He has received posthumous recognition with a major biography, and scholarship considers him to be the heir to graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada.
[2][5] His father and uncles worked as vendors in a mining town called El Oro until the political strongmen of the area forced them to leave, burning down their store.
His teachers included Saturninio Herrán, Germán Gedovius, Ignacio Rosas, Francisco de la Torre and Leandro Izaguirre.
After three years at the academy, he left to attend the new Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre opened by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in the Chimalistac area in the south of Mexico City.
This coincided with the state government under General Jara, but when he fell out of power, Méndez moved back to Mexico City and joined the Mexican Communist Party .
[4] His time here and other parts of rural Mexico gave him an appreciation of the country's handcraft and folk art tradition, making him a collector during his life.
His role in the political activities of many artists and writers of his time was large but he tended to claim little individual credit and to stay in the background.
[2] In 1940s, he was under arrest for a few days after David Alfaro Siqueiros and his group assaulted Leon Trotsky’s house in Coyoacán, kidnapping and killing his secretary.
[3][6] Méndez's career mixed political activism, painting, art education and book design but is best known for his engraving work, creating over 700 during his lifetime.
Both were aimed at farm communities and served as a sources of materials for teachers, so the use of graphics along with text was considered fundamental because of high illiteracy.
[3] In 1942, he published En el nombre de Cristo a series of seven lithographs about barbarism attributed to the Cristeros and the assassination of teachers.
[3] His first major body of work was created as a founding member of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) begun in 1933.
He generally focused on secular, rather than religious images as well as popular themes taking after the work of José Guadalupe Posada.
While his work is mostly realistic, it has incorporated imaginative elements from Cubism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism and Surrealism.
He founded a new group that year called the Taller de Gráfica Popular along with Pablo O'Higgins, Alfredo Zalce, Luis Arenal, Ignacio Aguirre, Isidora Ocampo and others.
[3] Like LEAR, its function was political solidly to the left but anti-Trotsky and allied with Silvestre Revueltas, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lombardo Toledano and others.
[8] In 1958/1959 Méndez left the Taller de la Gráfica Popular due to ideological differences and founded a new publishing concern called the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana along with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Carlos Pellicer, Rafael Carrillo Azpeitia and Ricardo J.
[3] Méndez was part of a generation of artists that emerged in the 1920s and played an important role in the culture and politics of Mexico after the Mexican Revolution.
[2][4] During his lifetime, his only formal recognitions included one of his books, Incidentes melódicos del mundo irracional, receiving a local prize in 1944, the first Premio Nacional de Grabado in Mexico City in 1946 and the International Prize of Peace as a member of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular in 1952.
Mexican academic research generally ranks him as high as other artists of the 20th century such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, but little documentation of his life exists.
[4] In 2002, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, writer Carlos Monsivais sponsored a conference on Méndez's work at the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL).
[10] However, there remains no museum dedicated to his work and the only formal catalog was created by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1977.