Jovita Idar

The Texas Rangers were founded when Stephen F. Austin employed men to protect white families, many of whom established cotton plantations and slave labor in Mexican parts of Texas. In 1835 the Texas government ordered the rangers to fight American Indians and essentially push them off their lands. The Rangers fought in the U.S.-Mexican War from 1846-1848 and many Rangers fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In the 1900s, with the rise of Anglo American populations in the border region, the rangers became known to perpetuate violence, including executions and torture, against ethnic Mexicans, Blacks and other people of color, winning them the name “Los Diablos Tejanos”—”the Texan Devils.” Between 1914-1919, Texas Rangers killed approximately 5,000 Mexican Americans.

Operating as a state police force, the Texas Rangers are credited with catching the crime couple, Bonnie and Clyde. Since 1935, the organization has been a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, serving as a statewide investigative law enforcement agency.

[Sources: PBS Learning Media: Jovita Idar; https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-rangers; and https://refusingtoforget.org/the-history/] 

[Image courtesy of Austin History Center, Austin Public Library ]

In 1845, U.S. President James K. Polk, supported “Manifest Destiny,” a political ideology positing that the U.S. was predestined to occupy the North American continent. As a result, Polk offered to purchase California and New Mexico from Mexico. The Mexican government refused and Polk sent military troops to disputed lands along the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico saw this as an act of aggression and in retaliation sent troops across the Rio Grande. In 1846, the U.S. declared war on Mexico. 

[Image courtesy of Texas State Historical Association]

One of eight children, Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas, located at the border between Mexico and the U.S. Her father Nicasio Idar and mother Jovita were both educated, middle class Texans of Mexican descent, and raised Idar with a strong sense of social justice, community activism, and political involvement. Nicasio Idar was a labor organizer, civic leader, publisher and editor, Freemason, and respected man in Laredo. 

[Source: Por la Raza, Para la Raza: Jovita Idar and Progressive-Era Mexicana Maternalism along the Texas–Mexico Border Elizabeth Garner Masarik Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 122, Number 3, January 2019, pp. 278-299. ]

[Image courtesy of UTSA Special Collections] 

Labor shortages in the U.S. led railway companies to recruit Mexican laborers. In part as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented immigration of workers from China, in the early 1900s, Mexicans accounted for about 60% of the railway labor force. (Source: https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-mexico-relations) 

[Image courtesy of University of North Texas]

Idar was educated at Laredo Seminary, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church. After earning a teaching certificate, Idar moved to Los Ojuelos, Texas, to teach at a primary school. But she quickly became frustrated with the lack of resources and poor classroom conditions, and after a short period returned to Laredo. 

[Image courtesy of UTSA Special Collections]

Following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson legalizing racial segregation, a new era of racism and racial terror was initiated against African Americans as well as Mexican Americans. Juan Crow, the Mexican American equivalent of Jim Crow laws, legally restricted and segregated Mexican and Latino communities. Signs stating “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed” were found in public areas such as restaurants across the state of Texas. 

[Image courtesy of Library of Congress]

After leaving her teaching career, Idar  joined her father and siblings at La Crónica, to enact social change through journalism. Idar and her two brothers, Clemente and Eduardo, became the lead writers of La Crónica, a Spanish-language newspaper that reported on lynchings, segregation, and discrimination against Mexicans Americans. Its motto was, “We work for the progress and the industrial, moral, and intellectual development of the Mexican inhabitants of Texas.” 

As a reporter, Idar wrote about segregation, lynching, women’s and children’s rights, and other injustices endured by Mexican Texans, or Tejanos, in the early 20th century. Idar sometimes wrote under two pseudonyms, A. V. Negra, meaning Black Bird, or Astrea, the Greek goddess of justice. Some of the articles she wrote include, “Para La Mujer que Lee” (For the woman who reads) and “A La Mujer Mexicana de Ambos Laredo” (For the Mexican woman of both Laredos). 

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia]

La Crónica began publication around the 1890s, in Laredo Texas. Nicasio Idar started as an editor and then became the owner and publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper, turning it into a family business. La Crónica, exposed injustices towards Mexican Americans, and openly criticized social issues including educational segregation of Tejano children and the lynchings of Mexican Americans.

La Crónica also focused on empowering Mexican Americans by publishing commentary and essays on philosophical, literary, religious, and political themes. A frequent contributor was the renowned poet and political activist, Sara Estela Ramírez. An influential paper. especially in the Mexican American border regions, La Crónica ceased operations in 1914 after Nicasio Idar died.

The Mexican Revolution began after middle class Mexican workers revolted against the dictator Porfirio Díaz Mori, who had ruled for 34 years. Revolutionaries took the north and the south of Mexico, forcing Díaz to resign. Unrest over who should be president continued until 1917, when Mexico adopted a new constitution to ensure a permanent democracy. Between 1910 and 1920, more than 890,000 Mexicans crossed the border to the United States seeking refuge. 

[Image courtesy of Library of Congress]

Antonio Gómez, a 14-year-old Mexican American boy was lynched by a group of white vigilantes in Thorndale, Texas, after the murder of local white businessman Charles Zieschang. Gómez was captured by a violent mob and dragged by horse and then publicly lynched. This  event was one of thousands of acts of racial violence that occurred along the Mexican-American border between 1910 and 1920. La Crónica denounced the lynching of Antonio Gómez in an article titled “Barbarismo” (Barbarism), reporting on racial atrocities and the authorities’ lack of response.  

