Jovita Idar: Pioneer of Women's Rights and Mexican-American Activism (1885–1946)
Revised by: Jessica Brannon-Wranosky
Published: February 1, 1995
Updated: October 4, 2025
Jovita Idar, teacher, journalist, and political activist, was born in Laredo on September 7 1885, one of eight children of Jovita and Nicasio Idar. She attended the Holding Institute (a Methodist school) in Laredo, from which she earned a teaching certificate in 1903. She then taught at a small school in Los Ojuelos in Webb County. Inadequate equipment and poor conditions, as well as her inability to improve them, frustrated her, so she resigned and joined two of her brothers as writers for her father's weekly newspaper, La Crónica.
Idar worked as a census taker for the 1910 U.S. federal census and began publishing El Estudiante Laredense for students. In 1910 and 1911 La Crónica actively criticized certain aspects of Hispanic-Anglo relations. It featured stories on educational and social discrimination against Mexican-Americans, deteriorating economic conditions, decreasing use of the Spanish language, the loss of Mexican culture, and lynchings of Hispanics. The newspaper also supported revolutionary forces in Mexico. In 1911 La Crónica called for a convention of the Orden Caballeros de Honor, a fraternal order, to discuss the troubling issues of the times. In September 1911 Idar joined fellow lodge members and others at Laredo in the First Mexican Congress to discuss educational, social, labor, and economic matters. Women participated as speakers and participants; for some it was their first political meeting. This congress has been called the first attempt in Mexican-American history to organize a militant feminist movement.That same year, Idar published a pro-woman suffrage piece in La Crónica. In 1916, when she and her brother, Eduardo, formed another newspaper entitled Evolución, they continued to advocate publicly through their press the importance of women's rights in politics. Another outcome of the congress was the formation in October 1911 of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women). Jovita Idar became its first president and organized its principal effort, to provide education for poor children.
In 1913 during the Mexican Revolution battle at Nuevo Laredo, Idar and a friend, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, crossed the border to care for the injured. Idar later joined La Cruz Blanca, founded by Villegas de Magnón as a medical group similar to the Red Cross, and traveled in northern Mexico with revolutionary forces as a nurse. When she returned to Laredo she joined the staff of the newspaper El Progreso and later wrote a critical editorial protesting President Woodrow Wilson's dispatch of troops to the border in March 1916. According to interviews from the 1980s with Idar's younger brother Aquilino Idar and her neice Jovita Fuentes Lopez, when rangers arrived to close down El Progreso, Idar stood in the doorway to keep them from entering. Meanwhile, local newspapers documented a series of events that began on May 15, 1916, when the district attorney of Webb County, John A. Valls, directed Ranger Captain J. J. Sanders to arrest El Progreso editor Leo D. Walker on a criminal libel charge due to repeated inflammatory editorials. He was released on a $4,000 bond. The following month a civilian mob kidnapped Walker, who they forced to relocate across the Rio Grande. The “vigilantes” vandalized the El Progreso office and ordered the remaining staff to stop publishing. Jovita Idar was likely one of the women that newspapers referred to as staff or bystanders. Idar returned to La Crónica, which she ran after the death of her father.
Idar married Bartolo Juárez on May 20, 1917. The couple moved to San Antonio, where Jovita Juárez became an active member of the Democratic Party, established a free kindergarten, worked as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients in a county hospital, and was an editor of El Heraldo Cristiano, a publication of the Rio Grande Conference of the Methodist Church. She and her husband had no children. She died from tuberculosis at her home in San Antonio on June 13, 1946, and was buried at San Jose Burial Park. Idar’s likeness appeared on the U.S. quarter as part of the American Women Quarters program from the U.S. Mint starting in August 2023.
Bibliography:
Bisbee Daily Review (Bisbee, Arizona), June 16, 1916. Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, “Southern Promise and Necessity: Texas, Regional Identity, and the National Woman Suffrage Movement, 1868-1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 2010). Martha P. Cotera, Diosa y Hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the U.S. (Austin: Information Systems Development, 1976). La Defensa, June 19, 1916. El Democrata (Mexico City), June 18, 1916. José E. Limón, "El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911," Aztlán 5 (Spring, Fall 1974). Galveston Daily News, May 16, 1916. Houston Post, May 16, 1916, June 19, 1916. Mary Beth Rogers et al., We Can Fly: Stories of Katherine Stinson and Other Gutsy Texas Women (Austin: Texas Foundation for Women's Resources, 1983). Gabriela González, “Jovita Idar: The Ideological Origins of a Transnational Advocate of La Raza,” in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, eds. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Rebecca Sharpless, and Stephanie Cole (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). La Prensa, May 16, 1916. Laredo Times, May 21, 1916. San Antonio Light, May 16, 1916. Victoria Daily Advocate, June 17, 2025.
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Nancy Baker Jones Revised by Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, “Idar, Jovita,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/idar-jovita.
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- February 1, 1995
- October 4, 2025
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