Lydia Mendoza was the first star of Tejano music.

Performing the popular corridos, polkas, and boleros of rural northern Mexico and south Texas, she gained enormous popularity throughout the Southwest and the broader Spanish-speaking world in the 1930s. 

Unlike earlier female Spanish-language recording artists, who often sang in a trained, theatrical style aimed at the middle and upper classes, Lydia's emotional, vernacular style gave voice to the border region's working class. From her turbulent childhood with her family of traveling musicians, she emerged, in Chris Strachwitz's words, as "a self-accompanied, self-taught singer-guitarist of immense vitality and charisma."    

Her fans called her La Alondra de la Frontera—the Lark of the Borderland—a nickname that reflected her close connection to the region and the affection in which its people held her. 

Lydia's life in music began amid migration and economic hardship. 

As a child, she journeyed with her family's band, Cuarteto Carta Blanca, as they followed agricultural workers through Texas, Michigan, and California. They played the popular songs of the day on street corners and in restaurants—wherever they could earn tips. 

As a teenager, Lydia and her siblings played vaudeville-style carpas, or tent shows, throughout the Southwest. She developed a vast repertoire of songs and an ability to inhabit them with deep emotion and conviction.

"[Lydia] must know thousands of songs by heart," Chris Strachwitz wrote, "and she does not have them written out in front of her—they are all in her head and in her soul."

Lydia was resilient. During childhood, her family was poor, moved constantly, and lived in the shadow of an emotionally and physically abusive father. Later, under pressure from her husband to be a stay-at-home mother, she put aside a successful career. But she always kept going. 

As James Nicolopulos writes in his foreword to Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography, that lifelong resiliency is Lydia's essence:

"Lydia and the Mendoza family's story is, above all, the story of several generations of remarkable women struggling to survive in an often hostile world. Despite violent revolution, economic depression, world war, male violence, and both ethnic and gender-based discrimination, the Mendoza women always seemed to find a way to preserve their family and carry on."

This exhibition reimagines key stories from Lydia's oral histories.

We commissioned eight artists from the U.S.-Mexico border region to reinterpret narratives from the Mendoza Family Interviews, a series of oral histories conducted by Chris Strachwitz between 1977 and 1984.

We helped the artists identify stories from the interviews that seemed particularly significant and rich in narrative detail. We did our best to collect stories from across Lydia's life. As you will see, some artists have re-created those narratives in close detail, while others have used the interviews as starting places for more abstract reflections on Lydia's life and legacy.

The stories that this exhibit reimagines are in some ways unique to Lydia Mendoza, her family, and her remarkable life in show business. In other ways, though, these are stories of the Mexican American experience more broadly—stories of migration, labor, and cultural adaptation in El Norte.

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Sergio Sánchez Santamaría

Lecciones de Guitarra (Guitar Lessons)

In Lydia’s family, music was handed down through the generations. She learned guitar from her mother and maternal grandmother, Teófila, a teacher from San Luis Potosí. Her grandmother's educational attainment was "a fairly rare thing at that time," Lydia recalled. "There weren't very many educated women in the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, especially outside of the capital."

Teófila probably learned guitar from her own mother, an Italian immigrant. "Our mother told us that grandmother was always playing music," Lydia remembered. "[She played the] dances of those years, like 'La negra noche,' songs of that style ... very romantic songs from those years, on her guitar."

In 1924, when Lydia was eight years old, the family returned to Monterrey from Texas. By then, Lydia could already play in all keys on guitar. That's when she began learning from Grandma Teófila:

When we got there [to Monterrey], the first thing that my father said to my granny was, "You have a granddaughter that can play the guitar very prettily." It pleased him so much! After that, my mother didn't have to worry about the little that I lacked to perfect my playing, because my granny would work with me on it every day. My granny had a little guitar, and she would grab it and say, "Come on, my little girl, sit yourself down!" And she would sit with me and tune the guitar and teach me to tune and play it as she did—my granny.

In his linocut Lecciones de Guitarra, Sergio Sánchez Santamaría reflects on Teófila’s important role in Lydia’s musical development. His piece makes clear that Lydia’s talent was not an aberration, but rather the product of skills and knowledge passed down from her mother and grandmother.

Click "Related page" to view a zoomable version of the artwork.

Belinda Salazar

Cerveza Carta Blanca (Carta Blanca Beer)

Lydia’s father, Francisco—known as Pancho by his friends and relatives—was a complicated man. By turns affectionate and abusive, for years he dragged his family back and forth between Monterrey and Texas. The work he found, mainly at breweries and railroads, never lasted long. "My father was a...what do you call it, a vagabond," said Lydia's brother Manuel. "He didn't like to stay in one place all the time." 

In Monterrey, Pancho drank. A lot. Lydia recalled him finishing a bottle of mezcal every evening. “He would get mean and beat up on Mamá—he would really hit her.” Those nights, as Lydia vividly describes in the following interview, were an inferno: a living hell. 

Papa would get off work at four o'clock in the afternoon, and he would be fine, sane and healthy, and everything was all right. When he got home, he would sit down in the main room of the house in his big chair. He had lots of books and newspapers, and he would sit down and start reading ... and drinking and drinking. His measure—his usual ration—was a bottle that held about a liter or more that he would refill every day from the garrafón, the big jug. He always drank at least one like that a day: every day. He would take a swig of the mezcal and then take a drink of soda, and he would go on like that until the bottle was empty. When he started getting down towards the end of the liter bottle that he used as a daily measure, he would say to me, "Lydia, tell your nana that I want to have dinner."

Well, he was already . . . well, just imagine, with that great big bottle. He would sit down to eat, and for any little thing, he would start accusing my mother of all sorts of things. It was all his imagination. And just on account of those imaginings, he would beat up Mamá.

And many times when my sainted mother had barely escaped being killed by him in his drunkenness-he would beat up on her and then he would fall down asleep—the next day in the morning he would get up and wash himself, and then, 

"Ay, please forgive me," he would say to Mamá, "don't pay any attention to me, I was just drunk. Don't answer me when I'm like that."

"But Pancho ... ," Mamá would start to say to him when he was drunk and accusing her.

"Shut up, Leonorcita!" he would yell.

"Mamá," we would whisper to her, "don't answer him, he's drunk."

And if she didn't answer him?

"What am I, your fool? Your dog? What am I?" he would shout at her. "Why don't you answer me? Can't you see I'm talking to you?"

Well, what could she do? If she answered him, "Shut up!" If she didn't answer, the same. So it was an infierno, a living hell. There were arguments and fights every day. There was no tranquility in that place ... just because of things that he would imagine, he would want to kill her. He was very jealous, and just because he would imagine that someone had told him that she had gone out somewhere while he was at work, he would beat her up.

