Jovita Idar may be the most influential Texan you’ve never heard of before today. Idar was at various times an activist, a journalist, a nurse, and an educator, always lending her effort and intellect where she felt they were needed most.
Idar was born in late 1885, into a privileged Tejano family in Laredo. The second of eight children, her childhood home was vibrant, and the conversation was often unflinchingly political. Due to her parents’ relative wealth and social standing, she was able to obtain a high-quality, private Methodist education. Like many educated women of her era, she earned a teaching certificate and set off upon her graduation to be a school teacher.
Disgusted by the conditions of the school, which she felt made learning virtually impossible, Idar shifted her sights to what we might these days call “big structural change.” Seeing an opportunity to leverage freedom of the press into a platform from which to fight for civil rights, she moved back home in 1911 and joined her father in the family business, running a newspaper called La Cronica. That same year, she worked with her family to hold the First Mexican Congress, after which she published an opinion piece in La Cronica calling for women’s suffrage.
After a brief stint in El Cruz Blanco (a local version of the Red Cross active in the landscape of the Mexican Revolution), Idar moved to a different Laredo paper, El Progreso. It was there, as a staffer, where her most cinematic claim-to-fame took place. El Progreso published an opinion piece Idar wrote criticizing then-President Woodrow Wilson for dispatching United States military forces and the Texas Rangers to the Mexican border. Taking umbrage, Texas Rangers appeared at the headquarters of El Progreso. Idar stopped them that day by advocating for the paper’s rights under the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press, and fearlessly blocking their entrance to the building with her own body.
Idar’s accomplishments are literally too many to list here, including founding La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, fighting for the eradication of the Texas “Juan Crow” laws, and even working as a Spanish language translator in a Bexar County hospital to ensure Tejano access to medical care. But it is important to note that her political philosophy was at all times driven by a belief that equality of the sexes was crucial to the liberation of all marginalized peoples.