Jovita Idar

By 1916 the Idar press was a target. Jovita Idar had joined El Progreso, where she wrote against sending troops to the border, and that May the Webb County district attorney, John A. Valls, had Ranger Captain J. J. Sanders arrest its editor, Leo D. Walker, for criminal libel. A month later a civilian mob kidnapped Walker, forced him across the Rio Grande, wrecked the office and ordered the staff to stop publishing. Jovita was likely among the women newspapers called staff or bystanders. Her blocking Rangers at a doorway comes from 1980s family interviews.

What the plaque says

Jovita Idar Born in Laredo, Texas, on September 7, 1885, Jovita Idar was a journalist, educator and activist on behalf of the Mexican-origin population in South Texas. Born to Nicasio and Jovita (Vivero) Idar, Idar and members of her family participated in social, political and labor activism in both the United States and Mexico. She received her teaching credentials in 1903 from the Holding Institute, a Methodist school in Laredo, and taught Mexican children at a school in Los Ojuelos. Disenchanted by scarce resources, Idar returned to Laredo to contribute to her family's newspaper, La Cronica. Her writings reported on gender inequality, discrimination against people of Mexican origin in the United States and forms of extralegal violence such as lynchings. In 1911, Idar met with other activists in the First Mexican Congress to discuss civil rights in Texas. As a result, the League of Mexican Women was formed, with Idar as the group's first president, to offer free education to Mexican children. Idar was highly critical of U.S. Intervention during the Mexican Revolution. After she wrote a scathing article about President Woodrow Wilson, Texas Rangers came to Idar's home to destroy La Cronica's equipment. Idar stood in her door to refuse their entrance, although the rangers returned to destroy Idar's presses. She also joined La Cruz Blanca, a medical team that nursed revolutionary soldiers. After moving to San Antonio, Idar established the Democratic Club and a free kindergarten for Mexican American children. Until her death in 1946, Idar was dedicated to improving the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, women and children through her writings and activism. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Plaza — 0.5 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 0.5 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• San Agustín Cathedral — 0.5 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 0.6 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• El Primer Congreso Mexicanista — steps away
• Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church — steps away
• Jarvis Plaza — 0.2 mi
• Laredo's Washington's Birthday Celebration — 0.4 mi