Because of all this, Mamá and I and all of the rest of us were scared all the time. It frightened all of us. My sister Beatriz was the most afraid. If he so much as looked at her when he was drinking, she would run and hide under the bed. And the other kids would all hide, each in their own place. I was the only one that would stay and face him. I wasn't quite as terrified of him as the others, because he cared for me so much.

"Papacito, please don't hit Mamá" I would beg him.

I always followed him around when he got like that, and he would reply, "No, hijita, you don't understand." And he would go on persecuting Mamá. And this was a mortificación, a living hell for all of the family.

So when we came to the United States, it was the greatest happiness we ever felt. Over here [during Prohibition], he didn't drink, and when he was sober, he was a very nice person. But if he took a drink, God help us!

In 1927, Pancho began experiencing fainting, fevers, and fatigue—liver damage—and could no longer work. That’s when the family turned to music to survive. 

The family recorded their first songs for OKeh Records in 1928, in San Antonio. Ironically, it was Pancho who had seen the recording sessions advertised in the newspaper and who made sure the family showed up. It was also Pancho who gave the group their name, Cuarteto Carta Blanca, after the brewery where he had worked in Monterrey.

In the interview that inspired Belinda Salazar's Cerveza Carta Blanca, interviewers Dan Dickey and Chris Strachwitz ask Lydia about who came up with the group's name:

Lydia: My dad. When they asked him [what we were called]... because when we roamed around singing, we didn't have a name or anything—just the family. But when we went to record, they always asked that the group needed to take a title. And my dad, well, he said, 'Carta Blanca.'

Dan: But it's from the brewery where he worked?

Chris: In Monterrey?

Lydia: Yes, the brewery where he worked.

Dan: For that reason, he gave the group the name Cuarteto Carta Blanca?

Lydia: Yes.

In her piece, Salazar reimagines a brooding photograph of the Mendoza family (below) to dwell on the role of the Carta Blanca brewery in family lore. On a deeper level, Cerveza Carta Blanca considers Pancho Mendoza’s complicated role within the family and the infierno caused by his drinking.  

The Cuarteto Carta Blanca. From left to right: Leonor, Lydia, Pancho, and Francisca (Panchita). From the Frontera Image Archive.

Emmanuel Tanús 

Mal Hombre Lyrics y Primera Guitarra (First Guitar)

Lydia felt her first musical impulse at age four, during a period when the family was living in Ennis, Texas. “We always had music in the house,” she remembered. “My mother would take out the guitar and play whenever she got the chance … So, after the family tasks, the dinner and all that, they would all sit down and sing. My dad also sang with her. The two of them would start to sing. And that was when I began to feel that I, too, wanted to play the guitar.”

Wanted to, but couldn’t. In the interview that inspired Emmanuel Tanús’s Mal Hombre Lyrics and Primera Guitarra, Lydia recalls how her mother forbade her from touching her guitar:

I was four years old, and I wanted to play the guitar, so much so that I tried to get hold of my mother's guitar. But she never allowed me to touch it, because she thought that I was going to pull out the strings or that I could break it. She took very good care of her guitar and was very watchful. And at my age, well, they took my interest as a childish thing, without realizing that my aspirations were real.

All right, my mother wouldn't let me get hold of the guitar. In order to prevent me from getting at it, she put a nail up real high and hung it up so that I couldn't reach it. One time when she wasn't paying attention, when she was in the kitchen, I grabbed a chair, and very carefully—just think, at four years old !—I dragged it, I pulled it to where that guitar was hanging, very carefully, in danger of falling down with the guitar and everything else just imagine! But I climbed up on the chair; I took down the guitar very carefully, and then when I was back down on the floor, I sat myself down and started to play it with just one finger.

As soon as my mother heard the sound she burst out of the kitchen, scolded me and took it away. She told me that if I ever took the guitar down again, she was going to punish me very severely. Well, she put the fear of God into me, and I never did it again. I would just stand in front of where it was hanging and stare at that guitar. I resigned myself to just being there contemplating it.

Still determined to hold a guitar in her hands, Lydia created a makeshift guitar from a board, nails, and rubber bands. As she explains in the same interview, “That was the first toy I made for myself—a guitar—when I was four years old, because my desire to have a guitar in my hands was so great, and my mother wouldn't let me touch her real guitar yet. I just imitated the way that I saw my mother play her guitar. And finally my wish was granted me, because my mother taught me how to play a real guitar when I was seven years old.”

In Tanús's imaginative retelling, Leonor's guitar, Lydia's makeshift toy guitar, and the gum wrapper lyrics for "Mal Hombre" seem to hover in the air like symbols of young Lydia's otherworldly drive toward music. 

Sergio Sánchez Santamaría

Llegando a la Frontera (Arriving at the Border)

The border was part of the fabric of life for Lydia and her family. In some ways, it was almost invisible; it was easy to get across and cost only a couple of dollars. Then as now, families and communities spanned both sides.

“The family was always on the move, sometimes on one side of the border, sometimes on the other,” Lydia remembered, “probably because my father worked for the railroad on both sides. As [my sister] Maria says, it's hard to know exactly where and when any of us were born.”

In other ways, though, the border separated two realities for the Mendoza family. The North offered better economic opportunities, but discrimination against Mexicans was widespread and only grew worse during the Great Depression. Systemic racism made work and travel hard. Signs saying “No Mexicans allowed” were hung in hotel and restaurant windows throughout the Southwest. 

In the narrative depicted by Sergio Sánchez Santamaría in Llegando a la Frontera, Lydia describes a border crossing incident during which she and other Mexican children were forcibly bathed in gasoline to treat lice. This degrading experience, Lydia recalls, reflected the pervasive prejudice against Mexicans at the time: 

I was barely four years old. I recall that when we crossed over that time, they had a bad opinion of all Mexicans, and especially of the children. They washed my head with gasoline. They told us that we were infected with lice or some such things.

Right away they took us there in back behind the immigration station where they had a bath, one of those big ones, full of gasoline. It wasn't just me; there were several other children, all Mexicans. And they doused us with gasoline; they threw on plenty. The gasoline got in my eyes and I became very ill. I came out with red eyes. That was the last and only time they did that to me, because afterwards they stopped doing it; this was precisely in 1920.

Sánchez shares his reflection on this story and his inspiration for Llegando a la Frontera: “The stories from Maestra Lydia's interviews brought her immigrant experiences to life for me, especially the challenges of being Mexican in those regions during those years. It may sound quaint or even humorous, but to me, it feels dark and tragic.”

Emmanuel Tanús 

Cruzando La Frontera Pa'l Desahije (Crossing the Border for the Harvest)

In the late 1920s, the Mendoza family traveled by train to Michigan on an enganche (labor contract) to work the sugar beet harvest. Lydia's father, Pancho, had signed the contract despite their inexperience with field labor. They stayed in an old boxcar set up for workers: two beds for the family of eight. During the day, Lydia, Pancho, and her older sister Beatriz worked the fields while Leonora prepared the meals. 

