The promise of Onda Tagoror

The promise of Onda Tagoror by Carlos Jesús Pérez Simancas.

One early morning in the early 2000s, the phone rang at my grandparents' house and shook them from sleep like thunder in the middle of the night. They woke up with a start, fearing the worst, because early morning calls almost never bring good news. My grandfather, with a trembling voice, picked up the receiver and on the other end heard a phrase that he would never forget: «I am in front of Jorge Negrete's grave. I'm here".

The listener explained that it had been a chance discovery, an unexpected encounter in that immense cemetery in Mexico. They had stumbled upon the tomb of Charro de Oro, but they had no flowers and could not leave an offering there in the name of Onda Tagoror. My grandfather, who kept more than a thousand songs by Negrete, Pedro Infante and Javier Solís in his soul, regretted that moment all his life. He always dreamed of traveling to Mexico to honor someone who had filled the radio waves in La Gomera so many times with music and emotion, but fate never granted him that trip.

The years passed and that story remained like an open wound in the family memory. Until one day, my cousin Jorge, a journalist in Mexico and responsible for the front page of the newspaper El País in the Federal District, reminded me of the pending promise. He told me that this time he had already located the grave and that he was going to do it. And he kept his word.

Riding his bicycle, he traveled for almost two hours through the intricate labyrinth of streets in Mexico City until he reached the cemetery. There, among the silence of the tombstones and the murmur of the wind, he placed a bouquet of flowers not only on the grave of Jorge Negrete, but also on that of Pedro Infante. That simple gesture became an act of shared memory, a silent tribute in which, without knowing it, all the listeners who ever tuned into Onda Tagoror participated.

When my grandfather saw the photographs, he was moved in a way he had not been moved for years. He felt that his dream had finally come true: although it was not him who traveled, a part of his desire had reached there. However, along with joy, deep regret invaded him. Jorge Negrete's tomb was not the majestic mausoleum he had imagined, but a forgotten resting place, almost claimed by grass, with a simple sign that barely said his name. That vision saddened him, because for him Negrete had been one of the greatest voices in history, an artist comparable only to Antonio Machín and those singers who accompanied the nights of his youth.

Emotion was mixed with disappointment and in that contrast the inevitable comparison with Pedro Infante's tomb arose, cared for and majestic, a reflection of the place it occupies in Mexican memory. And yet, sadness for Negrete did not manage to dull the brilliance of the gesture: finally the Charro de Oro had received the flowers he had so deserved.

Mexican music had crossed oceans to find a home in La Gomera. Since the 1940s, when immigrants returning from Venezuela brought pasta records, rancheras became a Gomero beat. They were songs of love and betrayal, of struggles and revolutions, of heroes like Zapata or Pancho Villa. Songs that got under the skin of the island and that continue to resonate today as part of its identity.

And it was in that bouquet of flowers, deposited at the foot of two distant graves, where a circle was closed and a promise was fulfilled. A simple gesture, but full of meaning, that united Mexico and La Gomera through music and memory.

There, in the silence of a Mexican cemetery, a humble offering said what thousands of songs had already told.

The bouquet was inscribed: From the family of Onda Tagoror.