[Image courtesy of Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History]

Following the lynching of Mexican Americans Antonio Gómez and 20-year-old Mexican Antonio Rodríguez, the Idars organized the first statewide Mexican American civil and human rights conference. Held in Laredo, Texas, the Congress united hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to discuss segregation and discrimination, the loss of Mexican culture, and educational segregation. The Congress led to the creation of the Gran Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección (Great Mexican League for Benefit and Protection) and the Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women). Nicasio Idar was chosen as leader of the Gran Liga, and Jovita Idar was elected president of the Liga Femenil. 

[Image courtesy of La Crónica]

Following the first Mexicanist Congress, Idar organized and became the first president of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista. The organization promoted women’s suffrage, quality education for Tejano children, and the preservation of Mexican culture. La Liga Femenil is one of the first known attempts by Mexican American women to organize for social and political causes. (Source: Texas State Historical Association, Liga Femenil Mexicanista). 

[Image courtesy of  Andrew Butler Photos]

[Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin]

During the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, Idar’s friend, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, created La Cruz Blanca (The White Cross) to care for soldiers across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Idar and several other women joined the nursing unit and smuggled wounded soldiers across the Rio Grande river to safety. 

La Cruz Blanca was a medical organization, composed predominantly of women, allied with revolutionary José Venustiano Carranza de la Garza, one of the main leaders of the Mexican Revolution. The White Cross traveled with Carranza’s troops and established medical brigades in northern Mexico. In 1914, Carranza declared La Cruz Blanca a national organization. 

[Image courtesy of UTSA Special Collections]

After working for La Cruz Blanca, Idar returned to journalism. She began working as a staff writer for the Spanish-language pro-Carranza newspaper, El Progreso, published by Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s brother Leopoldo Villegas. It was while working at El Progreso, that Idar risked her life to defend  freedom of the press. In 1914, the Mexican revolutionary Manuel García Virgil wrote an editorial criticizing the U.S. government for its occupation of Veracruz, Mexico in opposition to the military regime of General Victoriano Huerta. As a result, at the behest of the Texas governor, the Texas Rangers set out to destroy the presses of El Progreso. When they arrived, they found Jovita Idar blocking the entrance. The Texas Rangers left, but they returned the next morning and destroyed everything.

[Image courtesy of UTSA Special Collections]

After El Progreso was destroyed, the Idar family and the Villegas family planned a new pro-Carranza newspaper, Evolución, with Jovita, and her brothers Eduardo and Clemente Idar playing principal roles. Idar took a lead role in the development of Evolución. She stated, “I bought a press worth more than a thousand dollars and bought plenty of type and everything. I can make a seven-column newspaper and will start soon.”

[Image courtesy of Evolución]

[Image courtesy of Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside] 

The Immigration Act of 1924 established immigrant quotas by nationality. Federal law favored western European countries over others as Germany, Ireland, and Britain were entitled to 70% of the quota visas available. The U.S. Border Patrol was established to enforce these new immigrant regulations and limit the number of immigrants crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. 

[Image courtesy of Getty]

LULAC, one of the oldest, largest and continually active Latino civil rights organizations in the United States, was founded in 1929 to fight against the racial discrimination and segregation of Mexican Americans. Jovita Idar’s brother Eduardo Idar, a prominent leader in Mexican American civil rights, was one of the founders of LULAC and authored its constitution. Her brother Clemente Idar became one of LULAC’s honorary presidents in the 1930s.

Since its founding, LULAC has been active in the fight for social reform and the rights of Latinos in the U.S., including for the desegregation of schools, employment, and housing rights.  

[Image courtesy of University of Texas]

Due to a labor shortage in agriculture during WWII, the U.S. established the Bracero Program (meaning “manual laborer” program), which granted employment contracts to Mexican agricultural laborers to work in the U.S.  The largest foreign worker program in U.S. history, the program lasted until 1964, and employed 5 million braceros in 24 U.S. states. It was banned in Texas during the mid 1940s due to discrimination and mistreatment of Mexican workers, including lynchings that occurred along the border. 

The term “Chicano” gained widespread recognition as young Mexican Americans started using this term during the civil rights movement. Two of the major causes prominent during the Chicano movement were farmer rights and education reform. 

[Image courtesy of History Colorado Collection]

The National Farm Workers Association, later known as the United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union created to support the rights of farmers and agricultural workers, especially those that worked under the Bracero Program, to ensure they were paid and  had equal rights.  Chávez and Huerta organized the Delano grape farmers strike, which sparked a national grape boycott in the late 1960s. 

In 1973, Huerta organized another strike and consumer boycott, which led to passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, allowing farm workers to form unions and demand better employment conditions and wages. 

[Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution]

Futuro Media is a non-profit organization committed to producing multimedia journalism that explores and gives a critical voice to the diverse issues and population of the U.S. 

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Only 2% of newspapers’ newsrooms are composed of Latina women, and they constitute about 4% of the workforce in radio, and  8% in television news. 

[Sources: American Society of News Editors and Radio Television Digital News Association]