In Lydia’s telling, the family was ill-suited for the enganche: 

And, well, what did we know about any of this? Those little plants—we had never seen anything like that before. The little beet plants were real small, but they were starting to put out leaves. We were told that each plant should only have two leaves. 

According to Lydia, music was the only thing that brought the family happiness during these grueling days. And soon music would provide their ticket out of the enganche, as she recalls in this interview: 

At the end of the week, they would have sort of a little fiesta out there, and all of the people that were working on the farms around there would come. One Saturday, some Mexicans who were working on another ranch passed by, and they stopped to hear the family sing. After listening to us for a little while, they told Papa, "Listen, what are you doing here? You can make more money with this music than by being stuck way out here. Wouldn't you like to go to town with this music? You'll make good money."

One Saturday, the family got a ride to nearby Pontiac, where they found a little Mexican restaurant that welcomed their singing. In Lydia’s words, “we caused a sensation, un furor.” Other workers gathered to hear the songs from home, and they rewarded the family with piles of silver coins—two hundred dollars in all. They never went back to the enganche.

This story previews an important aspect of Lydia’s career. She knew intimately what it meant to be a migrant, to be far from the land of her birth. Her songs captured those feelings and were cherished by other migrants. In the evocative words of scholar Yolanda Broyles-González, Lydia conjured “an audible Mexican American homeland” wherever she sang. 

In Cruzando la Frontera Pa'l Desahije, Tanús takes one of Lydia’s trademarks—her beautiful, elaborate performance costumes—and turns it into a symbol of her time in the Michigan fields. The piece reflects Lydia’s firsthand experience with migration and agricultural labor and her proud connection to the Mexican American laboring class.

Housing for Mexican sugar beet workers. Saginaw Farms, Michigan, 1941. Photograph by John Vachon. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. 

Jacinto Guevara

La Plaza

For the Mendozas, music became a means of survival when Francisco could no longer work steadily. “From the age of eleven,” Lydia remembered, “I began to understand what it was like to struggle in life, what it was to earn each day’s bread … [When my father] could no longer work, we really began to notice the things we no longer had. And, well, we were without education, without a way to go to work someplace to earn money. We didn’t know anything but music.” 

In 1927, the family started singing their way around the Rio Grande Valley: mother Leonor on guitar, Lydia on mandolin, and shy little Panchita on triangle. Sometimes Francisco would feel well enough to play tambourine and sing. They played on street corners, in front of bakeries, in restaurants.

After extended stays in Detroit and Houston, the family settled in San Antonio in 1932. With the modest winnings from a singing contest, they rented a house, bought old chairs, and set themselves up at the city’s open-air market: Plaza del Zacate. This chapter of Lydia’s story is the focus of Jacinto Guevara’s painting La Plaza. 

In the interview that Guevara based his work on, Lydia paints a vivid picture of the Plaza, where talented singing groups set up shop alongside the city’s famous chili queens and played for tips from passing customers. As Lydia recalls, the Mendozas were unique among Plaza musicians: 

There were a lot of groups in the Plaza, but they were all men. We were women; we were the only women singers: my mother, my sisters, and I. We were also the only group that was a family. The rest were strictly male trios or duets … with their guitars … singing … making their living like us.

Lydia goes on to recall how, unlike most of the other groups, who chased cars around the Plaza in hopes of earning a few centavos, the Mendozas stayed put in one corner of the Plaza and lured listeners to them:

Anyone that wanted to listen to us had to come on over to our little corner; we didn’t go chasing after them like the others. The cars would arrive, and the people would get out to hear us. They would form a little knot around us and listen to us sing, while the other groups would run around as best they could. 

Chili stand in Plaza del Zacate, circa 1930s. Courtesy San Antonio Light Collection, UTSA.

Emmanuel Tanús 

¡Hoy! Lydia Mendoza (Today! Lydia Mendoza)

Carpas, or traveling tent shows, thrived throughout rural Texas and the greater Border region throughout the 1920s and 30s. Like vaudeville, carpas combined elements of stage comedy, music, and acrobatics. Returning on rotation to the same towns every year, the carpas were an affordable form of entertainment for working-class families. 

In this interview, Lydia describes her early experiences with the carpas: 

We worked in the carpas around or after 1932, about the same time that we got to San Antonio. In the Mexican carpas they had a trapeze, and they had clowns and tightropes. They had pantomimes, chorus dancers, two or three girls that danced—a variety of everything. They had comedy skits, all of that kind of thing.

The Mendoza siblings got their start as a professional stage act while working for the Carpa García, as Lydia’s sister Juanita Mendoza explains in this interview:

Where we really started out as a stage act was in the carpas, the tent shows. The Carpa Garcia was the first one that took us on. We went and auditioned, and Mr. Garcia decided that he wanted us to sing there, so he took us on. He didn't pay us very much. They used to give me a nickel. Mamá would get fifty cents and Lydia, a dollar.

In ¡Hoy! Lydia Mendoza, Emmanuel Tanús draws upon Lydia and Juanita’s recollections to re-create the world of the carpa in miniature. Here Lydia seems right at home among the whimsical characters that made the carpas so popular. Tanús was inspired by the idea that the carpas were part of Lydia’s education in “singing for the people.” 

“How beautiful as an artist to know stories like this,” Tanús reflects, “full of authenticity and dedication to the craft of singing.”

Promoting the Carpa García, circa 1930s. From the Frontera Image Archive.

Sergio Sánchez Santamaría

El Siguente Pueblo (The Next Town)

The Mendozas moved constantly throughout the late 1920s and early 30s: from Monterrey to the Rio Grande Valley and all the way north to Michigan, where they first sang for the sugar beet harvesters, and where Francisco later got a job at a Ford factory. In 1929, the Depression sent the family back to Texas.

The family’s trip from Michigan to Houston took almost three months. Though traveling by car, they left with little money and had to stop in towns along the route to sing for food and gas money. At night they would pull off the road, cook simple meals over campfires, and sleep in their car. 

Lydia remembered the struggles they faced on that trip, how they had to make do with basics and hope for the generosity of other Mexican families along the way: 

On the road from Detroit to Houston we camped out most of the time. When we did arrive in a city—we looked for cities where we thought there might be some Mexicans—we would go and ask them for help. When they saw how we were traveling, what kind of shape we were in, that we needed help, well, they would organize reuniones, get-togethers, or little parties in some family's house. We would sing for them, and they would ... help us. That's how we would get money together for traveling. We'd fill up all the cars with gasoline, and we'd hit the road.

Linocut artist Sergio Sánchez Santamaría’s El Siguiente Pueblo is an allegory of the Mendoza family’s many journeys. In his recasting of Lydia’s travel narrative, Lydia and two others (possibly her brothers) walk along a highway with instruments in hand. We can’t see their faces, but they stand tall. They seem capable of walking like that for a long ways. 

