Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

19. The Lark of the Border

✥ 19 ✥ The Lark of the Border On e o f m y Christmas gifts from my wife this year was a small retablo dedicated to the Mexican American singer Lydia Mendoza. It is a decorated wooden shadow box, painted pink and Virgin Mary blue, surmounted by a cross and containing a tinted photograph of a very young Lydia Mendoza holding a twelve-string guitar. My wife bought it surreptitiously, at Kiowa Gallery in Alpine on one of our visits there last fall, and put it away until Christmas. I was delighted with it because I am a great fan of both Lydia Mendoza’s music and Mexican folk art. It is a very appropriate tribute to her artistry, which was directed primarily to the working -class Spanish-speaking people of San Antonio and South Texas. They called her la alondra de la frontera, the Lark of the Border, and for fifty years they flocked to see her perform. The odd thing about my gift is that Lydia Mendoza died five days before Christmas, at the age of ninety-one. I read her obituary on the Internet on Christmas Eve, which made unwrapping her retablo the next morning a close-to-supernatural experience. I almost expected to hear her voice singing “El Corrido de Luis Pulido” from the vicinity of the ceiling as I took it out of its box. Mendoza was born in Houston in 1916, but she spent a good deal of her childhood in her mother’s hometown of Monterrey, Nuevo León. Her father worked for the railroad as a locomotive mechanic, and he continually moved his family back and forth between Texas and Mexico. Mendoza first demonstrated her uncanny musical talent as a child in Monterrey. In the 1920s, Mexican chewing gum wrappers had the words of popular songs ✥ 75 printed on them, and Mendoza started collecting them and memorizing the words, although she had no idea what the tunes of the songs were. One day her mother sent her to the corner grocery on an errand, and she discovered that a four-man street orchestra had set up in front of the store. She lingered to listen and quickly realized that they were playing the tunes that she had memorized the words to. Over the next few days she memorized the tunes to all of her gum wrapper songs and then sang them a cappella to her astonished parents. Later in life she bragged to her biographer, Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez (Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music, Oxford University Press, 2001), that she knew the words and tunes to hundreds of songs by heart. Unlike other singers, she never used a songbook or sheet music on stage. She just picked up her twelvestring guitar and sang. Mendoza learned to play the guitar from her mother, who played and sang at home to entertain her children. Her father also sang, and after he retired from the railroad and settled in San Antonio, he organized a family orchestra that played for tips in barber shops and restaurants, and at food stands in San Antonio’s produce market—anywhere that Mexican people gathered. Mendoza remembered that in 1927 they went to the Rio Grande Valley and hitchhiked from town to town, playing for the migrant workers who harvested the Valley’s crops. In 1928, they followed the migrant stream to Michigan and played Mexican songs in dance halls there. That same year they made a recording in a San Antonio hotel room for Okeh Records. The Okeh agent asked Mendoza’s father what the name of the group was, and he looked around the room and saw a bottle of Carta Blanca beer on a table and said “El Cuarteto Carta Blanca,” and that was the name that the family performed under during the 1930s. Lydia was the mentor of the quartet, even though she was only a teenager. She taught her sister Maria to play the mandolin and the piano, and taught herself to play the violin. She coached her ✥ 77 brother Manuel and her sister Juanita in a series of comedy skits. As she told Broyles-Gonzalez, “I was the one who lit the fire.” The family performed an hour-and-a-half-long variety show in carpas (tent shows), in lodge halls, in theaters where Mexican movies were shown—anywhere they could get an audience. They traveled to New Mexico and California. Eventually, Lydia...