José Mojica

Fray José de Guadalupe Mojica [mohe-cah] (September 14, 1896 – September 20, 1974) was a Mexican Franciscan friar and former tenor and film actor. He was known in the music and film fields as José Mojica.

Mojica joined the world of the American film industry before entering religious life. Together with Dolores del Río, Tito Guízar, Ramón Novarro and Lupe Vélez, he was among the few Mexican people who made history in the early years of Hollywood. Regarding his activity as a friar, singer and actor, he felt that religion and art have never been at conflict. If God gave me the grace of voice and singing skills, I use them for His glory, he explained.

Born in San Gabriel, Jalisco, Mojica was raised in a coffee and sugar plantation community until the age of six, after his step father Francisco died. He never knew his real father. When his mother's extended family suffered financial reverses, they moved with limited means to Mexico City, where he studied at the Academy of San Carlos and later attended the National School of Agriculture. To learn more of those years of Revolution and Counter Revolution and their impacts on the young Mojica, you might read Mojica's "I a Sinner"where he describes the traumatic day of the closing of the military academy due to the Mexican Revolution armed conflict. This experience led him to find his true calling, and began to take private voice lessons while studying at the National Conservatory of Music of Mexico.

In addition, Mojica sharpened his skills in drama and displayed a particular gift for languages as he mastered English, Italian and French. He also learned to play the guitar and play Mexican songs as well practiced dance, athletics and horse riding. When he felt secure, he began working as operatic tenor at the Teatro Ideal. Then, on October 5, 1916 debuted at the Teatro Arbeu, where he played the Count Almaviva role in Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville. The following year, he performed the role of Rodrigo in Verdi's Otello.

Shortly after the United States had entered World War I, funded by his mother, with $500 in his pocket, Mojica went to New York City and did petty jobs before he could join an opera company. In his spare time, he usually attended performances of Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera. The famed Caruso, having met Mojica in 1919, was impressed with the vocal skills of the young Mexican singer and helped him to obtain a contract with the Chicago Civic Opera company. He debuted on November 22 of the same year singing the minor role of Lord Arthur Bucklaw in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, an opera loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor.

While at Chicago he landed secondary roles, but his career slowly gained momentum in 1921 when he played leading parts in Debussy´s Pelléas et Mélisande and Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, the former alongside renowned soprano Mary Garden. Prokofiev himself attended to the rehearsals of his work and conducted the very first performance on December 30, sung in French. Mojica also befriended Feodor Chaliapin during the singer's visit to Chicago. Under Chaliapin's guidance, he played the role of Shúyskiy in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

Two additional introductions made on his behalf by Caruso impacted his career. The first was when Caruso recommended Mojica to Edison to become one of Edison's Three Tenors. The second was when Caruso gave him letters of introduction and told him to go to Hollywood where they'll need young voices to sing in 'talkies'. He went to California, and except for individual trips back to Chicago and New York for singing engagements, his career was in films in Hollywood and throughout Latin America.

In 1933, after leaving Chicago, Mojica made his one trip across the Atlantic. He sang at the Mexican Embassy in Berlin, and also performed in Italy and Egypt. He later worked at the Metropolitan Opera House, where he was soon given leads opposite Lily Pons. Occasionally, he returned to the Chicago Opera, notably as Fenton in Verdi's Falstaff during the 1940 season.

The versatility of Mojica is reflected in his extensive discography, which he recorded for Edison and the Victor Talking Machine Company.

By the time Mojica recorded for Edison, 1925–1926, he had become an important figure at the Chicago Opera, having moved into principal roles. He left Edison and joined the roster of Victor in 1927 and also made several successful early sound films. He moved comfortably during the 1930s through the worlds of opera, film, and concerts, but left this milieu in 1943, to become a priest. Like Edison, Mojica eventually became completely deaf.

His popular musical recordings show an attractive lyric voice often used with skill and imagination in songs such as Júrame, composed by María Grever, which was released by Victor in 1927. The song became an instant success and has been recorded by countless singers over the years.