El Siguiente Pueblo captures the extraordinary strength and perseverance at the heart of Lydia and her family's story. When things got tough in one place, they kept moving. The next town: maybe things would be better there. The family's constant migration posed many hardships for young Lydia, a theme which she reflects on in this clip: 

I will tell you that for us happiness and gaiety came until that, when I recorded my recordings and that we started to live a more unsuffocated life. But, let's say, from 1927 until the, I can say until 1933, well, we didn't have any novelties, just striving for life and working to live and sometimes well and sometimes badly. Encountering a lot of calamities. That ... was our life, and I say that it was my life, because I didn't know what ... parties ... or friends ...well, nothing that might make my years happy, including that I didn't have clothes, we didn't have anything. I, who was the oldest, and then at the age that I was growing, well, I looked at other girls, so neat and I didn't have [what they had]…

Of course, I didn’t rebel from my situation. But it did give me sadness, that I couldn't enjoy [life] like other girls. But it was impossible. It was nothing but working in order to live. For that reason is why I didn't have gaieties in my youth. Just bitterness and sadness.

Says Sánchez Santamaría, “I emphasize [Lydia] carrying the guitar case herself, which symbolizes her dedication and strength. I imagine she would insist on carrying it, asserting her independence and commitment to her craft.”

Joel Bernal 

Los Papelitos (Little Papers)

Joel Bernal’s Los Papelitos dramatizes the story of how Lydia learned “Mal Hombre” ("Bad Man"), the song that propelled her to stardom in 1934 and became her lifelong trademark. 

“Mal Hombre,” which narrates a young woman’s defiant rebuke of her abusive lover, was likely written in Argentina: a tango. First recorded by singer Elisa Berumen in 1928, the song was a moderate success in Mexico during Lydia’s childhood.  

In this interview, Lydia describes her unlikely journey to learning "Mal Hombre," which she had first encountered as lyrics printed on a chewing gum wrapper:

Interviewer Dan Dickey: You learned the lyrics to "Mal Hombre" from one of those little pieces of paper, like from “Chicle” [chewing gum] in Monterrey. But how did you learn the melody? Was it from a record or from someone singing it?

Lydia: I remember I had a collection of [little papers for] many songs, and I didn’t know the music, of course, but I was interested in having them just in case one day I happened to hear one of those songs. With "Mal Hombre," I heard the lyrics and only heard the music once, just once.

There was a variety show that came from Mexico, but I don’t remember exactly what kind of variety show it was. In that show, there was a very pretty girl singing tangos and cuplés, and this was around 1926 or maybe early 1927. There was a performance at the Independencia Theater in Monterrey, and since there weren’t many variety shows coming from Mexico at that time, my father took my mother, my little sister, and me to see it. Usually, my father didn’t take us, but for some reason, he brought us along that time.

During the show, the girl sang a couple of tangos, and one of the songs she performed was "Mal Hombre." I was always alert when it came to hearing songs I was interested in. When they announced the song, I immediately took out the paper where I had the lyrics written. I had the lyrics, but I didn’t know the melody yet. After hearing her sing "Mal Hombre," just that one time, I memorized the music. When we got home, I reviewed the song and studied it. That’s how I learned it.

Argentine singer Elisa Berumen's "Mal Hombre," recorded for Victor in Los Angeles, May 1926. Possibly Berumen was the singer who Lydia heard in Monterrey, as told above.

Lexx Valdez 

When Lydia Sings

Along with the carpas, singing contests were an important part of Lydia’s early musical success in San Antonio. She describes two particular contests in the interview that inspired Lexx Valdez’s When Lydia Sings: 

Lydia: Yes, there were two contests. The first one was for the Ferro-Vitamina tonic, and the second was for Perla beer. But those were back in the 1930s, around 32 or 33.

(Interviewer Dan Dickey): And you won both contests?

Lydia: Yes, I won both. Oh yeah.

Dan Dickey: What were these contests about?

Lydia: Well, they were connected to a radio station. We would sing on the radio, people would listen, and in all the cantinas they had voting boxes. You’d have a beer, and the bartender would ask, "Who are you going to vote for?" because they knew the contest was going on. So people would vote for their favorite singer.

Dan: And most people voted for you?

Lydia: Oh yes, almost everyone voted for me.

Dan: Were the contestants mostly women?

Lydia: Yes, mostly women, though there were some men too. But the majority
of the contestants were girls.

Dan: How many contestants were there?

Lydia: There were 12 contestants at the start, but as the votes came in, they
began eliminating some until only three of us were left. Then we worked for two months
with just the three of us to see who would come out on top.

Dan: And what was the prize for the winner?

Lydia: The first prize was a very nice bedroom set, complete with everything–mattress, blanket, everything. The second prize was a radio, and the third prize, I
think, was a clock. I don't remember very well.

Dan: And you won the bedroom set?

Lydia: Yes, I won the bedroom set. It was very nice, and it was a good prize because we didn’t have much at the time.

Dan: And you weren’t married yet?

Lydia: No, I wasn't married yet at that time. It was still just my family and me in our house.

As she gained popularity in San Antonio through her radio appearances and singing contests, Lydia came to realize that some other women resented her success—especially when they learned that promoters were paying her to appear on their programs. She tells this story about the music director of the Pearl Beer contest: 

In half an hour's time, twelve of us contestants would all congregate there in the studio. Each one would only get to sing a little piece of a song. The directora de música was a woman named Estela González. She would have it arranged so that when I arrived, there wouldn't be enough time for me to even sing a little scrap of my number. 

Lydia goes on to explain how the public protested her lack of airtime, which led the show promoter to reprimand the music director: 

"Señorita González," he told her, "you have to be more careful in the rehearsals to measure the time so that there will be enough time for all of the contestants, principally for Lydia Mendoza—because the public is demanding to hear her."

Well, I guess that Miss González got angry, because after Mr. Cortez spoke to her, she disliked me even more. It was also she who gave me the ugly dress [at the presentation]. 

The first presentation was at the State Theater. All of the contestants were presented. All of the major clothing stores of San Antonio—La Feria, Franklin's—loaned a dress to be exhibited by a contestant. The dresses were to be worn with a big sash across them bearing the name of the store. The stores paid five dollars for each "ad." They not only gave me the ugliest dress, they didn't even give me the five dollars.

These stories not only highlight the competitive social environment of the singing contests; they underscore how, even early on, Lydia understood that the world of radio and commercial advertising would be useful to her career. 

