Jovita Idar

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk
about Jovita Edar, who was a journalist and a teacher
and an activist in South Texas in the early twentieth century,
and researching her life can be a little bit tricky.
There are some family papers and newspapers she worked on

(00:34):
that are held in various libraries and archives today, but
the newspaper collections are incomplete, and a lot of personal
documentation was lost in fires at family members' homes in
the decades after her death. Also, after Hovi Ta Edar died,
her husband remarried, and then after he died in nineteen

(00:55):
fifty eight, his widow burned a trunk full of Hovita's
personal papers. So sometimes what we know about her comes
from like family members recollections from later on. As is
often the case when you are talking to somebody about
something they remember from decades before, it's not always completely

(01:16):
clear which order things happened in or exactly who was involved. Regardless,
though it is very clear that she was a force
to be reckoned with I do have a couple of
language notes. One is, there is not consistency about whether
the name Dar should have an accent mark over the a,
including in some Spanish language sources today. Based on the

(01:40):
rules of how accent marks work in Spanish, there typically
would not be one there, so we have not used
one in the text descriptions of the episode. Also, we
do recognize that there are a lot of Spanish speaking
people in Texas who have a lot of different ancestries.
But Dar and her family were really folk focused on

(02:00):
Mexicans specifically, often regardless of whether they were born in
the United States or Mexico or which nation they were
a citizen of. So when they talked about Mexicans, they
were usually talking about both Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants
to the US, and also Mexicans living in Mexico. And

(02:23):
also last thing, I do want to note upfront that
there's going to be some discussion of some particularly horrifying
racial violence in this episode. Jovina Dar was born on
September seventh, eighteen eighty five, in Laredo, Texas, so as
about fifty years after Texas ceased to be part of
Mexico and forty years after Texas became a US state.

(02:45):
Her parents were Nicasio and Jovina Vivero. Darjovino was the
second of their nine surviving children, although a lot of
articles say she was the second of eight. It's possible
that this discrepancy comes from a misreading of an oral
history in given by her brother Aquiliano, who went by
Ike and his wife Guadaloupe in nineteen eighty four. He

(03:06):
lists off seven siblings and himself who were born in
the United States, but then he goes on to say
their brother, Federico, was born in Monterey, Mexico. Later in
the same oral history, he describes their family as including
seven brothers and two sisters. So this may just be
a math reckoning problem. Yeah, I think people I don't.

(03:28):
I'm just this is sort of my conjecture. I think
there may have been an account that read that first
sentence and said that was eight people, and then a
lot of other people have picked it up from there
or sort of misunderstood that when he said seven brothers
and two sisters, like he's counting everyone. I sat there

(03:49):
for a while, kind of counting the children in a
family tree, going this is nine? Why does everyone say eight?
And then I read that oral history later on this
whole family. It was very politically aware and active, so
the kind of family that regularly sat down together to
discuss all the social and political issues of the day.

(04:09):
They were also a middle class family, so they had
more money and more opportunities than a lot of other
people of Mexican descent who were living in South Texas.
This included more educational opportunities for Hovita and her siblings
than a lot of people in their community had access to.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
In this part of South Texas, when Hovita was born,
less than a quarter of the population was Anglo or white,
without Mexican or other Latin American ancestry. Even so, the
Mexican population faced ongoing bigotry and racism and racist stereotypes
at the hands of the Anglo minority. This was true

(04:48):
for the ADARs, although their class often gave them some
amount of protection. In general, the Anglo community saw families
like the ADARs as more respectable and a little bit
closer to white than and other Mexican Americans.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Within their community. The ADARs were seen as leaders. This
was during the progressive era in the United States and
a lot of the reform movements and organizations of this
period were established by people who were a little more
affluent and wanted to try to improve the lives and
circumstances of people who had less. So this was also

(05:22):
true of the ADARs, and for the Adar family, this
was also connected to a very strong sense of Mexican identity.
Nicasio was a member of a Mexican Masonic lodge as
well as a number of fraternal organizations, including one he
established along with some of Hovita's brothers called Lusosiodad Caballero's

(05:43):
to honor Or the Knights of Honor. He served as
a Justice of the Peace and as a US Marshal,
and he was a publisher. He published a Masonic review
called laure Vista, as well as a newspaper called Lacronica.
Lacronica's motto, translated into English, was we work for the
progress and industrial, moral and intellectual development of all of

