The first time you see Lydia Mendoza in Les Blank’s 1976 documentary Chulas Fronteras, she’s in the kitchen of her San Antonio home making tamales. The US/Mexico border’s greatest singer of the 20th century — and one of its sole female voices — is with relatives and friends, all women, all focused on rituals of chopping and scooping, wrapping peppers and masa in tamale leaves.

Her graying raven hair is perfectly done and she’s wearing a traditional embroidered dress that doesn’t look very different from the one she wears in the film’s next scene, when she’s out of her kitchen and in the middle of a restaurant. She strums her 12-string guitar and sings to a room full of Texas-Mexicans who hang on every word shaped by the bitter reed of a voice made grainy and rough by nearly a century of singing on both sides of the border. As she begins the lament “Pero ay que triste,” a ranchero in a cowboy hat lets out a gut-quaking grito — that uniquely Mexican high-pitch holler — that lets her know her song about a love without hope has taken up residence in the heart of a stranger nursing a bottle of beer.

Gritos of recognition are also heard throughout her final live performance in Santa Barbara, a recording of which accompanies her bilingual autobiography Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music (compiled by Yolanda Broyles-González). The CD, full of intimate, often wrenching versions of popular rancheras, was recorded in 1986, when Mendoza was just shy of 70 and just shy of a stroke that would make the performance her last. In a companion essay, Broyles-González calls these gritos “piercing primordial screams” that signal the kind of “working-class sentimiento” — working-class feelings and emotions — that Mendoza’s music has spoken to ever since she was an itinerant child singer in the ’20s.

After she recorded her first single in 1934 — the evil-man name-calling ditty “Mal hombre” (which she learned off a gum wrapper when she was nine) — Mendoza became legendary for what she meant to others. She was “the singer of the poor,” “the lark of the border.” Her Santa Barbara show ends with her in full sentimiento mode. “When I see myself as alone and sad as a leaf in the wind,” she sings on the classic “Canción Mixteca,” “I want to cry, I want to die of grief.”

Life in Music isn’t exactly an autobiography. It’s more in keeping with the female oral tradition of borderland singing and storytelling that Mendoza comes out of. It’s “historia,” a collection of narrated, spoken stories that have been compiled, edited, and committed to the page. We learn plenty of facts about Mendoza’s life: her birth in Houston in 1916, her family’s moves back and forth across the border, the lessons in guitar playing handed down from her mother and grandmother, her days playing for migrant farmworkers in Michigan, her invention of a new 12-string tuning system. But the book reads more like a conversation: themes repeat, stories overlap, digressions abound.

At every turn, we are aware that this is Mendoza telling her life in order to make sense of it, re-author it, take control over it, commit it to public memory. An issue she keeps returning to is the small number of women singers active in norteño music: Mexican-American women of her generation (and in succeeding generations, too) have too often been made to choose between the home and the stage. “Because I was a wife, a married woman, they opposed my continued touring, my working, my performances in theaters,” Mendoza says, referring to her experiences with her first husband’s family.

It’s difficult to gauge Mendoza’s impact on the border women who have followed her. She certainly helped prime the tejano boys’ club for Selena, and she’s inspired solistas like Eva Ybarra and Julieta Venegas. The best tribute, however, has come from Tijuana-born singer Milena Muzquiz of alterna-Latin ironists Los Super Elegantes: in a video the band shot in their San Francisco kitchen in 1997, she lip-synchs a punk version of “Mal hombre” — “Don’t be surprised now if I tell you to your face what you really are,” Muzquiz mouths, as she pretends to scrub plates caked with invisible food. Like Mendoza, Muzquiz is a border woman calling out a vile man. But the kitchen has become a stage, where the traditions that form you become the traditions that free you.