'Mateo' Tells The Surprisingly Dark Story Of 'Gringo Mariachi'

The documentary film Mateo tells the story of one of the more unusual figures in Latin music. "Mateo" is actually Matthew Stoneman, a red-headed white man from New Hampshire who learned mariachi music and a bit of Spanish while serving time for robbery in a California prison. Living in Los Angeles, California, Stoneman becomes a kind of cult figure as the "Gringo Mariachi" and begins making enough money to record periodically in Havana, Cuba.

Sounds like a light-hearted fish-out-of-water story, doesn’t it? But the film has a surprising dark side. Yes, Mateo has a lovely voice, but he's a complicated guy, and he’s almost shockingly okay about sharing that with the camera.  

Around 20 minutes in, the course of the film changes drastically when Mateo is depicted hopping into the shower with a prostitute. In conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, the film's director Aaron Naar and Mateo himself, discusses the difficulty of making this pivot. 

"It's kind of the reason I wanted to tell it, because its actually the experience that I went through trying to make this film," says Naar. "As we just sort of learned, Matthew has a very sordid past. It's kind of very complicated and hard to connect the dots. And the story that I saw and the character that I saw, and the person that I was starting to understand revolved much more around this second life in Cuba. I became much more fascinated by that and it became much more reflective of who I thought Matthew was in present day."

Mateo is screening at Lincoln Center, as part of the Sound + Vision festival, on August, 4th.