In When Lydia Sings, Lexx Valdez interprets the singing contests as part of the vivid symbolic landscape of Lydia’s early career. As Valdez writes, “This [story] inspired the imagery of amber beer and tonic bottles, placed alongside a Texas landscape and a dry tree log, symbolizing Lydia's Mexican roots. On the bottom right, a meadowlark perched on a rock radiates light from its mouth, representing Lydia's future as "La Alondra de la Frontera."

Advertisement for Pearl Brewery (which sold a malt beverage during Prohibition) in La Prensa, 1919. From the Frontera Image Archive.

Bárbara De La Garza 

Un Respaldo Importante (An Important Support)

Despite American record companies’ growing embrace of regional Mexican music in the 1920s-30s, the music industry was not always friendly to the Mendoza family. Middlemen deprived them of royalties, while radio stations used Lydia’s image and voice without paying her. Lydia and her family had to rely on their wits and learn fast to stay afloat in the industry.  

They came to count on the help of people like Manuel J. Cortez, the host of a half-hour “Voz Latina” radio program in San Antonio and Lydia’s first promoter. After hearing Lydia sing in the Plaza, Cortez invited her onto his program against the protests of Leonor, who didn't want to lose the money she knew Lydia would make in the Plaza.

When Lydia finally appeared on Cortez’s “Voz Latina,” she was an instant hit with listeners. With Leonor still doubtful about Lydia's radio work, Cortez returned with a new pitch. Lydia would earn sponsorship money for her appearances, he said, and the family would get steady work performing in restaurants. Lydia recounts the story here: 

When the señor [Cortez] paid ... that $3.50 for me to sing, it was every day. I went. And there it started ... my renown, and the fame [started]... And then, now he said, "It shames me that Lydia Mendoza should be singing in the Plaza del Zacate. I'm going to take her out of there.”

Mamá said, "Well, that's impossible. This is our living."

"Well," he said, "I'm going to look for jobs for you, just as long as they're not here in the Plaza. I'm going to make Lydia Mendoza into a big star, and it’s not right that she should be singing there in the Plaza del Zacate.” And he got us Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the restaurants, one hour in one, another hour in another, and like that until he got us out of the Plaza completely. The jobs he got were for the whole group, for all of the family. I couldn't go to the Plaza anymore because he was resolutely against my continuing there. And my fame began from there. That was in 1932. A lot of fame in San Antonio. 

Cortez’s work helped Lydia become a household name in San Antonio. Her rising star also benefitted him, as Lydia explains in this interview: 

Mr. Manuel J. Cortez was my first promoter, and he really helped me out a lot. He was the first one to take charge of building up my career. Of course, he also made some good money for himself by helping me, because I didn't make anything from all this at the time. It didn't bother me that after that contest he bought himself a brand-new car or that he made a lot of money off me. But all of the people used to say ''There goes Cortez with Lydia Mendoza's money." That's what they used to yell out as he drove by.

Bárbara De La Garza’s Un Respaldo Importante considers the role of Manuel J. Cortez in Lydia’s early career. In De La Garza’s vision, Cortez is an ambiguous figure—a protector, possibly, but also one with his own ambitions for Lydia. We might even interpret him as a composite of the men in Lydia's life: not just Manuel Cortez but also Eli Oberstein, Pancho Mendoza, and Lydia's first husband, Juan Alvarado. Each of these men affirmed Lydia's career even as they imposed themselves on it. 

"I felt that Manuel J. Cortez's role was essential for Lydia to stand out in the musical field,” De La Garza reflects. “That's why I decided to introduce the shadow of a man in the visual piece, representing that at that time, women had the fortune of standing out thanks to the support of a man who believed in them and had enough power to help them in the artistic world.”

Joel Bernal 

El Vuelo Del Canto (The Flight of Song)

On March 27, 1934, Lydia Mendoza—then sixteen years old—recorded four songs for Bluebird Records in San Antonio. One of those songs, “Mal Hombre,” would become her first hit, propelling her to fame throughout the Border region and greatly expanding opportunities for her musical family. 

In retrospect, the “Mal Hombre” session was a watershed moment for Lydia, the moment that announced her arrival as a major voice in Mexican American music. At the time, however, the success of the session was hardly guaranteed. She had been contacted by a Bluebird talent scout, who said the label would pay fifteen dollars per song but offer no guarantee of royalties. “It all depends on how your records turn out,” Lydia recalled the scout saying.

And so Lydia and her parents went to the Texas Hotel—”just a house with a sign that said ‘Hotel’”—where producer Eli Oberstein had created a makeshift recording studio. Lydia told Chris Strachwitz the full story of the session:

I came to record there just like any other group that was going. They took me, well they ... didn’t know if I ... because they were making an experiment, to see if they could bring out a star from the recordings. And as they knew that there were a lot of groups in San Antonio, well, they gave an opportunity to everyone there as long as they played an instrument and sang. They gave them the chance, although obviously some just recorded for the first time and then afterwards they didn’t hire them because they didn’t like them or they didn’t sound good or something, see. And those that were half-way good they left. So that when I went they just took me like one of the bunch there that was going to record just like anyone else. But they saw, when the record came out, they saw that it was good. Then, they took me on contract.

They only let me do two records. That's what they were doing with everybody. Two records, and get out of here: go home and let someone else record. Oberstein was recording everybody that showed up, whether they sang well or not, it was sort of like a recorded audition. It was, "Oh, you play the guitar? Into the studio!"

They made una infinidad [an infinity], a whole bunch, of records—some good, others bad, but they recorded them all. When I got there, I was just like everyone else. They treated me exactly like they were treating all the others. "You sing?" they asked me. "Okay." And I made my recordings, and they paid me, and then, "Vamonos, let's go. Next please!"

Working from this narrative and a photograph of Lydia from a later Bluebird session (below), Joel Bernal’s El Vuelo del Canto (The Flight of Song) invites us into the iconic “Mal Hombre” session, where a poised and confident Lydia appears ready to take flight on the wings of her first major recording.

Bernal also finds a deeper symbolism in those wings, writing, “This piece symbolizes Lydia Mendoza's journey, capturing the essence of her nickname, La Alondra de la Frontera' ['The Lark of the Border']. Much like the bird whose song transcends boundaries, her music continued to soar beyond physical limits, embodying the idea that music knows no borders."

Lydia recording for Bluebird under the supervision of Eli Oberstein, October 1936. From the San Antonio Light Collection, UTSA.  

Bárbara De La Garza 

Mi Madre Siempre Me Acompaña (My Mother Always Accompanies Me)

Through all of the Mendozas’ early hardships, family matriarch Leonor—Mamá—was a constant source of strength. It was Leonor’s “strong survival instinct,” writes Chris Strachwitz, that kept the family afloat and made a life in music possible. 

