Lois Peña Villaseñor: Pioneer Latina Funeral Director in Texas (1933–2020)
By: Mia Gomez
Published: February 20, 2025
Updated: February 20, 2025
Lois Peña Villaseñor, born to migrant farmers Melquirez and Manuela Peña on May 12, 1933, in Cuero, Texas, founded and operated the first funeral home catering to Latino families in Austin. In 1959 she and her husband Charles Louis Villaseñor, who later served as president of the State Board of Morticians, opened Mission Funeral Home, located on East First Street (now East Cesar Chavez Street). They later acquired the Los Angeles Funeral Home in San Marcos as well. In 1961 Villaseñor became one of the first women to graduate from the Commonwealth College of Science (later the Commonwealth Institute of Funeral Service) in Houston. She was the first Latina to serve on the Texas Funeral Service Commission after Governor William Clements appointed her to the commission in 1989. Following her six-year term, Villaseñor was asked to serve as interim director of the commission in 1996. She served as president of a local council of the League of United Latin American Citizens and belonged to several other Latino and Catholic organizations, including the Catholic Daughters of America, the Cursillistas, Bishop John McCarthy’s Austin Diocese Forum (see AUSTIN, CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF), and the Mexican-American Professional Women’s Association. Villaseñor was also active in the American Red Cross, the Ladies of Charity, the Travis County Grand Jury Board, and Austin’s Urban Renewal Commission.
Villaseñor was honored as one of Austin’s Outstanding Professional Women in 1978, as the Texas Funeral Directors Association’s Funeral Director of the Year in 2000, and as the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Businesswomen of the Year in 2004. Lois and Charles Villaseñor were both members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. A year after her husband’s death in 1991, Villaseñor’s son, Charles Villaseñor II, took over the family business. Lois Villaseñor died at the age of eighty-seven in Austin on July 28, 2020, from complications related to the coronavirus (COVID-19). She was interred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. She was survived by her son and two daughters, Rebecca and Melissa.
Bibliography:
Austin American-Statesman, November 29, 1990; March 16, 1991; April 27, 1996; July 20, 2000; August 2, 12, 2020. Austin Business Journal, March 26, 2004.
Categories:
Time Periods:
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Mia Gomez, “Villaseñor, Lois Peña,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/villasenor-lois-pena.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FVI39
All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public. The TSHA makes every effort to conform to the principles of fair use and to comply with copyright law.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
- February 20, 2025
- February 20, 2025
This entry belongs to the following special projects:
