[JPL] Lydia Mendoza, 91; Singer was in the vanguard of Tejano music

[Jazz Promo Services]

Lydia Mendoza, 91; Singer was in the vanguard of Tejano music
By Valerie J. Nelson,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

  December 30, 2007

  Lydia Mendoza, an early star of Mexican American music whose
passionate, despairing songs about working-class life on both sides of
the border made her a trailblazer for the Tejano genre, has died. She
was 91.

Mendoza, whose singing career spanned more than 60 years, died Dec. 20
of natural causes in San Antonio, Texas, according to media reports.

  Texas Monthly magazine called her the "greatest Mexican American
female performer ever to grace a stage" in a 1999 story that named her
"the voice of the century" in Texas.

Lupe Saenz, president of the South Texas Conjunto Assn., told The Times
that Mendoza was a "pioneer of our musical heritage."

"She was a rebel, in that she did what no other woman artist singer had
done before her; that is, she sang about the 'machismo' culture in a
way that set the course for many women today," Saenz said in an e-mail.

The words for her first, and most enduring, hit came from her girlhood
collection of gum wrappers that contained song lyrics. She put the
words from one wrapper to a tune she had heard in concert in Mexico and
first performed "Mal Hombre" (Evil Man), a song about false-hearted
lovers, when she was 10.

  After Mendoza recorded the song -- a tango -- in 1934, it became a
major hit throughout the Spanish-speaking community and launched her
career.

Accompanied by her signature 12-string guitar, Mendoza often sang about
hardship and rejection in a powerfully sincere style that reflected the
music developing along the U.S.-Mexican border. Her trilling voice
earned her the nickname "La Alondra de la Frontera," or Lark of the
Border.

In 1935, she married shoemaker Juan Alvarado and continued to perform
in an era when wives usually gave up their careers. By 1940, Mendoza
had recorded more than 200 songs in a wide variety of musical styles
that included boleros, rancheras and cumbias. She wrote many of them
herself.

"People say I'm the mother of Tejano music," Mendoza told the Chicago
Tribune in 1996, "but I don't think I even heard the word, knew what it
was, until many years after I started. . . . People watched what I was
doing -- singing and playing guitar -- and that inspired them."

She performed at the 1977 inauguration of President Carter and in 1999
received a National Medal of Arts, which recognizes outstanding
contributions to the field. At a ceremony, President Clinton praised
her for bridging "the gap between generations and cultures."

"Lydia Mendoza is a true American pioneer," Clinton said, "and she
paved the way for a whole new generation of Latino performers who today
are making all Americans sing."

She was born May 12, 1916, in Houston to Francisco and Leonor Mendoza.
Her family came from northern Mexico, and she and several siblings grew
up moving between Monterrey, Mexico, and south Texas.

Her mother played the guitar and sang Mexican songs, which made Mendoza
wish for a guitar of her own. At 4, she made one out of a plank of
wood, six nails and several rubber bands.

"It made a sound -- I was happy enough," Mendoza told the Houston
Chronicle in 2001.

When her father became too ill to work as a railroad mechanic, she
began performing with her parents and a sister on the streets and in
restaurants of border towns.

In 1928, her father answered an ad in a San Antonio newspaper placed by
a New York company looking to record Spanish-language musicians. Family
members recorded their first record in a hotel room and were paid $140
for 20 songs.

Still needing to find regular jobs, the Mendozas moved to Michigan to
work in the vegetable fields. Upon hearing the family perform,
co-workers encouraged them to play in town, and they spent several
years working and performing in small restaurants.

Back in Texas in the early 1930s, the family often played for tips at
an outdoor market in San Antonio, where the host of a local
Spanish-language radio show heard Mendoza sing. She was soon performing
on the radio for $3.50 a week.

The radio show made her popular in the region, and the repeal of
Prohibition in 1933 created opportunities for musicians in cantinas.

Eventually, the family began touring throughout the Rio Grande Valley
in southern Texas. Mendoza performed solo while her siblings sang
together and put on a variety act.

"The very sight of her was magical and could awaken a populist frenzy
and collective pride in Mexicans," Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez wrote in
her 2001 book, "Lydia Mendoza's Life in Music."

Even after having three daughters, Mendoza kept performing, but gas
rationing during World War II temporarily ended her touring.

