Lydia Mendoza's life story encompasses a 60-year singing career including innumerable tours, recordings, best-selling hits, and national awards. Her performing career began with the advent of the recording industry in the 1920s and continued into the 1980s. Mendoza's status as a working-class idol continues to this day, making her one of the most prominent and long-standing performers in the history of the recording industry and a champion of Mexican-American music. This bilingual book presents Lydia Mendoza's life story in her own words, both in the original Spanish and in a sensitive English translation by Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez. Broyles-Gonzalez concludes the volume with a consideration of the significance of Lydia Mendoza's career and her place in Tejana music and Chicana studies. Best known as a solo artist, Lydia Mendoza possessed an emotive voice and guitar-playing skill that allowed her to nurture and preserve the vast oral tradition of Mexican popular song with beauty and integrity. She is loved as a voice of working-class sentimiento, an embodiment of Chicano culture, and a leading force in raza people's struggle for survival. Book jacket.

Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez is jointly Professor of Chicano Studies and Affiliate Professor of German Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her publications include Re-emerging Native Women of the Americas: Native Chicana Latina Women's Studies (2001) and El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (1994).