On June 19th, 1911, fourteen-year-old Mexican American Antonio Gómez was lynched in Thorndale, Texas. There were up to 100 witnesses, and no one was ever convicted. While lynchings were common during this time, the tragedy involving a young boy was widely reported in national and local press, including Black and Spanish-language press, like the Laredo newspaper La Crónica, where teacher and education activist Jovita Idar worked as a writer. Months later, Idar would found La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (La Liga), one of the first recorded organizations of Mexican American women formed for civic and political action.

Idar is just one in a long line of Tejana activists throughout the 20th century. Women like Emma Tenayuca and Cecilia Rodríguez, who led community-based organizations and labor movements that fought for the promise of liberty and justice for all. Yet, until recently, many women’s contributions to the Chicano Civil Rights movement have been overshadowed by male figureheads.

While their names were forgotten for decades, their activism—which recognized that race, gender, and class were interconnected systems of oppression—has stood the test of time. Their collective-action strategies, which emphasized education and leadership training for women, offer important lessons for today’s nonprofit and social movements working to combat authoritarianism, discrimination, violence, and economic inequality.

Jovita Idar: Teacher, Journalist, Activist

Under the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, the early 1900s Texas borderlands saw rapidly increasing racial tensions between existing Mexican American communities and White Anglo settlers, eager to claim land. The government responded with increased militarization, deploying greater numbers of US Border Patrol officers and Texas Rangers along the border. Mexican immigrants and US citizens were deported, lynchings of Black and Mexican American citizens were common, and schools were segregated for both groups.

Raised by an activist newspaper publisher father, young teacher Jovita Idar saw the poor conditions in schools firsthand and committed herself to raising funds to establish free schools for poor Mexican American children. By 1911, she had left teaching to work as a journalist at La Crónica, owned by her father, and later El Progreso, using the papers as a platform to raise awareness about the racial, economic, and literacy issues facing the Mexican American community and La Liga’s educational campaign efforts.

Read the full article about the legacy of Latina labor organizing in Texas by Alysse Rodriguez at Nonprofit Quarterly.