s, he and like-minded musicians became passionate champions of the music and dance known as son jarocho—one of several genres born in Mexico’s rural Gulf Coast region that includes Veracruz.

Gutiérrez and his bandmates in the group Mono Blanco scoured remote villages to record old-timers singing and playing traditional sones. Then they launched workshops and meetups where knowledge was transferred to young people eager to learn.

“They had enthusiasm, but there were no instruments,” Gutiérrez says of his students through a translator. “So that’s why I decided to go learn [to make them] in the summer of 1980.”

Among the instruments Gutiérrez hoped to construct was the guitar-like jarana, which, built in various sizes, forms the backbone of the rhythm section. Unlike a guitar, glued from various wooden parts, a jarana is carved, body and neck, from a single block of wood.

“That’s why I think of the jarana as a sculpture,” he says. “It has a lot of detail, especially where the neck and the top meet, and requires a certain skill. And visually, it has to look good.”

Gutiérrez learned this sculptural art in the workshop of Don Quirino Montalvo Corro, then in his 80s, who built jaranas by hand using traditional techniques. In the years since, Gutiérrez has taught the craft, largely as he learned it, to hundreds of students across Mexico and the United States.

Photo by Joe Brusky

Dancers perform intricate foot patterns on the tarima, a percussive, hollow platform.

A Return to Cultural Context

Son jarocho has its roots in the cultural mix of 16th-century Veracruz, a diverse, Indigenous region where the Spanish established a port. As the colonizers moved inward, the port served as an entry point for enslaved people arriving from West Africa by way of the Caribbean. Much of the music of the region, including son jarocho, reflects a blend of Indigenous, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean influences.

Sones, often played in 6/8 time, unfold in a rapid staccato, with the rhythm held by the jaranas and by the tarima, a platform specially designed to amplify the intricate zapateado dance steps that beat out the percussion.

César Castro, who studied with Gutiérrez and now lives in Los Angeles, describes the tarima as a hypnotic foundation for the music.

“You feel it in your chest. That’s how strong the percussion is,” he says. “We call it the heartbeat of son jarocho.”

Other instruments include the requinto, a four- or five-stringed melody guitar played with a horn plectrum. Some son jarocho groups also include a harp, various percussion instruments, or a bass instrument.

The son lyrics, typically sung in call and response, follow a complex rhyme scheme and often turn on wry puns and innuendo. For example, the son “Chuchumbé” (a euphemistic reference to private parts) pokes fun at Catholic clergymen who preach chastity more than they practice it. This son was banned by religious authorities in the late 1700s.

Originally, son jarocho centered on a fandango, a participatory community celebration with food, music, and dance. Over the centuries, however, performers have repackaged the genre for audiences in Mexico and beyond. Folklórico troupes, for example, presented a highly stylized version for audiences in Mexico City. (And Ritchie Valens’s signature rock-and-roll version of “La Bamba” bears little resemblance to the traditional son of the same name.)

Gutiérrez and his cohort, in contrast, advocated for a return to roots with a revival of the fandango. They forged what has become known as the “son jarocho movement” to bring back the fundamental cultural context for the music.

Gilberto Gutiérrez poses in the desert holding an instrument.

Photo by Pau Ortiz

Gilberto Gutiérrez is a leader in the son jarocho movement, dedicated to preserving tradition.

Photo courtesy of César Castro

Unlike many string instruments, assembled from various wood pieces, each jarana is carved from a slab of tropical hardwood. The larger the instrument, the deeper its tone.
Photo courtesy of César Castro

A drill press is used to carve out the body of a jarana.
Photo courtesy of César Castro

Hand tools are used for fine detail work and shaping the neck.

Preserving (and Modernizing) Methods

Gutiérrez’s approach to instrument making reflects his determination to preserve son jarocho culture. With some concessions to modern techniques, makers schooled in the movement generally cleave to tradition.

You might think of a jarana as an Indigenous remix of the Spanish guitar. The original jarana makers, it’s speculated, imitated the guitar shape with whatever tools and materials they could put their hands to.

Construction begins with the selection of a suitable piece of wood. The historical choice is Spanish cedar, a tropical hardwood (not to be confused with softwood juniper cedars common throughout the US). Mahogany is also commonly used.

“You learn to recognize the characteristics for a wood that will give good results,” Gutiérrez explains. A jarana is more percussive and less resonant than a guitar; still, the wood carries and amplifies the sound waves and overtones from the plucked strings in a similar way. Thus, in choosing a wood block, the maker determines the timbre of the final instrument.

Castro describes the next step as shaping the rough form of the jarana by tracing a centerline down the block and cutting the outer shape of the instrument. At this point, he says, modern makers use a band saw to ease what would be a lengthy task by hand.

