Unexpected Love Story

There exists many special moments in my life in which I have felt pure euphoria and immense happiness. One of those moments of euphoria and epiphany occurred when I was a little girl. Growing in a Hispanic household, mariachi music was always around me. I was lucky enough to grow up in a culture rich in its arts. I enjoyed listening to mariachi music with my grandparents and learned many songs at a very young age. But, the one song that changed my life forever the moment in entered my ear canal and scraped it’s way into my head and into my heart, was “Sabor A Mi” by Trio Los Panchos. Something about this song just captured me in such a way I could not explain. I just felt pure happiness, hopeful, heartbroken, and sad, yet the involuntary will to dance. A very weird feeling, so weird that I can still remember it very much. It was one of the very first songs I actually tried to listen to and understand to what it was saying. The way the guitar drove this romantic song around just made me want to listen to it all day. I remember asking my uncle Eddy to burn a CD for me with this song on, to listen to it on my CD player. I would put on my headphones and dance around my house, sit looking out the window feeling sad, as well as road trips, this song was perfect for any feeling in my opinion.
My grandma would show me pictures of the albums she had of three men with guitars. She played these Trio Los Panchos albums for me every day, we would lie down in the couch talking and listening for hours. I would ask her questions about the music we were listening, what her favorite song by them was, why she liked them, when was the first time she had listened to them, and many many other things that would pop into my mind as she would play them. Mariachi music and Trio music was my favorite. This would be the song that drove me to listen to more mariachi and trio music up until the point I was in third grade. The very first time I would see a violin before my eyes, I had seen them in pictures and videos on TV, never in real life. I was genuinely intrigued. We were asked if we would like to join Orchestra Club in my elementary school, I saw this as an opportunity to learn the violin to play it in a mariachi one day. I played violin for four years and had fell in love with classical music a bit more I felt like Mariachi wasn’t what I wanted anymore, until there was a budget cut that got rid of orchestra in my middle school.
My friends and I were put against the sword and the wall, we were to chose band or mariachi if we wanted to continue being part of a musical group there at the school. That is when I thought about my grandparents and what their reaction would be if I told them I got into the school’s mariachi. I immediately felt excited and asked to join Mariachi. But, listening back to “Sabor A Mi” I felt more connected with how the guitar sounded in the Trios as well as mariachi songs and really felt like I wanted to replicate that sound instead of that of the violin.
I began to play guitar the second semester of my 7th grade at the age of 13. I went on to high school playing in a mariachi band in which I would get to be the person playing all the guitar solos, including “Sabor A Mi” . It has now been ten years of playing guitar. I fell in love with it since I heard it as a little girl and have unconsciously taken decisions in my life that would put me closer and closer each time to that instrument. I am currently working on a Guitar Performance Degree. My dream is to become a professional traveling guitarist. Play my guitar, travel, learn and play different genres of music. My guitar and I against the world!