A Tejana is on a U.S. Quarter

A fierce Tejana who until recent years was left at the margins of history is on a new U.S. quarter.

The coin depicts Tejana journalist and activist Jovita Idar, who is the inspiration for this channel at WMC online. Released today, the quarter features her image on one side with inscriptions that include “teacher,” “journalist,” “Liga Femenil Mexicanista” and “La Cruz Blanca,” which describe her, the Mexican women’s organization she helmed, and the nurses brigade she belonged to during the Mexican Revolution.

The is the ninth release of the American Women Quarters Program, a four-year effort to honor women such as Anna May Wong, Maya Angelou and Maria Tallchief.

At IDAR/E, we want to ensure that context and analysis are a part of the telling of Jovita’s story. The idea of this channel upholding the name Idar was the brainchild of advisory committee member Michelle García. Soon after our launch, García and other leading Chicana and Tejana journalists and experts María Hinojosa and Monica Martínez shared in a panel discussion their knowledge and insight about the legacy of Jovita. While we should take inspiration from her, it’s also important to examine who and what forced her to defend her voice and community.

More than a century ago, Jovita denounced the lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans by vigilantes and the army and police force known as the Texas Rangers. She wrote in her family paper La Cronica and also in El Progreso about educational and economic inequities, condemned racism and racial violence, and advocated for the rights of women.

In 1914, following the publication of an opinion in El Progreso criticizing U.S. actions along the southern border and intervention in Veracruz, Mexico, the Rangers showed up at the paper’s office in Laredo, Texas to shut it down. Citing the First Amendment, Jovita barred their entry. The Rangers returned the next day, using sledge hammers to destroy the printing press of El Progreso. They then tracked and brutally beat the man who wrote that opinion, Manuel García Virgil, as Professor Elizabeth Garner Masarick describes in Por la Raza, Para la Raza: Jovita Idar and Progressive-Era Mexicana Maternalism along the Texas–Mexico Border.

Jovita was courageous. This doesn’t mean fear was absent.

UT Austin Professor Monica Martínez points out in the panel that Jovita had already been writing about the violence of sheriffs and the Texas Rangers and the victims of their assaults. So when they showed up at El Progreso, she was aware of the danger she was in. “I’m sure she was terrified,” Hinojosa said. “But there’s something that makes you understand and push through that fear.” Jovita stood in the way of intimidation and attempts to violate her rights and the U.S. constitution.

Jovita was defending free speech, including the right to criticize U.S. intervention.

This year, 2023, marks 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine. With the introduction of this policy in 1823, the United States announced to the world that the Americas were its sphere of influence. At the core of the Monroe Doctrine was “Manifest Destiny,” the guiding belief that white Americans were destined to control the North American continent. Land Native Americans lived on and that was once part of Mexico became the target.

The Monroe Doctrine and subsequent corollaries were used to justify the annexation of Texas, U.S. intervention in Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America and beyond. A U.S. arms embargo in 1913 and naval occupation in 1914 of Veracruz took place in this context.

The Texas Rangers were a violent arm of white supremacist expansion.

As federal and local officials approved or looked away, the Rangers violently facilitated and reinforced Anglo expansion and dominance. They hunted fugitive slaves, drove Native Americans off their lands, and killed Mexicans. In 1935, the Rangers were made members of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Films to baseball teams still celebrate the Texas Rangers.

Anglo settlers trying to cement control of the southwest wanted to displace families like the Idars and control their voice.

Jovita and her family challenged a white supremacist narrative.

People on the ground in the early 20th century, and well before then, were experiencing western expansion, white supremacy and the creation of a racial and social hierarchy that exists to this day, Garcia explained.

By 1915, lynchings of Mexicans in south Texas were common and often executed by mobs that lit victims on fire or dragged them, including a 14-year-old boy, to death. This mirrored the white terror campaign that was being waged against Blacks.

The specter, and delivery, of Anglo violence was ever present. In 1916, then Texas Governor James E. Ferguson issued a “Loyalty Proclamation,” demanding absolute loyalty from ethnic Mexicans, including those who for generations lived in the land Texas encompassed, writes García in Palabra. He warned of the trouble Tejanos would bring for not reporting “rebel” movements.

English-language Anglo publications were telling a different story. “What’s going on at the border is characterized [by them] as quelling banditry and imposing law and order,” García explained.

She raised questions that every journalist should consider: Are we using the frame of banditry and law and order to report on the border? Or are we connecting what people were experiencing then to what’s unfolding today?

In a sea of white-serving narratives, that El Progreso and La Cronica chose to document brutality and issues that risked retaliatory violence shows the importance of independent and Spanish-language newspapers as truth tellers.

Jovita operated in and with community.

Jovita led and operated in spaces that advocated for women’s rights, like La Liga Femenil, which she served as president of, and championed collective action, as with La Cruz Blanca. Her fellow-revolutionary was Leonor Villegas de Magnón, otra chingona.

She came from a large family that was politically involved and her father had been a labor organizer. He would say to her and her siblings, “don’t let anyone tell you what to think. Use your own brain to work yourself out of any situation.”

That Jovita and the Idars had the respect of their community might be evidenced by how she was tipped off shortly before the Rangers appeared at El Progreso.