In 1947, she returned to the road, but the family group broke up in
1952 after her mother died and a sister married.

Although her status as an idol peaked during the 1950s, Mendoza
continued recording and touring as a solo act until a series of strokes
forced her to retire in 1988.

After her husband died in 1961, she married another shoemaker, Fred
Martinez, in 1964 and they moved to Houston, where she often performed
in small nightclubs. She drew from a repertoire of 1,200 songs spanning
nearly 100 years.

Mendoza is survived by a daughter, Yolanda Hernandez.

valerie.nelson at latimes.com

A national treasure, the living legend, the queen of Tejano, la londra
de la frontera - the lark of the border, Lydia Mendoza deserves a spot
in any respectable c.d. collection. Her voice was the voice of
immigrant labor in Texas during much of the first half of this century.
It conveyed longing, desire, sadness, and rapture. Like Violeta Parra
or the Carter Family, Lydia Mendoza's voice defines another place and
time. " We were playing for the workers."

Ms. Mendoza presently lives in a white, corner lot bungalow in the
Houston Heights. From its modest exterior you would be hard pressed to
discern that it was occupied by a Texas legend. The interior also gives
little indication of its host's importance aside from a few framed
photographs of her famous past. Mostly, it looks like your tia's house.
Jesus, knick-knacks, avocado green carpet and faux gilded fixtures.

Professional is the way to describe Lydia Mendoza. She greets us at the
door in her PR best. A lovely stage dress, rouged cheeks and lips, her
face freshly powdered. She was not only doing an interview, but she was
making an appearance.

A one time sitting with Ms. Mendoza is tough. Abstract musical
questions are almost laughed off. When we ask her what the purpose of
music is, she gave a surprised grin that masked alarm, like asking an
evangelist if the devil existed. We try to rephrase it and she shakes
her head and replies "Music is for celebration and enjoyment."


Being a musician in Mexican culture is a well respected profession. And
so it was for the Mendoza family. It was a living. Sadly, though
Mendoza's musical career is a thing of the past: "I suffered a stroke a
few years ago which has taken away my ability to sing and has prevented
me from playing my guitar." Her public still wants her presence though.
"I am occasionally asked to do presentations or speak to groups of
children but no more music."

Most people would agree that, back in the 30's and 40's, life in Texas
was tough for Mexican-Americans but Ms. Mendoza is downright chipper,
if not sometimes evasive, when posed with questions regarding any
hardships she or her family endured.

This makes for some perplexing responses.

WG: Did you ever experience racism on the road?

Mendoza: Oh no. We never had any problem with white people.

Well of course not directly. The book Lydia Mendoza: a Family
Autobiography (Arte Publico Press) paints a slightly different story.
Mendoza, herself, here states that they avoided discrimination by
"cooking our own food, staying out of restaurantsŠstaying in people's
homes or in tourist courts where we could cook for ourselves."(p.141)

Manuel Mendoza (her brother) recalls Levelland in West Texas.

"that place was so famous for its discrimination that Arturo Ortiz even
wrote a corrido about it during the war [WW2]. Something happened to us
there when we came back from the Service. I don't even like to think
about it. It's just something that happened, and I want to erase it
from my mind. I hate to think back about how they treated people in
places like that. But it's part of our historyŠ.There was [even] a
restaurant in Levelland that had a sign right next on the door: "No
Dogs or Mexicans Allowed."(P.267)

When we asked her about having been taken advantage of by record
companies Mendoza replies "I can't say that I was ever taken advantage
of because my father took care of all our business arrangements for
myself and the family."

This is only partially true. There was one incident where two
unscrupulous people from Blue Bird left the company with a substantial
chunk of Mendoza's royalty money from her hit "Mal Hombre." This became
even more of a problem when the IRS came looking for it's share of that
money. But Blue Bird patched things up with the IRS when the situation
was made known to them. After that incident Mendoza pretty much stayed
away from royalties and instead made sure she was paid an up front flat
fee per recording.



La Familia Mendoza:
Lydia and Juanita
Leonor
  Manuel and Maria.

