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Notes 58.4 (2002) 817-819



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Book Review

Lydia Mendoza's Life in Music/La historia de Lydia Mendoza:
Norteño Tejano Legacies

Lydia Mendoza:
A Family Autobiography


Lydia Mendoza's Life in Music/La historia de Lydia Mendoza: Norteño Tejano Legacies. By Yolanda Broyles-González. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. [xvi, 235 p. + compact disc. ISBN 0-19-512706-4. $29.95]
Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography. By Chris Strachwitz, with James Nicolopulos. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993. [xxi, 409 p. ISBN 1-55885-065-1. $32.95 (cloth); ISBN 1-55885-066-X. $17.95 (pbk.).]

Almost a decade after the autobiographic narrative of the Texas-Mexican singer Lydia Mendoza and her family compiled by Chris Strachwitz (with James Nicolopulos), a similar yet very different book on the legendary singer has appeared: a bilingual edition that presents Mendoza's life story (historia) as told to Yolanda Broyles-González in Spanish, with a translation into English and a comprehensive essay by the author situating Mendoza's story within the larger context of Mexicana/Chicana culture, history, and spirituality.

Lydia Mendoza began her sixty-year-long singing career as a child in the 1920s. Singing with her family for pennies on the streets of downtown San Antonio and following the migrant farm workers north, she was soon discovered by the first recording companies to capture songs and talents of the Mexican-American working class. With her solo hit, "Mal hombre" (1934), accompanied only on her twelve-string guitar, Lydia became an overnight star. Yet she continued to be a grassroot idol: "la cancionera de los pobres" (the Songstress of the Poor) and "la alondra de la frontera" (the Meadowlark of the Border) were epithets that reflected her close affiliation with her people. Mendoza's unmistakable interpretation of popular Mexican songs has captivated the hearts of a vast Spanish-speaking audience throughout the Southwest and beyond.

The main reason why these two books are such valuable documents is, as Broyles-González has noted, Mendoza's "speaking talents as a storyteller" (p. 180). Mendoza has a natural ability to bring the past into being. Her use of direct speech and the narrative device of retrospection and anticipation are constituent for her dramatic narration; they vivify the past and entangle the listener. Broyles-González thus opts to let Mendoza weave her own narrative and not interrupt the flow with questions that "seek to extract 'material' from human subjects—materials then shaped by the ethnographic imagination" (p. 180). This book is a great attempt at giving voice to its protagonist without interfering and taking control by means of questions. Nevertheless, comparing some of Mendoza's stories that appear in both volumes, it becomes clear that it does matter who the face-to-face listener is.

Broyles-González explicitly reflects her own role and participation in this historia (p. 178-81). She claims that Mendoza "delivered this historia (her history, her life-telling) to me from a sense of confianza (trust) between us" (p. 178). In most European languages—English is the exception— no linguistic distinction is made between "story" and "history." The Spanish word "historia" retains the rich ambiguity of designating both the course of recounted events and the narrative that we construct. The discourse of history (or historiography) is indeed an accumulation of stories about past events. It is the sum of particular narrative practices and, hence, particular views of those who dominated the course of history. Human beings have used power not only to master or dominate, but also to be remembered and recollected in narrative discourse, to be memorable. The existential and historical implications of narrativity are far-reaching because they determine what is to be preserved and rendered permanent in a people's sense of its own past, of its own identity. Broyles-González presents Mendoza's life story "on her own terms: self-configured and shaped as a direct reflection of her own human agency and Mexicana/Chicana working-class subjectivity...

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