(06:04):
the Mexican inhabitants of Texas. Theodars were also devout Methodists,
and Hovita went to Methodist schools. This included the Holding
Institute originally known as Laredo Seminary, where she earned a
teaching certificate in nineteen oh three. Her brother Ike described
Hovita as a very patient woman and teaching as her

(06:25):
true passion. Even before getting her teaching certificate, if she
ran into a child who couldn't read, she'd invite them
home for daily lessons in reading and writing with her.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
But then she got a job teaching in Los Ojuelos,
a very small town to the east of Laredo that
at the time had less than two hundred residents. In
earlier years, this town had been bigger and more prosperous,
but it had gone into economic decline after a newly
built railroad passed it by. Dar quickly became frustrated with

(06:56):
the realities of teaching there. Racial segregation was widespread in
much of the US at this point, and while segregated
schools for black children often get the most focused, areas
with large Mexican populations followed a similar system, including a
lack of funding and resources at the schools for Mexican children.

(07:16):
It wasn't just that the school where Adar was teaching
was inadequate. She also felt powerless to do anything about it.
She cared about what she was doing, and she cared
about her students. But she doubted that she could really
make a difference in their lives and circumstances.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
So she switched careers to one where she thought she
could make a difference, and that was journalism. She went
to work at Lacronica. The newspaper had at that point
grown into a family business, with her brothers Clemente and
Eduardo also working there. There were other Spanish language periodicals
being published in and around Laredo, but Lakronica became the

(07:56):
leading Spanish language newspaper. Jovita's brothers and father published articles
under their own names, but Hovita used a number of pseudonyms.
One was a vi Negra, which read aloud, sounded like
ave negra, meaning blackbird. Another was Astrea, for the Greek
goddess of justice. There were also articles in Lacronica that

(08:17):
ran without a byeline, and some of these were also
Hoveda's work. Hovita also wasn't the only woman who contributed
to the paper. Another was poet and teacher Sarah Estella Ramirez,
who had been born in Mexico and moved to Laredo
in eighteen ninety eight. Ramirez also published newspapers of her own,
one in Mexico City and another in Laredo. Lacronica's reporting

(08:41):
included a big focus on civil rights. The systemic bias
and racism that were prevalent in areas with a large
Mexican population has become known as je Crow as a
counterpart to Jim Crow, although that's not a term that
was actually in use at the time. Hovita and her
brother CLB. Memente both wrote a lot about school segregation

(09:03):
and discrimination within the schools. Articles in Lacronica also described
how the loss of Spanish language skills in children who
were taught only English at school was leading to the
erosion of Mexican culture. The paper called for the creation
of schools that were taught exclusively in Spanish, with teachers

(09:24):
recruited from Mexico. Jovita also wrote about the need to
teach children Mexican history, not just Anglo history. Various sources
translate her thoughts on this as quote, Mexican children in
Texas need an education, but if they are taught the
biography of Washington, but not Hidalgo, the exploits of Lincoln

(09:44):
but not Juarez, that child will be indifferent to his heritage.
The paper also criticized the treatment of women by the
Catholic Church, and Hovita in particular wrote a lot about
women's access to social and educational opportunity. She had a
column called par la mucher quelas, or for the woman

(10:05):
who reads, and she liked to say quote, educate a
woman and you educate her family. She also wrote about
the suffrage movement in Texas and the need for women
to have the right to vote. Just as a note,
women in Texas were given the right to vote in
primaries in nineteen eighteen and then in other elections when
Texas ratified the nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in nineteen nineteen,

(10:28):
but non white people still faced discriminatory laws and practices
that often prevented them from being able to exercise their
right to vote.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
In addition to her work at Lachronica, in nineteen ten,
jove te Adar applied and was approved to be a
census taker. In nineteen eleven, she also started publishing a
four page bilingual newspaper with two pages in English and
two in Spanish. This was by and for the school
children of Laredo, with students and teachers both writing and

(10:59):
editing the paper. I find that whole project Very Charming
Me Too. In nineteen eleven, Edar and her family were
also involved in a civil rights conference that was held
in Laredo, and we will get to that after a
sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
One of the subjects that the newspaper Lactronica covered in
the early twentieth century was the lynching of Mexicans and
Mexican Americans in South Texas. Exact numbers are hard to
quantify because official records didn't consistently reflect whether a person
had Mexican ancestry. Sometimes Mexican Americans were described as Mexican

(11:45):
and sometimes as white, and often that was based more
on what suited Anglo authorities than how a person framed
their own identity. We have talked about this before in
our episode on Hernandez versus Texas, which we ran as
a Saturday Classic in October of twenty twenty one. Hernandez
versus Texas was a nineteen fifty four Supreme Court case