As for her father, Fransico Mendoza may have formed the early Mendoza
family into the Cuarteto Carta Blanca (named after the beer when put on
the spot by a record company) but he became less helpful, to be polite,
as the years went on. Manuel J. Cortez who owned KCOR in San Antonio
was the first to manage Mendoza's career and give her a weekly radio
segment. This pulled Mendoza out of the Plaza Del Zacate, an outdoor
plaza where musicians performed. But it was not until 1936 that the
Mendoza family's career truly took off. That was when Antonio Montes
began to mange the group. Lydia Mendoza recalls, "Of all the people who
helped us during our career, Antonio Montes was the principal oneŠ.
When Montes joined up with us, we really didn't know what to do. My
name was well known, but we had to fill out an entire show with
something. Montes put together a complete {variedad} [similar to a
vaudeville troupe]." (pp.107-109) For 6 years the family traveled
successfully performing as a troupe. Their touring ended in 1942 by the
Second World War which severely limited travel.

The few years from which Mendoza was out of the spotlight made for a
hilarious problem when she returned to the stage in 1947. Ramiro Cortes
tells the story:

"About that time, everybody had almost forgotten about her. Because the
public thought that Lydia was the one killed in the car wreck that had
caused the death of her sister Panchita. When I started to try to book
her in theatres, nobody wanted to believe me. In Sonora, Arizona I was
in the lobby when here comes and old woman and hit me on the head,
blood came out and everything. I was taken to the hospital because she
hit me with the handle of the umbrella."

'You should be ashamed! Bringing this woman to sing here, using the
name of people who are already dead! Lydia Mendoza is in heaven now!
And you bring somebody else here thinking you could get away with it!
You should be ashamed!'

And she kept hitting me with the umbrella. I couldn't convince her;
they took me away in an ambulance. On account of those five years she
hid from people, things like that happened many times on that first
tour in 1947." (PP. 159- 160)

Asked who her influences have been through the years she replies, "I
never tried to emulate anyone. I always had my own style though I
learned all about playing the guitar from my mother." And surely if
anything held the Mendoza troupe together it was Leonor Mendoza. Upon
her death in the 1952 not only did the troupe fall apart completely
but, without Leonor, the success of Las Hermanas Mendoza (Lydia's
sisters Juanita and Maria) was cut short by short sighted and jealous
husbands.



Lydia Mendoza today

Lydia though continued touring by herself and even expanded her tours
into Mexico and as far away as Columbia. In 1971 Mexico, not the United
States, chose Mendoza to represent them in the Smithsonian Festival of
American Folk Life. She appeared at the Library of Congress in 1977 at
the request of the American Folk Life center for the conference on
"Ethnic Recordings in America." Furthermore she has been properly
honored by many other appearances at the request of people who see her
as a living legend and link to an American Heritage that many have
forgotten.

When she is asked about the newer forms of Spanish Language Tex-Mex
Mendoza seems less than exited. Her preference is for the older
Conjunto with its emphasis on stringed instruments than on horns or the
bane that is the inorganic sound of the synthesizer. She feels that
people who go back and enjoy her and other folkloric music aren't
having the same experience. "Oh, no it's not the same. This was music
for the workers."

And while she's probably right on one level, it is still a joy to
listen to the old recordings and important for people to make that leap
to the past and realize that this music was and is an important part of
the American experience.

Tejano singer Lydia Mendoza dies

Published: Dec. 30, 2007 at 12:41 PM
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  SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Pioneering Tejano music star Lydia
Mendoza has died in San Antonio at the age of 91.

Mendoza, who sang about working-class life, died Dec. 20 of natural
causes, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

Mendoza was the "greatest Mexican-American female performer ever to
grace a stage" Texas Monthly magazine reported in a 1999 story that
named Mendoza "the voice of the century" in Texas.

"She was a rebel, in that she did what no other woman artist singer had
done before her; that is, she sang about the 'machismo' culture in a
way that set the course for many women today," Lupe Saenz, president of
the South Texas Conjunto Association, told the Times.

By 1940, Mendoza had recorded more than 200 songs, including many she
wrote, and in 1999 she received a National Medal of Arts from
then-President Bill Clinton for outstanding contributions in her field.

"Lydia Mendoza is a true American pioneer," Clinton said, "and she
paved the way for a whole new generation of Latino performers who today
are making all Americans sing."

Mendoza, who was born in Houston, was married and widowed twice. She is
survived by her daughter, Yolanda Hernandez.