In 1914, Texas Rangers — armed, uniformed, angry — rode up to the offices of El Progreso, a Spanish-language newspaper in Laredo, and beat on the door.
The state officers were notorious for harassing and even murdering ethnic Mexicans in Texas, and now El Progreso was in their crosshairs for publishing an article critical of President Wilson’s 1914 occupation of Veracruz, Mexico.
Jovita Idar, a diminutive reporter and one of the few women who worked at the paper, knew that the Rangers responded to any minor act of defiance with outsize brutality. But instead of doing as they told her, she barred the door and told them to leave. They protested, demanding that she open the door, but she stood her ground. Finally, they left.
Idar had insisted on the press’s right to hold the powerful accountable, which was all the more impressive considering her relative powerlessness. She was a woman and a person of Mexican heritage in a place that had little respect for either.
Idar was born into a progressive Mexican American family in Laredo, Texas, in 1885. Her father, Nicasio Idar, served as justice of the peace and assistant city marshal in the small border city and became intimately involved in Laredo’s social and economic life.
Though Texas had once been part of Mexico, Anglo-Americans spent much of the late 19th century trying to seize Tejano-owned property and subjugate Texas’s Spanish-speaking population. As the Mexican Revolution loomed, anti-Mexican sentiment blossomed throughout the region, a reaction to a wave of immigration and fears that revolutionaries might try to reclaim even more Texan land for Mexicans.
The tension that resulted turned the Texas–Mexico border into a tinderbox — one marked by segregation, open racism, and anti-Mexican stereotypes that still haunt the country today. To expose the lived reality of Mexican Americans, Nicasio founded a newspaper, La Crónica, in the 1890s.
At first, Jovita worked as a teacher, but she became frustrated with the horrific conditions in Tejano schools. In 1910, she joined the staff of her father’s newspaper, convinced that her verve for justice would be better used there. In a time when there were few women in journalism, Jovita became a reporter and columnist.
Sometimes she reported under her own name; at other times, she signed her articles as “Astrea” (the Greek goddess of purity and justice) or “A.V. Negra” (which could be read phonetically as “Ave Negra,” or Blackbird). Together, the father and daughter reported on everything from the conditions of local workplaces and schools to the racism and oppression in the borderlands.
“Her writing has a sense of gravitas,” Gabriela González, a history professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told Timeline. “There is much knowledge, awareness, and a powerful consciousness informing and educating the reader, but her messages are delivered with a dignified humility.” González sees Idar as a woman ahead of her time and points out that her stances on social injustice, bilingual education, feminism, and politics were all in line with those of modern progressives and feminists. “She used her talents and privileges as an educated middle-class woman to courageously expose and speak out against injustice,” she says.
In her columns, Idar wrote directly to the women of Laredo. “Woman must always seek to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge,” she wrote, “for in modern times, she has broad horizons.”
In 1911, the newspaper put on a conference called the Congreso Mexicanista and invited all of the state’s Mexican journalists, local ethnic Mexican fraternal orders, mutual benefit societies, and representatives of other Tejanos, which Idar used as an opportunity for feminist organizing. She and a group of like-minded women formed the Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women), a feminist organization that took a modern stance on social issues.
“Educate a woman and you educate a family,” the league’s slogan proclaimed. In keeping with this commitment to education, the group also organized free schools for Tejano children. They tackled injustices in education and the criminal justice system and fought poverty and sexism within the community. In 1911, they organized a statewide campaign to demand that Leon Cardenas Martinez Jr., a 16-year-old forced to confess to the rape and murder of a white woman, be set free. Despite their efforts and Texas laws that prevented the execution of a minor, he was put to death.
Idar also helped create the White Cross, a kind of Mexican Red Cross that provided nursing across the border during the the Mexican Revolution. She traveled to Mexico City with the organization as a nurse, caring for injured combatants and supporting her fellow nurses during the bloody battles for the democratization of Mexico.
As was the case with many resistance efforts in the borderlands, successes were often easily and unceremoniously undone. In the case of the Texas Rangers’ attempt to take over El Progreso, Idar managed only to save the paper for a single day. The next day, the Rangers stormed the building again, destroying the printing presses.
“We can endeavor, even to the point of sacrifice, if necessary, to enlighten our children,” wrote Idar in La Crónica in 1911. Her life stands as a testament to that mission — even if it is barely remembered today.
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