Estimated read time: 3 minutes
The Texas Rangers are at the door of El Progreso. The newspaper has just criticized the president of the United States for sending troops to the border, and someone has decided it needs to stop printing.
A woman steps into the doorway and doesn’t move.
Her name is Jovita Idar. She’s about 30 years old, and she has been fighting with ink her whole life.
Born Into the Fight
Jovita was born in Laredo in 1885, one of eight children. Her father, Nicasio Idar, ran La Crónica, a Spanish-language weekly that spoke up for Mexican Americans when almost no one else in Texas would.
She trained as a teacher and took a job at a small school in Los Ojuelos. What she found there broke her heart: too little equipment, poor conditions and no way to fix any of it. So she quit and picked up the one weapon her family knew how to use: the printing press.
Printing What Others Ignored
La Crónica published what the English-language papers ignored. Mexican American children were shut out of good schools. Families were sliding into poverty. Spanish and Mexican culture were being pushed out of public life. And Mexican Americans were being lynched.
Jovita wrote it all down.
In September 1911, the Idars brought their community together in Laredo for the First Mexican Congress, to fight back on education, labor and economic injustice. Women didn’t just attend; they spoke. Historians have called it the first attempt in Mexican American history to organize a militant feminist movement. That same year, Jovita wrote in support of women’s right to vote, years before most American women had it. A month after the Congress, she became the first president of the League of Mexican Women, which set out to educate poor children.
Across the River, Into the War
In 1913, the Mexican Revolution reached Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande. Jovita and her friend Leonor Villegas de Magnón crossed the river to care for the wounded. Jovita then joined La Cruz Blanca, the White Cross, a medical relief group Villegas de Magnón founded, and traveled with revolutionary forces as a nurse.
The Doorway
Back in Laredo, she joined El Progreso and wrote the editorial against President Woodrow Wilson sending troops to the border. Then the Rangers came.
Her brother and her niece later told the story: Jovita stood in the doorway and refused to let them in.
What followed is recorded in local newspapers from 1916. The paper’s editor was arrested on a libel charge. A month later, a mob kidnapped him and forced him across the Rio Grande. Vigilantes wrecked the office and ordered the staff to stop publishing.
El Progreso was silenced. Jovita Idar was not.
She Never Stopped
She went back to La Crónica and ran it after her father died. In 1917 she married Bartolo Juárez and moved to San Antonio, where she kept building. She worked in the Democratic Party, opened a free kindergarten, interpreted for Spanish-speaking patients at the county hospital, and edited a Methodist newspaper, El Heraldo Cristiano. She died in 1946.
More than 75 years after her death, the United States put her face on its quarter.
Why She Matters Now
Jovita Idar knew a free press, schools and women’s voices were how a community protects itself. That fight hasn’t ended. Newsrooms are still pressured, schools are still unequal, and Latinas are still told to wait their turn.
She is often quoted as saying, “When you educate a woman, you educate a family.”
She never waited. Neither should we.
Sources
- Handbook of Texas Online, “Idar, Jovita,” Texas State Historical Association
- National Women’s History Museum, “Jovita Idar” (Kerri Lee Alexander)
- U.S. Mint, American Women Quarters Program: Jovita Idar
- Wikimedia Commons: image records and licenses
Featured image: Jovita Idar around 1905. Public domain. UTSA Libraries Special Collections, via Wikimedia Commons.