With young children at home and a husband who was always leaving, Leonor had to provide for the family any way she could. Lydia’s brother, Andrew, recalls one such episode: 

I'll tell you one time ... one time we were living beside the railroads, and our father had left. I don't know where he went. But my mother ...we didn't have any food to eat, nothing like that. But the train would go by there at a certain hour, Mamá knew that. There were a lot of pigeons around there, and when the train would go by it would kill pigeons. And she would pick them up, bring them over ... had boiling water, [she would] clean them ... and make us something to eat. 

Andrew tells another story that highlights Leonor’s religious faith, and how it guided her advocacy for her children:

I remember many times, many times, that I used to wake up sometimes at night and go to the bathroom, and I would see her sitting down at two, three, four, five o'clock in the morning ... sitting down in bed. And sometimes I would find her outside in the yard. I wouldn't talk to her, but I would see her, and I would ask a question in my mind, like: "What is she doing?" Now I know what she was doing. You see, the only way that she could support us was by going out and working. She had to go out and play in different towns. And what she was doing, she was asking God, the Divine Force, to find us work.

So when you ask us about religion, I don't think she had any religion. I think that her religion was the Divine Force. Because she never specified, to us, God, in a name, like God, like Jehovah, or ... no, she wouldn't. I will never forget that, to her, God was the Divine Force. Because, she would say the Divine Force is everything. And if you don't understand it, you will never understand nothing.

Lydia had her own special relationship with her mother. As she reflects in this interview, "I tried to behave myself well so as not to hurt her. I tried to help her to do ... everything I could for her."

I loved my mother very much. I worshipped my mother. Of course, there were times when she would punish me for something I would do. Even when she punished me, I never came to the point of hating her ... of being angry at her.

Leonor’s role as family protector is the theme of Bárbara De La Garza’s Siempre Me Acompaña. “I felt that the figure of her mother, who inspired Lydia to start singing and studying guitar, was very present in her anecdotes,” De La Garza reflects. 

Belinda Salazar

Blue Bird

It didn't take long for "Mal Hombre" to make a big impact on listeners and for Bluebird to realize they'd found a star in Lydia. Within a month of the song's release, Eli Oberstein came to the Mendoza house to sign Lydia to an exclusive contract. However, as Lydia explains in the interview behind Belinda Salazar's Blue Bird, Oberstein's offer came with a catch: 

They didn't want to give a recording to the [family] group; they just wanted me. So, when I saw that they didn't want to, I told him that if he didn't the group one or two chances, I was no longer going to record with them.

Around this time Decca was there ... and other companies that wanted me to record for them. There were other companies that were interested in me and the group, as well. I didn't have to tell Oberstein twice, and right away the whole family was included in the deal.

Lydia's devotion to her family and her ability to negotiate on their behalf inspire Salazar's Blue Bird. In this piece, Lydia and her family are flown by a giant blue bird—symbolic of how Lydia's Bluebird recordings lifted the family's prospects. 

While Lydia's success after 1934 did not transform the family's fortunes overnight, her career helped the family begin to achieve, for the first time, steady paying work and economic security. As Lydia reflects in the following interview, the family was grateful for even the most modest of comforts after the tumultuous years of Lydia's childhood: 

Ah, well, but it's true that ... above all we had a happy life, quiet, very contented. Above all, because we had lived many years in calamities ... with ... we lacked for everything, including many times food and all. And in that time, now when we started to work and all that, that my name got big, well now we had a life of millionaires for us. Because nothing was lacking for us, compared to what we had lived before. So then, the little bit or the lot that we earned for ourselves, was good. We at least had the wherewithal to keep on living, with which to clothe ourselves, with which to eat, and to have a tranquil life. It's like that, we lived happily. And then, well ... I was very content because I was traveling with my mother, my brothers and sisters, all my family, my husband, my little girls ... enchanted with life. It was a very beautiful thing. We weren't suffering. 

Joel Bernal 

Por Todos Lados (Everywhere) 

In Los Papelitos and El Vuelo del Canto, Joel Bernal reimagines Lydia’s journey of learning and recording “Mal Hombre.” In Por Todos Lados, he considers how the song was received by the listening public.  

“Mal Hombre” tells the bitter story of a young girl’s seduction and abandonment by an abusive lover. And yet, as scholar Yolanda Broyles-González writes, by “rising to sing, with her strong indictment of the Evil Man,” Lydia’s narrator has the last word. The song's powerful affirmation of female strength and perseverance in the face of patriarchy and sexual exploitation was all the more remarkable given its singer was only sixteen years old. 

Despite the song's fast popularity, Lydia recalls being unsure how to feel about the record when it came out:

The first impression that I felt when my first recording came out was that I had made a mistake. "Now they won't come to listen to me in person," I said to myself, and that here, it died, I was dead now. "Who is going to come to hear me if they already have the record?"

And of course it was completely to the contrary because it helped me out. Well, I didn't know that ... making a record gave me a lot of pleasure. I felt happy. But when the record came out, I was a little disappointed. I said, well, "Who's going to hire me now? They aren't going to come hear me because there they have the record already."

We had a little wind-up Victrola. And no sooner did the first record come out and my father was the first booster and he advertised my record. There wasn't a house that he didn't stop at. "My daughter recorded, Lydia Mendoza recorded! Do you want to hear her?" And right there he would put the record on right away. And no sooner did they hear it, but that they would buy it. But my Dad, that was the first thing that he would do. He would grab that Victrola and walk from house to house all around where we lived, nearby, and play them the record.

For the rest of her career, Lydia's fans would wonder where she found the strength and inspiration to deliver such a devastating song on her very first solo recording. Many assumed the song was biographical: a cry from her own tortured heart. 

As Lydia recalls in this interview, nothing could have been further from the truth. What "Mal Hombre" revealed, in Lydia's mind, had nothing to do with her own life story and everything to do with her uncanny ability to inhabit the world of her songs:

How was I to be in love? When I learned that, I wasn't even ... I was about ... nine years old. No, ten years. I was a little girl. My biggest ambition was, well, that which I felt for the music. To learn songs. As I was now playing the guitar, well, just to learn for myself, because I didn't let anyone know and no one noticed that I wanted to sing by myself. And I didn't ... well I, as I was now playing the guitar, well, I wanted to accompany myself as well. Crooked or straight, but I wanted to accompany myself. But that I suffered a romantic disappointment or something like that for what I was singing, no.

Even now, many families, people I meet, they come up to me and ask why I sing all my songs with ... such feeling, with so much feeling. That if that which I am singing, I have passed through in parts of my hard life. Well, thank God, no. I have been, in this sense ... God has given me the peace of mind, and I have had happiness. Now that I sing a song like that, I don't know ... that comes out of me ... when I am singing a song it seems like I live that moment, it seems like I ... that I went through what it says, that song or that corridor, I've always said. I feel them. Like I like very much this corrido ...

And sometimes my daughter makes fun of me, the one that left, and she says: "Aw Mom, why do you like that song?" 

"I don't know!" I tell her. 

