Por la Raza, Para la Raza: Jovita Idar and Progressive-Era Mexicana Maternalism along the Texas–Mexico Border

Leonor Villegas de Magnón (left) and Jovita Idar (right). March 17, 1913. 084-0597, General Photograph Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio, Special Collections-Institute of Texan Cultures.

Jovita Idar stood firm in the door way, hands gripping the frame on either side. Her tall form and long skirt shielded the printing presses behind her. Mounted Texas Rangers, or rinches as Tejanos and people of Mexican heritage derogatorily called them in 1914 Laredo, slowed their horses until they stopped mere feet in front of her. The Rangers were there on orders from the U.S. government to shut down the Spanish-language newspaper, El Progreso.¹

El Progreso was a small weekly publication circulated along the Texas–Mexico border. The paper served Mexican and Tejano inhabitants living within the area scholars call the "borderlands."² Jovita³ was a journalist for El Progreso, which had recently published a scathing article by the Mexican revolutionary Manuel García Virgil about U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's actions along the border and U.S. military intervention in Veracruz, Mexico. In response, the Texas Rangers went to the offices of El Progreso to shut the paper down.

Locals informed Jovita that the Rangers were on their way only minutes before their arrival. The Rangers tended to enforce Anglo dominance in the region and were known to violently punish Tejanos for even minor infractions. This system enforced a racialized hierarchy that systematically discriminated against Tejano and Mexican-heritage residents. Standing up to them was no small act of defiance.

Jovita blocked the newspaper doorway and stared at the Rangers, citing the paper's First Amendment right to freedom of press. A crowd formed to watch the spectacle. After a tense moment the Rangers, apparently not eager to harm a respected, if troublesome, middle-class member of the community, retreated. Prominent and politically active, the Idar family was part of early twentieth-century Laredo's gente decente, or "decent" people, who shared a sense of propriety, education, and a level of civic engagement. Being part of the gente decente did not depend upon economic status necessarily, but on a level of comportment and cultural influence. Arguably, this allowed Jovita more leverage to negotiate a public space within middle and upper-class Mexican society in Laredo and allowed her to face the Texas Rangers without the violence that could have erupted during such an antagonistic meeting.⁴

The Texas Rangers did not leave for good, however. They returned the following day when Jovita was away, smashed the printing presses, and arrested the remaining employees. According to later testimony, the Rangers tracked down Manuel García Virgil, severely beat him and put him in jail. Only because of a favor from a friendly judge was Virgil released and given medical assistance.⁵ The Rangers' use of force was a powerful component of the prejudice Tejanos experienced in the borderlands; yet, the episode did not quiet voices along the border that increasingly spoke out against the Anglo racism and violence that Mexican-heritage people experienced in their daily life. The borderlands region was a vibrant cultural area where Mexican and Anglo inhabitants engaged in a sometimes harmonious, sometimes contentious relationship. The violence that periodically spilled over the border from the ongoing Mexican Revolution only heightened racial animosity.

Reformers like Jovita utilized their Mexican heritage, U.S. citizenship, and gender to develop a Mexicana political maternalism to demand civil and political rights for Mexican and Tejano borderland inhabitants. Within this context, maternalism was the transformation of women's private, familial responsibilities as caretakers of the domestic realm into public action. Maternalism was an ideology that under some circumstances extended a woman's capacity to mother, care, and nurture from her own family to the vulnerable of society at large. Maternalist politics primarily focused on the protection of mothers and children and sometimes encompassed the vulnerable of society at large. However, maternalist reforms could also impose middle-class...