Lydia Mendoza

Mendoza's career began long before Mal Hombre. At four she made herself a guitar of wood, nails and rubber bands. In 1928, answering an OKeh Records advertisement in La Prensa, her family recorded twenty songs in San Antonio as the Cuarteto Carta Blanca for $140, then left to work the sugar beet fields of Michigan. Back in San Antonio they sang for coins in the Plaza del Zacate, where broadcaster Manuel J. Cortez heard her and put her on his radio show for $3.50 a week. That money, she recalled, made the family feel like millionaires.

What the plaque says

Lydia Mendoza, a native of Houston, was one of the first and most famous singers of the Texas-Mexico border and Latin America. Mendoza's 1934 recording of "Mal Hombre" for Bluebird Records launched her sixty-year career. She became famous for both her voice and skills playing the twelve-string guitar. During her career, she was known as "La Alondra de la Frontera" and performed at the inauguration of President Carter. She won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1999, National Heritage Fellowship Award in 1982 and she was inducted in the Texas Women's Hall of Fame, the Tejano Music Hall of Fame and the Conjunto Music Hall of Fame. Mendoza's image was featured on a U.S. Postage stamp in 2013. Her career ended after she suffered a stroke in 1988. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Casa Navarro State Historic Site — 3.3 mi
  The adobe and caliche-block home of José Antonio Navarro, a native-born signer of the 1836 declaration, and the last remnant of the Tejano neighborhood called Laredito.
• Spanish Governor's Palace — 3.4 mi
  The last visible piece of the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar: a presidio captain's house with a 1749 keystone, a century as shops and saloons, and a romantic 1930 restoration.
• King William Historic District — 3.4 mi
  Mission farmland turned German merchants' quarter on the San Antonio River, renamed in World War I, then saved by a neighbor who restored fourteen houses, starting with his own.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 3.5 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.

More markers nearby

• Our Lady of the Lake University — 0.9 mi
• The Grass Fight — 2.3 mi
• Col. Jose Francisco Ruiz — 2.3 mi
• Alejo de la Encarnacion Perez — 2.3 mi