And she says, "Ay Mom, mightn't you have been a relative of something of that horse that ... and that's why you like it?" 

It's just that I like that song a lot. And just like that one, any other one, and we're talking about a song about ... the corrido of a horse. What does this have to do with anything in particular? Nothing. But I feel it really deep down in my soul, or ... I don't know, but ... like "Mal Hombre," many people tell me that that song is about something that happened to me. Well, nothing like what it says ever happened to me, but, well, that's what the public is like. 

Lydia, 1930s. From the Frontera Image Archive.

Lexx Valdez 

Lydia & Leonor 

Leonor Mendoza is the most important figure in the Mendoza family’s story. She looms large in her children's recollections as a figure of grit, hardwon dignity, and tough love that often turned abusive.

Her life was hard. By her early 20s, she was widowed with two children—her first husband, a singer, was murdered in a dispute while playing a dance one night. 

In some ways, Leonor fared no better with her second husband: the volatile, heavy-drinking Pancho Mendoza. As detailed elsewhere in the exhibit, Leonor went to heroic lengths to keep herself safe during Pancho’s drunken rages and to provide for her children amid his serial abandonment. These experiences made Leonor a hard, weary woman who nurtured her children with a strong hand. 

She was also a gifted musician, a savvy promoter, and, as Lydia details in this interview, a talented seamstress with a clear vision for how her children should dress for the stage: 

We had never worn costumes when we were singing down there in the Plaza del Zacate. We would just be there singing in whatever clothes we had. But when we started to put on a real show, to do salons, halls and theaters and all that, we realized that we needed costumes. We didn't have any way of going to Mexico and buying costumes, so my mother got the idea of making them herself because she was a very good seamstress. She sewed very prettily.

Mamá would make the costumes for my brother Manuel, so that he could go out to sing his numbers with my sister or put on his dances. She bought him some black pants, and she altered them so that they would be like a charro outfit. For adornment she bought buttons, those silvery ones, to simulate those silver fasteners, conchos, that they use on charro suits. She adorned all of his clothes; she made his jackets. The only thing that she bought ready-made was a hat: an ordinary cheap one. Mamá made everything else. The same for my sisters. For Juanita, she bought a rebozo, one of those Mexican shawls, and made it into a Mexican outfit.

As Lydia and her younger siblings developed into a successful variety act in the 1930s, it was Leonor who directed the skits and handled the money. Her children depended on her guidance, but they also feared displeasing her. Lydia describes how she “used to stand just behind the curtain on one side of the stage ... with a razor strap in her hand,” ready to dole out blows to her brother Manuel:

Well, Manuel, the poor kid, just seeing Mamá there with the strap made him start to get nervous, and of course, he would make a mistake in the skit. The minute the skit was over and Manuel walked off stage, Mamá would grab him and start really laying that strap on him. "Mamacita! Mamacita!" he would cry, but he didn't rebel, he didn't fight back. "Mamacita, what can I do?" And he would have to go back out and do another number. So he would try to get his costume straight and stop crying and regain his composure while Mamá stood there with the strap in her hand, and he would go back out on stage. That's how Mamá taught them to be good comics.

In Lexx Valdez’s collage Lydia & Leonor, which prominently features a striking portrait of Leonor taken in the 1930s, Leonor’s sewing is a symbol of her resourcefulness and dedication to her children’s success. 

"Inspired by Leonor’s use of rebozos and silver buttons, I incorporated these elements into this collage to reflect her world,” Valdez reflects. “The highlighted hat in the collage symbolizes the humble beginnings Lydia mentions, where her mother made clothes for her brother Manuel but always bought him a hat to complete his look."

Emmanuel Tanús 

Lydia Mendoza 

"In this engraving," Emmanuel Tanús writes, "I attempt to capture the essence and personality of Lydia Mendoza in a single brushstroke—an expressive depiction of beautiful simplicity."

Isabel Ann Castro 

From the Memories of María Sánchez 

Isabel Ann Castro’s narrative comic From the Memories of María Sánchez is inspired by an interview with María Sánchez, the owner of La Moderna Poesia in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Sánchez’s interview is collected in the Mendoza Family Interviews alongside interviews with Lydia, her siblings, and other individuals knowledgable about her life and career. 

Founded as a bookstore in 1927, La Moderna Poesia evolved into a record shop in response to rising interest in recorded music in the 1930s. In her narrative, re-created in exquisite detail by Castro, Sánchez describes San Francisco’s vibrant Mexican community and explains how her store became a center of Mexican culture when she started selling records by Lydia Mendoza and other prominent artists. Castro sees Sánchez as part of the community of record store owners and fans who helped to sustain Lydia’s career. 

“I did a lot of research about San Francisco in the late 1920s and 1930s,” Castro writes about her process. “I hoped to make this comic as period accurate [as possible], from the vehicles to the cash register to the bulldozer.”

She continues: “In my research, I learned about the Latino community of San Francisco during the 1920s-30s. They endured poverty, displacement, discrimination, unsafe working conditions, police brutality, and so many other things. I think Lydia Mendoza and many other performers brought much-needed shared experiences of joy to their lives.”

From the Memories of María Sánchez is presented in the following slides, alongside audio clips from Sánchez's interview corresponding to each panel. The male voice present in the interview is that of Chris Strachwitz's collaborator James Nicolopulos. 

Book label from La Moderna Poesía, courtesy of Seven Roads Gallery, "Gallery of Book Trade Labels"

Isabel Ann Castro 

From The Memories of María Sánchez (Part 1)

Click "Related page" to view a zoomable version of From The Memories of María Sánchez.

Isabel Ann Castro 

From The Memories of María Sánchez (Part 2)

Isabel Ann Castro 

From The Memories of María Sánchez (Part 3)

Isabel Ann Castro 

From The Memories of María Sánchez (Part 4)

Isabel Ann Castro 

From The Memories of María Sánchez (Part 5)

Bárbara De La Garza 

Delante De Mi Reflejo (Facing My Reflection) 

Bárbara De La Garza’s Delante De Mi Reflejo reimagines a famous episode in Lydia’s illustrious career: her welcome parade in the city of Chihuahua in 1950. 

Lydia recounts the story: 

Another very great satisfaction was when I went the first time to Chihuahua. We entered the city, which is the state capital, on June 27, 1950. The people received me there like they would have received a king, a president. They put … from corner to corner in all of the streets some banners saying, "Welcome Lydia Mendoza." For some three or four miles before entering the city there were people along the side of the road waiting for the car that I was riding in to pass by. They seated me in a convertible, and they filled it with flowers. I went passing through, and as I went by the people threw confetti and shouted, "iViva Lydia Mendoza!" And it was the same when I entered the city. That was a very great satisfaction when I went to Chihuahua.

Entering Chihuahua, 1950. From the Frontera Image Archive.