Similarly, an electric drill press with a flat flute bit replaces hand drills in the next phase: removing the bulk of the material to form the hollow body of the instrument. Even with an electric drill, this is painstaking work, according to Castro. On the smallest jarana, the walls can be as thin as 6 millimeters (up to 15 on larger instruments). Makers deploy a variety of hand tools, planes, and chisels to finish the body and shape the jarana’s neck to playable form.

The jarana’s solid construction helps produce its characteristic bright and percussive tone. So too does the instrument’s top—glued to the body and either unbraced or supported with two thin hardwood braces. Castro uses juniper-type cedar for the tops of his jaranas, but when he was learning, he used Spanish cedar.

“In the past, they weren’t that detailed. I remember just going to the lumberyard and asking for some boards as thin as possible,” Castro says. “In guitar building, they use two pieces of wood mirrored, so you have the same density on one side as the other. We don’t do any of that. We just go boom, and place the top in one piece.”

The jarana’s fretted fingerboard is another piece of mahogany. Frets, which signal finger placement, were originally made from bone. Today’s makers typically hammer in modern brass frets. Their placement is determined, like all Western string instruments, by a mathematical formula, along with various tools that simplify the formula.

Photos courtesy of César Castro

Finished son jarocho string instruments.

“Just by looking at an instrument from afar, you might be able to know either who made it or what school that person comes from.”

— César Castro

Although machined brass tuners are used on many modern jaranas, the old-school approach is a wooden tuning peg, like one would find on a violin. The fit must be perfect, as friction between peg and hole holds the string in tune. That’s a tall order with hand tools. So both Gutiérrez and Castro use specialized tools designed for violin makers to simplify the process.

“It’s a nightmare for people who don’t have them,” Castro says. “I remember trying to tune some instruments that were almost impossible because you would have to apply so much pressure to the peg.”

Finishing touches are a matter of taste, according to Castro. “People can get very creative with that, but there’s not a specific way to do it for everybody,” he says. Gutiérrez prefers to highlight the natural beauty of the wood with a shellac finish and minimal adornment.

Still, like every handmade object, the personality of the maker shines through. Gutiérrez has designed a bridge, where the strings connect with the jarana’s top, that is recognizable as his signature. Castro’s instruments can be identified by their unique tuning pegs.

“It becomes a personal touch,” he says. “Just by looking at an instrument from afar, you might be able to know either who made it or what school that person comes from.”

César Castro holding one of his instruments.

Photo by Chui Sandoval

Now based in Los Angeles, César Castro fell in love with son jarocho when he was a teenager living in his native Mexico. He’s helped spread the word about the genre throughout the US.

A Tradition Recontextualized

Forty-five years after its inception, the son jarocho movement has given birth to a generation with renewed appreciation for the fandango—not only in Mexico, but in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Milwaukee where workshops, classes, and visiting guests from Veracruz are common.

The revival centers on the fandango, which Castro likens to a family reunion among strangers—welcoming, participatory, and celebratory. And this collaborative attitude extends to the music itself, according to Gutiérrez.

“It is an ephemeral music—every time we play a son, it doesn’t repeat again, because it will always be different, right? A son is a rhythmic, harmonic, melodic structure that lets us express ourselves,” Gutiérrez says. “You’re free within that structure, as long as you respect the structure.”

Photo courtesy of César Castro

Makers typically add a unique element to their instruments, often on the bridge, which is between the strings’ anchoring point and the jarana’s neck.

“There’s some magic to this music. Something very, very special.”

— Jaime Garza

As with any folk revival, son jarocho contains a tension between tradition and innovation. Some fusion groups incorporate modern instruments into the mix or simply borrow elements of son jarocho, the way Ritchie Valens did in the 1960s. Even among preservationists, a fandango held in a Milwaukee cultural center is distinct from one in rural Sotavento.

“Some of the nuances get misrepresented,” explains Linda Serna, a first-generation Mexican American who leads classes and workshops in Milwaukee. “The thing with son jarocho is that even from one community to another, nothing is standardized. Whenever you say, ‘This is what it is,’ that’s not going to be completely accurate. Even the name, son jarocho—some people are resentful because that’s the name that academics started to use and just kind of dismissed all the other names.”

Despite these nuances, son jarocho lives on—and evolves—sustained by those dedicated to the revival. Jaime Garza, a working musician and promoter based in Chicago, is one of them. He also plays jazz, rock, and other genres, but for him, son jarocho is distinctive.

“Everywhere you go, you talk about son jarocho and immediately, someone who knows about it, their eyes light up, and you become best friends right away,” he says. “There’s some magic to this music. Something very, very special.”

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The author would like to acknowledge Gabriela Marvan, who served as translator for this article.

Joe Hart is a freelance writer based in southwestern Wisconsin. He’s also served as an editor for Utne Reader and Public Art Review.

Photo courtesy of César Castro

A band’s worth of finished son jarocho string instruments. While the octave range and tone vary by size, all jaranas are strummed with the distinctive 6/8 pattern that forms the backbone of the son jarocho rhythm section.

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