| Hermana Resist

Laredo women Leonor V. Magnon and Jovita Idar pose in front of the flag of their organization La Cruz Blanca, which helped wounded soldiers during the Mexican Revolution

Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas in 1885 to Nicasio Clemente and Jovita Vivero and was one of eight children. In 1903 at the age of 18 years she earned a teaching certificate from the Holding Institute in Laredo and taught in a small school but the conditions in which she had to teach Mexican children so frustrated her that she decided to join her two
brothers as a writer for her father’s newspaper “La Cronica.” She believed that by becoming a journalist and an activist she would be more effective in changing the deplorable conditions that existed in the public schools for Mexican children. During this time, Mexican school children were completely segregated and, in many occasions, totally excluded.

Throughout 1910 and 1911 she wrote weekly articles that called for equal educational treatment and exposed the extreme discrimination against Mexican children in the public schools. In addition, Jovita Idar started writing about the atrocities being committed by the Texas Rangers against Mexicans. She wrote about the lynching and hanging of a Mexican child in Thorndale, Texas by the Texas Ranchers and the brutal burning at the stake of 20 year old Antonio Rodriguez in Rocksprings, Texas. Of Antonio Rodriguez, she wrote, “The crowd cheered when the flames engulfed his
contorted body. They did not even turn away at the smell of his burning flesh and I wondered if they even knew his name. There are so many dead that sometimes I can’t remember all their names.”

Laredo women Leonor V. Magnon and Jovita Idar pose in front of the flag of their organization La Cruz Blanca, which helped wounded soldiers during the Mexican Revolution

The picture that comes to mind for most Anglo-Americans when women are discussed in the context of historical travels to California is that of the overland wagon trains moving westward, peopled by sturdy and daring pioneers who arrived in California after the discovery of gold in 1848. A few might also mention that some of the women came by ship, interrupting their voyage with an arduous trek—on foot or by mule—across the Isthmus of Panama, all the while with small children in tow. Even fewer people are aware that these women were relative latecomers to the Golden State, as California came to be known.

At the time Anglo-Americans began arriving in California in large numbers during the nineteenth century, they were part of the third wave of migration to the Pacific Coast. The first immigrants were Indians who had lived in California ten to fifteen thousand years before the region was visited by Old World explorers.¹ A prevalent myth that the rich land was empty, ripe for colonization, is refuted by recent studies indicating that “at the time of Euro-American contact, California was more densely populated than any area of equal size in North America, north of central Mexico . . . . What is labeled ‘wilderness’ in today’s popular imagination . . . harbored human gathering and hunting sites, burial grounds, work sites, sacred areas, trails, and village sites. Today’s wilderness was then human homeland.

Papagos. From United States. Dept. of the Interior. Report on the United States and Mexican boundary survey … by William H. Emory. 1857-59. Serial Set No. 861. Law Library.

WOMEN ON THE MOVE: OVERLAND JO URN EYS TO CALIFORNIA

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/aw06e/aw06e.html