Lydia Mendoza: Folk or Popular?

Please excuse the highly egocentric nature of this post, which undoubtedly will be more interesting to me than the rest of the universe as I tackle a question that has plagued me in my doctoral investigation.  The readings this week directly reflected a challenge I have faced in my research as a cultural historian, that of the tenuous divide between “folk” and “popular” or “mass” culture.  The topic of my study, singer Lydia Mendoza, began her musical life as a “folk” musician, with all the necessary markers of “folk authenticity.”  With the appropriate nod to Robin Kelley’s assertion that terms like “folk” and “authentic” represent social constructions scholars need to acknowledge and recognize, Lydia Mendoza fits solidly into the markers that determine a “folk” musician:  she was a self-taught musician with no formal training outside of her immediate family; she learned the local norteño and ranchera genre of her family´s Monterrey hometown through face-to-face oral transmission; and she displayed her raw talent regularly in the local outdoor market of San Antonio, Texas in the 1920s and 30s, playing and singing live for a community of Mexican, Mexican-American and non-Mexican clients who frequented the plaza.  Yet these folk roots gave way to radio and LP recordings, and soon placed her firmly in the popular mass-produced music market.  Lydia Mendoza was the first Mexican-American woman to be recorded as a solo artist, and by the 1940s the demand for her albums (many produced by RCA Victor and Columbia records specifically for the Latin American market) spread across the American continents.   Ostensibly, Mendoza embodied Mexico in her live performances, most of which took place in the U.S. Southwest and other enclaves of Mexican migrant workers and the communities that developed rapidly around their workplaces (such as Chicago and Detroit). In soulful ranchera style, she sang patriotic songs representing the Mexican nation, the Mexican revolution, and reproduced the historical tales of heroism, cunning and martyrdom recalled in the borderland corridos.  She hand-made her performance costumes, whose color theme tended toward red, white and green, and whose embroidered blouses and full skirts placed her squarely into the symbolic national tradition of ranchera and mariachi singers.   

The question that has always left me uneasy is the relationship between Lydia Mendoza the folk singer and Lydia Mendoza the most-recorded and highest-selling Mexican-American singer of her era.  It always seemed to me that the assumed simplicity and local nature of her folk tradition became lost at some point amidst her international tour circuit, and the hero’s welcome she received at some of her performances.  The question becomes important for my research precisely because I am seeking out her listening community in Mexico and asking questions about their perceptions of her as a musician and their relationship with her music.  Their understanding of her as a representation of “us folk” or as a highly venerated recording star becomes an important question as I analyze what she and her music meant to the members of the transnational migrant community I hope to study.

 

[Our folk hero being escorted into Chihuahua City by the encumbant mayor in 1951,

en route to a sold-out performance (image borrowed without permission from

Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez, Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music: La historia de Lydia Mendoza.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)]

The readings in this class this week are helping me frame the transition between “folk” and “popular” musician, and think about access to the recording apparatus and song selection.  They are also helping me think critically about the mode by which the fans I interview interacted with Mendoza’s music – whether they saw her perform live or know her purely through her radio performances and recorded albums. 

Levine’s article and some of the responses to it mention the question of access to the technology required for producing popular culture, and the power structure inherent in this dynamic.  In Lydia Mendoza’s case, she became one of the first female Mexican-American women to record solo in albums and on live radio, and she did so on the first 24-hour Spanish-language radio station in the United States, which was also the first radio station owned by a Mexican National (KCOR AM radio out of San Antonio, owned by Manuel Cortez).  In this case, then, the question of access to the means of producing mass culture becomes complicated, because the marginalized, “folk” ethnicity owned the means of production and did so in order to meet the  demands of a burgeoning local Spanish-speaking market.  The article by Levine and the corresponding responses have provided me with a framework (and a multitude of references in the footnotes) I can use to help me construct an argument around Lydia Mendoza as a representation of local “folk” or an international “popular” figure.  The debate in these articles also has inspired me to examine the source of her most popular albums  --  whether they were recorded by major U.S. labels or smaller local border labels like Falcon and Azteca records – and whether the production label affected the musical content, marketing and reception of the album itself. 

Possibly, my resaerch complicates the apparent dichotomy between what is "folk" and what is "popular," since Lydia Mendoza appears to have been both at various points in her life, and I woudl argue hhe could be perceived as both at some points in her career.  Questions of gender, race and class rise to the forefront.  Her status as a popular Mexican-American musician still earned her the "folk" label in mainstream US culture due to her ethnic otherness, an otherness that held different meanting -- or disappeared entirely -- as her records sold in Latin America. 

-- Kelley Merriam Castro