(12:08):
in which the court unanimously ruled that Pedro Hernandez, who
was known as Pete, had been denied a jury of
his peers in his murder trial. That trial was held
before an all white jury with nobody of Mexican ancestry,
and while Mexican Americans were officially defined as white, they
were being treated as a class apart. Even with that caveat,

(12:31):
though factoring in their relative population sizes, Mexicans seemed to
effaced the threat of lynching at a similar rate to
Black Americans in other parts of the US. In another similarity,
the rate of lynching often rose and fell alongside other social, political,
and economic issues. For example, we've discussed the Red Summer

(12:52):
of nineteen nineteen, in which white mobs responded to black
soldiers returning from World War One and the Great Migration
of Black Americans out of the South with a wave
of violence that included riots, massacres, and lynchings. Similarly, lynchings
of Mexicans increased during the Mexican Revolution as it stoked
Anglo community's fears around what was happening along the border.

(13:16):
White authorities often showed a lack of concern over these
extra judicial murders for both Mexican and black victims. Sometimes
authorities actively covered these killings up or were directly involved.
Two particular lynchings had a profound impact on the Adar
family and their community during this period. Antonio Rodriguez, aged twenty,

(13:40):
was accused of killing a white woman in Rock Springs, Texas,
northwest of San Antonio, in nineteen ten. On November three
of that year, an Anglo mob broke into the jail
where he was being held, abducted him, tied him to
a mesquite tree, and burned him to death. San Antonio
newspapers described the town as basically returning to business as

(14:03):
usual after Rodriguez was murdered, and no one was arrested
or tried for that crime. Since Rodriguez didn't face trial,
there was also no further investigation into the original murder.
This was just days before the start of the Mexican Revolution,
as tensions were rising in Mexico. We'll have more detail

(14:23):
on that later. Rodriguez was a Mexican national, and the
lack of response from American authorities led to outrage across Mexico,
which fed into the ongoing issues there. There were riots
in Mexico City and proposed boycotts of American imports. This
became further complicated when rumors surfaced that Rodriguez had been

(14:43):
born in the state of New Mexico, not in Mexico.
Throughout all of this, a lot of American authorities framed
the Mexican response to this injustice as barbaric. Then, on
June nineteenth, nineteen eleven, fourteen year old Antonio Gomez was
arrested for murder in Thorndale, Texas, which is outside of Austin.

(15:05):
Antonio had been whittling a shingle while walking down the
street and bits of wood were dropping onto the ground.
The owner of a saloon scolded him for littering, and
a man named Charles Zischung grabbed the shingle out of
Antonio's hand and swore at him. This led to a
physical fight in which Antonio stabbed Xishung in the chest.

(15:28):
This was a small knife and Xishung didn't immediately realize
that he had been stabbed, but Antonio had hit a
major of blood vessel and Xishang bled to death.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Constable Robert L. McCoy seemed to recognize that Antonio was
in danger of being lynched and planned to take him
to another town until he could face trial. But less
than three hours after Zishuk's murder, a mob intercepted them,
dragged Antonio's through tone by a chain around his neck,
beat him, and hanged him although a court of inquiry

(16:01):
was condemed, only four men were indicted, although it's certainly
likely that more were involved. Charges against one of them
were dropped and the other three men were acquitted. Their
reporting on this is all over the place, depending on
which newspaper you're looking at, so like there are Spanish
language newspapers that described this mob as one hundred people,

(16:22):
and then there are English language newspapers that say much
smaller numbers. It was almost certainly a lot more than four.
Though these were not the only lynchings that were carried
out in South Texas during these years, but these two
were a big motivating force for Mexican communities and organizers.
In response, people in San Antonio created a federation of

(16:45):
mutual aid societies called Agripascio and Protectora Mexicana to offer
basic social services to the community and to try to
protect people from lynching and other violence. And through the
pages of Lacronica, our family called on Mexican leaders to
attend a conference to discuss and organize around these issues.

