La Cruz Blanca Founders
Elena Arizmendi Mejía & Leonor Villega de Magnón
Elena Arizmendi Mejía
Elena Arizmendi Mejía was born in Mexico City in 1884. When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, she was studying at the School of Nursing of the Santa Rosa Hospital (now the School of Nursing at the University of the Incarnate Word) in San Antonio, Texas. In 1911, a few weeks prior to her graduation, Arizmendi returned via train to Mexico City to care for combatants and found that the Mexican Red Cross refused care for the opposition forces who sought to overthrow the dictator Porfirio Diaz’s government. Alongside her brother Carlos, she went on to form La Cruz Blanca Neutral (The Neutral White Cross) and together they worked to recruit volunteer medical students and nurses to provide care equally to any soldier regardless of side. By 1911, Mejía’s successful fundraising allowed them to build a field hospital and 25 brigades would be supported during the war. By 1915, she fled to New York and founded Feminismo Internacional (International Feminist) to publish articles reflective of Hispanic feminist ideals and also published as her autobiography Vida Incompleta in 1927.
Leonor Villega de Magnón
Leonor Villega de Magnón was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1876. She was educated in San Antonio and Austin, Texas and the Bronx, New York. She received her teaching degree in 1895 and married an American citizen in 1901. They had three children and settled in Mexico City. In 1910 she visited Laredo, Texas to attend her father’s funeral with her children, but as a result of the Mexican Revolution which transpired across borders, she found herself unable to leave safely at that time. Instead, she opened one of the first bilingual kindergartens in the region and began to write with Jovita Idár in (her father’s) newspaper La Crónica in support of the opposition forces who sought to overthrow Porfirio Diaz’s undemocratic government in order to gain improved socioeconomic opportunity for Mexico’s working class.
In 1913, after an attack on Nuevo Laredo, Villega de Magnón, alongside Idár and four other Laredo women, crossed the Rio Grande to nurse the wounded. There they found the same situation as Mejía — the Red Cross was not treating both sides fairly, so Villega de Magnón formed and financed a brigade of La Cruz Blanca. After a second attack in the city the following year, Villega de Magnón turned her home, garage, and school into hospitals for wounded soldiers who crossed the river and ended up treating over 100 soldiers the first month alone. When American army officials attempted to arrest her Mexican soldier-patients, she refused to release them and organized their escape by disguising them from uniforms to clean street clothes. Though some men were still taken into custody despite her efforts, she then hired an attorney to obtain their release. Though she wrote her autobiography (in both English and Spanish) and centered the work and founding of La Cruz Blanca, it remained unpublished and passed down to her granddaughter who worked to finally publish the manuscript, The Rebel, in 1994. The archives of Villega de Magnón have since been made digitally available through The University of Houston.
According to scholar Alexandra Ibarra, who researched Villega de Magnón for her 2018 thesis Reclaiming Women’s Stories at the Border: Mexicana Migration, Catholicism, and Revolution, 1910–1930, the work “stands as a tangible reflection of her experience in the revolution as well as her efforts to preserve the history of La Cruz Blanca” (page 43).
Ibarra further elaborates:
Magnón spent the last few decades of her life pushing for her autobiography to be published. She went so far as to even create two versions of her work in Spanish and English as an appeal to readers in the face of pushback from both Mexicans and American publishers. Ultimately after having received twenty-six letters of rejection from various American and Mexican publishing houses, her work would instead remain hidden among her affects and inaccessible to the public…she was told that no one wanted to read about a woman’s perspective [in the Revolution]…She recognized that women and the work of women were undervalued within the machismo culture of Mexico and sought to combat the erasure of women’s work. —Alexandra Ibarra (page 21, 27–28)
La Cruz Blanc Today
La Cruz Blanca continued as a quasi-governmentally subsidized organization into the 1940s, when it was converted into an organization to assist children. The organization is still in operation in Mexico today for children’s nutritional rehabiliation (Centro Infantil de Rehabilitación Nutricional).
Further Resources
Learn more about early healing culture in Mexico and the first Mexican Nightingale schools here.
Read Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi for more information on Elena Arizmendi Mejía.
Read the full text of The Rebel, in print via Amazon, or the thesis by Alexandra Ibarra for more information on Leonor Villega de Magnón.
Sources
The information above was sourced from the Handbook of Texas, University of Houston, Wikipedia, this PDF on La Cruz Blanca, and Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History.
Please submit any additional sources or information to us to add via social media or email us at nursesyoushouldknow@gmail.com.
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