Los Cadetes de Linares
Homero Guerrero de la Cerda was born April 10, 1937, in El Popote, a ranch hamlet in Linares, Nuevo León; too poor for a real guitar, he built one from wood and rubber bands and learned to play it. He drifted through Monterrey, the migrant trail north to Louisiana and Michigan, and three accordion partners before cutting his first record in a McAllen pressing plant in 1968. Everything changed in 1974, when he paired with accordionist Lupe Tijerina and Ramex Records pressed 200 copies of a single built around Tijerina's own composition, "Los Dos Amigos." It made Los Cadetes de Linares the defining voice of the corrido — plainspoken songs about ordinary people's crimes, friendships, and tragedies, sung in tight two-part harmony over bajo sexto and accordion — until Guerrero's death in a 1982 car crash cut the partnership short at eight years.
Days before he died in July 2016, Lupe Tijerina sat for an interview with the reporter Socorro Orozco of the Mexican newspaper El Debate. She wrote that he "confided to me that he was a devoted admirer of Los Alegres de Terán, the fathers of norteño music" ("Humildemente me confesó ser fiel admirador de Los Alegres de Terán padres de la música norteña") — her account of what he told her, not his own words on the record. Vice's Paul Medrano, drawing on an earlier interview, added that Tijerina's father gave him an accordion at fifteen, inspired by the same duo he admired his whole life.
listen forPlay "Carta Jugada," the 1953 single that made Los Alegres de Terán's Eugenio Ábrego and Tomás Ortiz, as one biography puts it, "the format's first stars": accordion carries the melody in short runs, bajo sexto thumps the beat beneath it, and the two voices lock into close, almost unison harmony on every line. Cue up "Los Dos Amigos" and the same architecture holds — Guerrero's bajo sexto and Tijerina's accordion trading the same call-and-answer, their voices doubling on the chorus — the duet blueprint Tijerina had admired since boyhood, now carrying a corrido of his own.
Before Homero Guerrero ever held a store-bought instrument, he built his own. "Sin poder comprar una guitarra, el muchacho construyó una a mano, hecha de madera y banditas elásticas," the Strachwitz Frontera Collection's biography records — unable to buy a guitar, the boy built one by hand, from wood and rubber bands. "Su hermano mayor Benjamín le enseñó a tocar" — his older brother Benjamín taught him to play it — first at school, then at family gatherings and in the town square of Linares, years before any accordionist joined him.
listen forThere's nothing to play against Benjamín's teaching — no recording of his exists. What survives is where that homemade-guitar foundation landed: "Estoy Pagando," one of the songs from Guerrero's first studio session in 1968, later carried into the Los Cadetes de Linares catalog. Listen for the same unschooled attack that writer Paul Medrano called Guerrero's "requinteo atravesado, furioso rasgueo y pisada clínica" — a slashing lead line, a furious strum, a clinical, unwavering stride — the sound of someone who learned bajo sexto on a guitar built from scrap wood.