(17:07):
This conference, called El premier Congresso Mexicanista, or the First
Mexicanist Congress, was held in Laredo from September fourteenth to
twenty second, nineteen eleven. It was described as poor larasa
i para larazza, or for the people and by the people.
The term LaRaza is still used sometimes today, but with

(17:27):
somewhat different connotations depending on where a person is from,
but the term Mexicanist isn't really used in this way anymore.
At the time, though, both terms were used to describe
Mexicans and people with Mexican ancestry as one group with
a similar racial or ethnic identity, often regardless of whether
they were born in or living in Mexico or the

(17:50):
United States. So this conference was underpinned by a sense
of Mexican identity, and it was something of a precursor
to the Chicano movement that would evolve decade later.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah sometimes people also translate larraza as the race, which
has like a similar connotation to the people, but like
slightly different. This conference was one of the first known
gatherings in the United States that was held specifically to
focus on civil rights for these communities. Attendees included members

(18:24):
of various fraternal organizations, including Freemasons, and members of churches
and community service organizations. This included people from both South
Texas and Northern Mexico. Topics under discussion included the need
for Spanish to be taught and spoken in schools, equal
rights for women, and land rights and protections. There was

(18:46):
an ongoing pattern of Mexican and Mexican American landowners losing
their land to Anglos through both legal and illegal or
deceptive means. As a note, a lot of Mexicans have
indoous ancestry, but of course this was also following and
connected to other indigenous communities similarly losing their land to Europeans.

(19:10):
Another big focus at this conference was on labor rights
and worker organization, as Mexican workers often faced low pay,
poor working conditions, and other exploitation, and.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
There were also discussions of how to obtain equal civil
and legal rights from Mexicans and Mexican Americans. This was
something that was already supposed to exist under the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo of eighteen forty eight, which had ended
the Mexican American War and led to former Mexican territory
becoming part of the United States, including Mexico relinquishing all

(19:44):
claims on Texas. Yeah under that treaty, Mexicans who remained
in the US and became US citizens were supposed to
have all the same access to the rights and privileges
of citizenship as white people were. Hovita Edar was elected
pre president of the Women's Division of the First Mexicanist Congress,

(20:04):
and a new organization, La Liga Feminil Mechganista, was announced
on October fifteenth, with Hovita Dar also selected as its president.
La Liga Feumanil Mehganista was both a political and a
charitable organization. They established free schools for Mexican children, as
well as doing other community work. Although the creation of

(20:26):
this organization was announced on October fifteenth, Hovita's brother Ike
said that it had been her idea from before the
First Mexicanist Congress took place. Another organization created through the
Congress was La grand Liga Mexicanista de Beneficia e Portession,
which was open to everyone, regardless of their citizenship or gender.

(20:49):
While these organizations don't seem to have lasted beyond the
nineteen teens, they are seen as precursors to the League
of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC. LULAC was founded
in nineteen twenty nine and still exists today and is
recognized as the first organization dedicated to civil rights for
Hispanic and Latin Americans in the United States. Hovi To's brother,

(21:13):
Eduardo was one of the founders of lou LAC.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, it's come up in some of our other episodes
that have been related to civil rights for Mexican Americans.
Some of the most dramatic events in Hovey to Edar's
life happened a couple of years after this conference, and
we will get to that after another sponsor break. The

(21:41):
final act of this episode today is going to involve
a lot about the Mexican Revolution. So here's an overview
of the Mexican Revolution that's just as concise as I
could manage. Porfirio Diaz was president of Mexico from eighteen
seventy seven to eighteen eighty and then again from eighteen
eighty four to nineteen eleven, and in the interim the

(22:03):
president was somebody that Diaz had personally selected to run.
Diaz essentially governed Mexico as a dictator, consolidating his power
and undermining the autonomy of local and regional governments. Overall,
his policies were seen as benefiting industrialists and wealthy landowners,
not the common people who made up the vast majority

(22:25):
of the population. That is a very sketchy overview. Over time,
Mexico also started to face a number of economic issues,
including declining wages and ongoing labor disputes, and there were
increasing calls for Diaz to be replaced. Diaz announced his
retirement in nineteen oh eight, but didn't actually retire and

(22:47):
instead ran for reelection against Francisco Madero, but this was
not a fair election. Diaz had Madero imprisoned and declared
himself the winner. This led to a revolt and Diaz
was forced to leave office in nineteen eleven. But once
Madero was in office, Diaz's nephew and others conspired against him,

(23:07):
launching a coup de ta and replacing him with Victoriano Huerta.
In February of nineteen thirteen, Madero and his vice president
were both arrested and shot. This period became known as
the Ten Tragic Days, and initially the war that followed
was between the constitutionalists who opposed Huerta and wanted to