Lydia always enjoyed a close bond with her audience. “Despite some of the things that we had to endure out on the road,” she told Chris Strachwitz, “I’m very glad to be able to say that in every place that I have sung in my long career, I have never received any disappointment from any audience.”

In Delante De Mi Reflejo, flowers, confetti, and a cheering crowd conjure the memory of Lydia’s grand welcome in Chihuahua. Amid this celebratory scene, De La Garza’s Lydia appears calm and reflective. 

In the Chihuahua story, De La Garza writes, “Lydia talks about a stage in her career where she was already more established and realized that her reach as an artist was very extensive. For this reason, I found it valuable to represent Lydia in a state of serenity, standing in front of her reflection, implying that over time and with experience, her achievements were due to her talent, discipline, and perseverance. If she became so acclaimed and well-received in states like Chihuahua, it was thanks to herself."

Indeed, while she was not a boastful person, Lydia was well aware of her significant accomplishments and the challenges she overcame as a woman (with children) in a male-dominated industry.

It's more difficult to build a career like I did for a woman than for a man. Now, of course, the luck one has also counts a lot. I, thank God, had a lot of luck. Everybody liked me and praised my voice and predicted great things for me. Nonetheless, I made my career by way of pure sacrifice.

Lexx Valdez 

Lydia, Fred, and Amor Bonito (Beautiful Love) 

For Lydia, love and marriage were complicated by her career aspirations. Lydia married her first husband, a bootmaker named Juan Alvarado, in 1935, when she was only seventeen. Soon after marrying, as Lydia recounts in this interview, Juan’s family began pressuring her to stop performing: 

Upon marrying, my husband's family were opposed to my continuing my career, and they really worked on my husband about it. They told him that I had now married and that I ought to stay at home with my husband. They put a lot of ideas into Juan's head, to the point that he wouldn't let me work anymore.

And then, of course, I got with family right away. I got pregnant soon after we were married, and so, for the moment, the idea of not working didn't bother me too much. Then when God gave me health, and I had my little girl safe and sound, I wanted to continue to follow my career with my family, like always.

Eventually, despite pressure from her husband’s family and the arrival of two more daughters, Lydia was able to take advantage of increasing record sales and perform consistently through the late 1930s. Juan, who became more supportive of Lydia’s career over the years, died in 1961 from complications of alcohol abuse. 

Bereft after Juan’s death, Lydia found a two-year engagement at a nightclub in Denver—”within my sorrow, the loss of my husband, well I wasn't going to stay stuck there [in San Antonio].” In Denver, Lydia met Fred Martínez, a shoemaker. “We got married in 1964, and I brought him to Texas,” Lydia recounted. “My first husband was a bootmaker, and this one is also a shoemaker. For some reason it just happened that both of my husbands were shoemakers.”

Lydia’s second marriage was different from her first in one key respect: now it was her husband, not her, who had to change his way of life. Lydia explains in a story about the origins of her song “Amor Bonito:”

We have "Amor Bonito." I composed this song when I married my second husband. As fate would have it, he is from Denver. He had his business there, everything. He couldn't sell it quickly, just like that, in order to move to Texas. But he came here; we got married in Houston. About three or four days later, he had to go take care of his business. I stayed in Houston; then about two months later my new husband returned and was here with me for a month, two months, and then he went again. I love him a lot and missed him very much. So then one of those times he went away, I went to Corpus, enthused that they were going to do a program there, and that I was going to teach a lot of students. I got everyone together, and I went with my kids to Corpus, and I was there for a while. And one night while I was there, I was inspired to compose that song: "Amor Bonito."  Everything I say in "Amor Bonito" is inspired by my husband. That song came to me ... because he was gone, and I was remembering him, and everything that referred to him. That's why I composed that song.

This story inspired Lexx Valdez’s Lydia, Fred, and Amor Bonito—a tribute to the loving partnership Lydia found in her second marriage. Valdez writes: “Using the border and flower symbols from the album cover design for [Lydia’s album] La Gloria de Texas, this digital collage commemorates Lydia’s bold expression of love through her soulful song composition.”

"Amor Bonito," recorded for Ideal Records in June 1964.

Amor Bonito (Beautiful Love) 

The world might be full

of lovers and affairs,

but for me there is only one

that brings light to my existence.

My love is extra beautiful,

brilliant like a bright, unblinking star;

in the sadness of my soul

I cheer up with memories of him.

I give thanks to my Dear Lord

for being so good to me;

He always hears my prayers

for everything I ask of Him.

Beautiful love, so beautiful,

beloved, my sweet, dear beloved,

I love you because I love you,

because you are my beautiful love.

Your love is extra beautiful,

radiant like a star;

just thinking about your affection,

all my troubles come to an end.

Belinda Salazar

Melodía De Origen (Melody of Origin)

Belinda Salazar's Melodía de Origen places Lydia in her native home of Monterrey, Mexico, where she spent her earliest years.

"[This shows] Lydia playing with the Cerro de la Silla in the background," Salazar reflects. "I wanted to create a tribute to her roots, since it was here in Bella Vista where her interest in music began, thanks to the musicians and small carnivals that came to her neighborhood."

Befitting Salazar’s evocatively titled piece, we end our exhibit with Lydia’s reflection on learning new songs. In her description, committing new melodías to memory becomes an almost sacred process: one final gift and inheritance from her mother.     

Well, I don't know ... I, for example, when I want to learn, to memorize, some songs that I want to learn, I ... in the quiet, so that nobody might disturb me, and of course, I take advantage, in the morning, very early, when there isn't any noise, there aren't any disturbances, of anything, that the telephone won't ring or anything, I take my guitar and I put myself to practice, in the morning, I learn very well, three or four songs that I have never sung nor have I ever heard. I just sing them two, three times ... and they stick with me here and from there they don't ... neither the melody nor the words ... goes away from me. 

I do forget, of course, some songs that I haven't sung for years and years. For songs like that I have to give them a run-through. But after a little run-through, they come out all right. I was in Austin recently, for instance, and at one of the concerts the audience asked me for "No Puedo Dejar de Quererte," "Deliciosa," ''Tranquila Es Mi Vida," and they asked me for "Lejos" and "Marimba"—all songs I had recorded.

Impossible. I need a list of songs before I go on if I'm going to sing something I haven't done for a long time. It's like now, that I'm getting ready to return to South America. The gentleman down there has sent me a list of my songs that the public there has heard and will ask for, and I have to learn them. If they ask for them all of a sudden, it's just impossible.

But you see, like I tell you, I want to learn something, I sit myself down in the morning, two or three little passes, now that song ... I don't know where I stick a song so it doesn't go away. I don't forget the music or anything. I can sing songs from memory for hours. I don't have to be looking at them. I have them here in my head.

It's that, I believe ... I inherited something from my mother. The memory, the music . . .