Opera work aside, Mojica found time to pursue an acting career in Hollywood. To this end, he began to court film Directors, one of whom was King Vidor. When Vidor learned that Mojica wanted to build a hacienda with a music salon in which to 'showcase his talent', he introduced Mojica to the architect (john Byers) who had just finished designing Vidor's home. Mojica told everyone that he was building his mother a "replica of the hacienda her family had lost during secularization." That so irritated the well-known architect hat he removed the hacienda from the list of homes he'd designed. The Hacienda Mojica in Santa Monica Canyon where he later lived with his mother, Dona Virginia, was in an idylic setting on Santa Monica creek with neighbors Leo Carrillo and Dolores del Rio as well as the remnants of the original Mexican Land Grant family. This home not only served as Mojica's "showcase" but through his constant entertaining it quickly became the center of Hollywood's Latino actors community. "Mojica's Rancho on SM Creek was a place where we could relax and be ourselves, away from Hollywood's expectations of players under contracts."

And it provided him with 'a stage' in which to perform getting attention from the Studios. Mojica signed a contract with Fox Film Corporation in 1930, making his debut the same year as a Spanish outlaw in the romantic musical One Mad Kiss (1930), co-starring Argentine actress Mona Maris. He co-starred with her in other films, and often alongside Spanish actresses Conchita Montenegro and Rosita Moreno. By finding himself in leading roles through his acting career, he was able to adapt to varied roles which included Latin lovers, a Russian cossack, Sultan of a harem, and a curious impersonation of the legendary Dick Turpin. For the rest of the decade, he also filmed in Argentine, Mexico, Peru and Spain.

A short time before his retirement, Mojica originally performed the song Solamente una vez, written by Agustín Lara, in the 1941 film Melodías de América. This song was known later as You Belong to My Heart, with English lyrics written by Ray Gilbert, and has been recorded by many other artists, including Andrea Bocelli, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Charlie Haden and Elvis Presley.

The Antigua Villa Santa Monica is located at San Miguel de Allende, a city and municipality in the state of Guanajuato in North-Central Mexico. This estate was built in the 17th century with mining wealth. Abandoned at the time of the Mexican Revolution, and in ruins for years, Mojica acquired and restored it around 1940. He then made this home for his mother. To this villa he invited his friends from the artistic community such as María Félix, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Gary Cooper, John Ford, John Huston, Pedro Infante, Agustín Lara, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Vargas and John Wayne. In fact there are some trees in the property that show plates with the names of those celebrities who planted them. It was his joy to introduce them to the beauty of the small mountain city that had been abandoned by the Spanish after the silver mines closed. Today Mojica's cultural mecca vision for the city is rewarded by San Miguel de Allende recognizing him a Distinguished Citizen and his former home on Parque Jardin being operated as a luxurious B&B on a street named Padre Mojica. . The Antigua Villa Santa Monica became a prestigious hotel in the mid 1940s.

The death of his mother in 1942 led him to reconsider his life. Two years later, he gave up his professional career,and joined the Franciscan Order in Peru. distributed his estate, mainly to the religious order.

Even after retiring from acting, Mojica periodically performed to support laudable charitable causes. Following his career he left for Cuzco, Perú, where he entered the Monastery of San Francisco, Lima and adopted the name of Fray Francisco José de Guadalupe Mojica. In Lima, Fray Mojica founded a school to train priests. Nevertheless, the lure of the stage could not be long absent from his life, for Mojica began directing amateur plays and later became a painter to continue his artistic legacy. Then, spanning the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared in a few films in order to collect money for his order, which included a concert tour of Central America to raise funds in 1954.

When Mojica became afflictled with a temporary deafness, he was prompted by his superiors to write his autobiography. putting halt to his singing, he was ordered by his superiors to write his memoirs. He then wrote his autobiography, Yo pecador... (I sinner), which appeared in 1956. The book sold more than three million copies in Spanish before its translation into English in 1963. A film adaptation of the book, with the same title, was released in 1959.

Mojica eventually became completely deaf. After suffering for years from acute hepatitis, he died in 1974 of heart failure at the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, just six days after his 78th birthday.