An Incomplete Redemption

Jovita Idar was a journalist who, along with her family, published La Crónica newspaper in early-twentieth-century Texas. She was a teacher and active in reform circles on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico divide. Well educated in the tradition of women's seminaries, Idar was a member of the gente decente—those who possessed middle-class educational and economic privileges.¹ As a part of the ideology bound in middle-class notions of cultural redemption, Jovita Idar eventually went on to found the League of Mexican Women, which framed political participation in terms of benevolence. Along with Leonor Villegas de Magnón, she and her sister Elvira served as volunteer nurses in La Cruz Blanca, after the 1913 Battle of Nuevo Laredo during the Mexican Revolution. González's Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights traces narratives like that of Jovita Idar from a gendered perspective to write the history of class-conscious political activism on the part of Mexicanorigin women between 1900 and 1950.

While the idea of racial uplift is often linked to African American reformers during the 1890s, Mexican and Mexican American women along the Texas–Mexico border were performing similar kinds of work a few decades later. González documents just how strong the impulse was for these middle-class reformers to uplift the Mexican masses from their exclusion from mainstream American society. They used gendered notions of modernity to counteract the ways in which Mexicans were economically exploited and politically marginalized. Framing her study with the idea of la raza ("the race") this construction was posited "along ethno-nationalist lines because a major cultural project of the revolutionary state was to engender a unified nationalist identity that would safeguard against divisive racial stratifications inherited from a deeply entrenched Spanish colonial legacy" (p. 129). González therefore demonstrates how the middle and upper classes invested in redemption for the lower classes as a form of national devotion to Mexico and its people.

Even though previous scholarship on Mexican American benevolent societies throughout the Southwest has addressed this form of racial uplift,² such work has mostly done so solely focusing on the perspectives of men. Women too had a role in these movements, not simply as participants in female auxiliaries or as fiesta queens. In providing fresh ways to more deeply historicize women's roles in the early-twentieth-century Texas–Mexico public sphere, González urges us to move beyond narratives of great men to the ways in which women navigated these tumultuous political times with skill. While highly paternalistic, middle-class Mexican women reproduced the structures of patriarchy with their activism in what González calls "maternal feminism," they drew on the same conventions of republican motherhood utilized by white women during the U.S. colonial period, which mandated that they maintain the virtues of the home and the family in service of the nation, uniting contradictory feelings about how proper patriotism could be expressed.³

González's book's main contribution lies in the way it extends the conversation about patriotism, racial uplift, and class benevolence to communities along the U.S.–Mexico border in the early-twentieth century. Nonetheless, the actors of the period would never define themselves as maternal feminists, and while some historians might quibble with this anachronism, the book traces the individual journeys of particular Mexican-origin women and their families as they critiqued women's exclusion from the public sphere. While such political activities were not completely liberatory for the women activists or the poor Mexicans they attempted to support, they nonetheless raised questions about what attempts at gender equality might look like.

Biographies of women like Jovita Idar, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and others demonstrate the ways in which many Mexican-origin peoples of the middle classes reframed dominant narratives about the uniformity of their ethnic group by using their class privilege to negotiate on behalf of others. Villegas de Magnón...