One of the best directing debuts from an at the time young director.
Along with Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi is a great example of how you can tell a compelling and entertaining story with little film experience and a tiny budget.
The ways Robert Rodriguez gets around some of the technical limitations and tells a great story makes this one of the best foreign language, directorial debut and one of Rodriguez's best films and few of his later films lived up to this with the possible only exception being From Dusk Till Dawn.