[1][2] After his death following a goring (cornada) in the Plaza of Manzanares, he was memorialized by several poets of the Generation of '27, notably by Federico García Lorca in his Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías ("Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías", sometimes translated under the title "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter").

[3] Sánchez Mejías was born in 1891 in the Calle de la Palma, Seville, to a wealthy doctor.

Back in Spain, he appeared in Madrid in September 1913, and on 21 June 1914 in his native Seville, where he received a goring that broke his femur and delayed his career for years.

In the 1928-1929 academic year, he enrolled at the "La Rábida" Secondary Education Institute in Huelva, at the age of thirty-eight, to finish his Bachelor's degree studies.

[6] In 1926 the Valencian sculptor Mariano Benlliure included him in a memorial statue, where he is pictured among the figures carrying the coffin of Joselito.