Lydia Mendoza

The Lark of the Border

Lydia Mendoza, a Mexican-American singer and 12-string guitarist, was born in Houston in 1916, on May 21 per MusicBrainz, UCLA and Houston History, though other sources give May 13 or May 31, and died in San Antonio on December 20, 2007, aged 91. Her parents were musicians from San Luis Potosí who left Mexico during the Revolution. She was nicknamed La Alondra de la Frontera, the Lark of the Border, and La Cancionera de los Pobres, the Songstress of the Poor; Michael Joseph Corcoran called her the Mother of Tejano Music. The National Endowment for the Arts says she began guitar at seven, and a Women in Texas History account says she built her first guitar at about four.

In March 1928 the family group, Cuarteto Carta Blanca, recorded 20 songs on 10 discs for OKeh in San Antonio, for a flat fee of 140 dollars. The family worked in Detroit from 1929 and returned to San Antonio in 1932. Corcoran reports that the radio pioneer Manuel J. Cortez hired her for La Voz Latina on WOAI, 3.50 dollars a week, and she said with that three-fifty, we felt like millionaires. In 1934 she auditioned for Bluebird in San Antonio, and her first solo session included "Mal Hombre", for which she received 60 dollars for her first four tracks, per Corcoran. Las Hermanas Mendoza, with her sisters, ran from the early 1940s to about 1952. UCLA's Frontera collection holds over 1,000 of her solo tracks.

She was rediscovered by the folk revival, with reissues by Chris Strachwitz's Arhoolie, played the 1971 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, appeared in Les Blank's film Chulas Fronteras (1976), played the Carter inaugural folk concert on January 20, 1977, and recorded a live album in Berkeley in 1982, issued as La Alondra de la Frontera, Live! in 2001. She received the 1982 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, the first for a Texan, and the National Medal of Arts in 1999, when Bill Clinton called her a true American pioneer. A stroke ended her career in 1987 or 1988 by most accounts, and Wikipedia says 1998. Books include Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography (1993) and Yolanda Broyles-González's Lydia Mendoza's Life in Music (2001), and a US postage stamp came in 2013.