(23:27):
restore Mexico's constitutional government, and the Mexican Federal Army. During
the Mexican Revolution, there was often fighting directly across the
border from the United States. That's something we just talked
more about in July and our Saturday Classic on the
Battle of Ambos Noogalles. This was also the case in Laredo,

(23:48):
which is right across the Rio Grande from the Mexican
city of Nuevo Laredo. General Jesus Carranza of the Constitutional
Army attacked the garrison at Nuevo Laredo on March seventeenth,
nineteen thirteen. Leonor vie Gas de Magnol was a friend
of Jovita Ador, who had been born to a wealthy

(24:09):
family in Nuevo Laredo in eighteen seventy six. She had
been educated in the US and had married an American citizen,
and they had been living in the US at some
points and in Mexico at others. The border between the
two nations was almost entirely open, and it wasn't unusual
for people to travel or move between them. She was

(24:30):
in Laredo during this attack, and after she heard about it,
she wasn't able to reach her family or friends back
in Nuevo Laredo. So, as she described in her memoir,
which is titled la Rebelde, or the Rebel. She flagged
down a car driven by a chauffeur. She had him
take her to a pharmacy, where the pharmacist gave her
a basket of first aid supplies. I got the impression

(24:52):
that this pharmacist was somebody that she knew. She drew
a red cross on a piece of paper to put
in the car's window, and she recr did some of
her friends, including jove To Dar and her sister Elvira,
and they all went with her. And then they all
in this car headed toward the border. When they got
to the bridge that crossed the Rio Grande, the driver
refused to go on, understandably fearful of driving into an

(25:16):
active war zone. Leonor, in the back seat, took a
bottle of whiskey from the basket of first aid supplies,
held the neck of it to the back of the
driver's neck, and told him to drive. He, not knowing
that this was just a whiskey bottle and not a.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
Gun, drove on. Leonor held a white cloth out the
window as they approached the other side of the bridge,
and the women were allowed to enter Mexico.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
This was the beginning of Lacruz Blanca, or the White Cross.
This was a different organization from the similarly named Lacruz
Blanca Utral, which was established by Elena Aresmindi Mehia in
nineteen eleven because the Mexican Red Cross was refusing to
treat the insurgents. Members of Leannor's organization La Cruz Blanca

(26:02):
included the Adar sisters and their brother Clemente, who worked
as a journalist. He basically documented the work that the
organization was doing. They provided aid in Mexico and also
smuggled revolutionaries into Texas to be cared for at an
improvised hospital that Leonor established in her home. At one point,

(26:23):
national guardsmen tried to shut this hospital down, and at
another Army officials came to try to arrest Mexican soldiers
who were being treated there. Leonor refused to let them
in and then arranged for visitors to bring these men
clean civilian clothes so that they could sneak out later
without attracting suspicion.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
The next moment in Nidar's life that has gotten a
lot of attention is one that's a little unclear in
terms of some of the details and the Timeline. Hovita's father, Nicasio,
died of some kind of intestinal disorder in nineteen fourteen.
His newspaper Lacronica, shut down, and Jovita went to work
at a newspaper called El Progresso. By that point, the

(27:05):
Mexican Revolution had also gone through a shift. Victoriano Huerta
had been forced to step down and he had gone
into exile, but the fighting had continued and now was
going on among multiple factions.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
President Woodrow Wilson dispatched US troops to the border in
nineteen fourteen. In one version of this story, Jovita Dar
wrote an editorial that was strongly critical of this. In
another version, the editorial had been written by Manuel Garcia Vihiel,
who was a Mexican national who wrote for the newspaper.
Either way, it's possible there were two different editorials. It

(27:42):
offended members of the Texas Rangers and the US military.
Rangers then came to the offices of El Progresso to
demand that the newspaper be shut down. Jovita Adar physically
blocked them from entering, telling them that what they were
doing was unlawful and was a violation of the First
Amendment to the US Constitution. In one account, she said, quote,

(28:03):
when a woman stands at the door, you cannot enter.
The Texas Rangers left, but they returned the next day
when she was not there, and destroyed the newspaper's press.
There was another incident at the paper, possibly connected to
this story, but possibly not.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
In nineteen sixteen. The paper's managing editor, Leo D. Walker,
had also written and published material that was critical of
the US and its military policy and of Venustiano Caranza.
Carranza had been a leader in the Constitutionalist Army before
it had splintered into factions, and he was on the
paths of becoming Mexico's first president under a new constitution.

