(b. Jan 27, 1894, Cholula, Puebla--d. October 27, 1964, Mexico City) Folklorist and composer, scholar of the corrido songs, its origins, as expression of national identity. He was encouraged by his parents to study music, and enrolled in the National Conservatory in 1914. It was up through 1927, while working with the National Forest Service, that he began collecting regional expressions of song, music, and dance and began documenting popular festivals. This job took him to faraway places within Mexico where many of these popular manifestations are still very prevalent. Among other places he went to Sonora, Chihuahua, and Michoacan.
In 1929, Mendoza was named professor of music theory and voice at the National Music Conservatory. Later he was named music inspector for elementary schools. Here he confirmed his suspicions on the lack of scientific documentation within Mexico of its own national music. Greatly admired by folklorists around the world, he became in 1938 the founder and first president of the Folklore Society of Mexico. He and his wife also established the first Mexican School of Folkloric Study. Mendoza continued the tradition of preserving popular culture (folklore) as established by Nicolas Leon from 1906-1910, and continued by the Mexican musicologist Manuel M. Ponce in the 1920s. But the efforts to establish scientific bases for the study of folklore still remained at a basic level: the emphasis was still at the descriptive stage. Other well-known researchers before Mendoza were Manuel Gamio, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (Sr.), and Maria Luisa de la Torre Otero, who published El Folklore en Mexico in 1933. The difference between Mendoza and these researchers was that he encouraged the study of folklore with strict and scientific principles of research. He brought the field of Mexican folkloric studies to a level equivalent to that of any scientific endeavor, and contributed greatly to the discovery of different historical roots for Mexican traditions. It should be pointed out that he collaborated with his wife, Virginia Rodriguez Rivera (1894-1968), an expert folklorist in her own right. From 1936 until his death in 1964, Mendoza had his base of operations at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the National University (UNAM). His musical background helped him concentrate his research on the musical traditions of Mexico dating back to medieval Spain and pre-Hispanic Mexico. At the time of his wife's death in 1968, all their manuscripts were donated to the National Library of the UNAM.
Vicente T. Mendoza produced an enormous number of works from 1920 to 1965, most of them dealing with research on popular folklore and in particular with the roots of these popular manifestations. In 1939 he published the work El Romance espanñl y el corrido mexicano, where, through a comparative study, he proposes to uncover the detailed relationships between the Mexico corrido and the medieval Spanish epic poems, otherwise known as ballads, and with their narrative-epic-lyric makeup. This is a key work by Mendoza, because it is here where he sets the basic pattern and tone of his future research: the relationship between poetry and music. The purpose here was also to determine which influences were Spanish and which one were autochthonous. In 1954 he published El corrido mexicano. Here again he traces the history of the corrido all the way back to the Spanish medieval ballads. Although most of the corridos that he lists belong chronologically to the twentieth century, there are some samples from the nineteenth century and a few from before that time. His concentration in this book is on the corrido of the Mexican Revolution. Listing them by topic, he goes through corridos that are historical or revolutionary, those that belong to the agrarian reform movement or the Cristero revolution, political corridos, lyrical corridos, those about execution by shooting, and corridos of valiant men, bandits, famous jails, kidnappings, persecutions, treachery, assassinations, etc.