(28:42):
The Texas Rangers had arrested Walker on a libel charge,
and after he was released on bond, a mob of
men kidnapped him and forced him to cross the Rio
Grande into Mexico at gunpoint. Then they went to the
newspaper offices to shut it down. In some versions of
the story, this is when Jovita faced down the Texas Rangers,

(29:03):
but reporting in English language newspapers which did not name
anyone specifically, said two women had been working at the
newspaper offices and that those women left when they were
asked to.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
There are various reasons for the vagueness that's around this story.
One is that there aren't any surviving copies of some
of the Spanish language newspapers that might have contained more
detail from the perspective of Laredo's Mexican American community. There
are some, but really not a lot. Coverage in English

(29:36):
language newspapers, on the other hand, is very spotty, and
this coverage generally frames the Texas Rangers as the heroes
of this whole story and the journalists's unruly miscreants or
even traders. Another issue is that a major source on
this is the oral history testimony given by Ike dar
in nineteen eighty four. At that point, he was eighty

(29:58):
and he was recounting events that had happened when he
was ten.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Or twelve years old. At various points in the interview,
including in relating this story, he jumps around in the timeline,
or he switches topics or asks for clarification about things
like the names of people that he knew long ago.
At the same time, the questions being asked in the
interview make it clear that Hoveta's facing down the Texas

(30:22):
Rangers was already well known in the family and the community,
and not something that had first come to light in
this interview.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yes, this oral history does kind of wander, not in
a way that seems alarming to me, just in the
way that seems very natural when somebody is trying to
talk about things that happened decades ago, often when they
were a child. So while there are some question marks
around the exact details of this, the idea of Hovita

(30:53):
Adar having a standoff with the Texas Rangers is, in
my opinion, absolutely believable. We've already talked about her crossing
the border into an active war zone in the company
of somebody who was pretending to hold a gun on
the driver. Aside from that, though, the Texas Rangers had
a long established and well documented history of violence and
harassment against non white people and their communities. This included

(31:17):
killing at least five thousand Hispanics between nineteen fourteen and
nineteen nineteen. One of these incidents was the Porvenir massacre
on January twenty eighth, nineteen eighteen, when Texas Rangers shot
and killed fifteen people at a ranch that belonged to
Manuel Morales. These killings and other reports of abuses led
to the joint Committee of the Senate and the House

(31:39):
in the investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force, also
called the Canales Investigation, in nineteen nineteen. This was named
for J. T. Canaliz, the only Mexican Americans serving in
the Texas legislature at the time who had been critical
of the Texas Rangers conduct and had introduced legislation related
to it. The committee that investigated these allegations of misconduct

(32:02):
found evidence of quote gross violations of civil and criminal statutes,
but did not implicate specific rangers or recommend that the
force be disbanded. This stand off against members of the
Texas Rangers is one of the things that Hovita Edar
is probably the most known for today. It's mentioned in

(32:23):
most biographical sketches of her, and it's what is depicted
in the twenty twenty Google doodle honoring her. But of
course her life continued after these events. In nineteen sixteen,
she founded her own newspaper, of Lucien. A year later,
she married plumber and tensmith Bartolo Warez. Their wedding was

(32:43):
described as a quiet one, with only immediate family members there.
They didn't have children together, but Hovita was a big
part of raising her sister Elvira's children after Elvira's death
in nineteen twenty five.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
By that point, the Mexican Revolution had ended. A new
constitution was passed in nineteen seventeen, although there was one
more coup in nineteen twenty. Jovita and Bartolo had also
moved to San Antonio. In San Antonio, Adar founded a
democratic club and established a free kindergarten. She also served
as conference officer for the Women's Society of Christian Service

(33:20):
at La Trinidad Methodist Church, and she worked on a
Methodist publication called El Haraldo Cristiano.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
In the nineteen twenties, the US border with Mexico became
progressively less open. As we've talked about, people had basically
been able to cross back and forth without really worrying
about it for a long time. The US Border Patrol
was established in nineteen twenty four, and while Mexicans were
initially exempt from the quotas that were becoming part of

(33:51):
immigration law for immigrants from other countries, they were charged
a head tax and visa fees. In nineteen twenty nine,
the US all So started requiring visas for Mexicans to
enter the United States, which had not been the case before.
During these years, Edar worked with Mexican immigrants to help
them obtain the necessary documentation, including naturalization papers for people

(34:15):
who wanted to become US citizens.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Jovita Adar eventually developed diabetes, and she contracted tuberculosis, possibly
through her work as a medical interpreter for hospital patients.
She died in San Antonio, Texas, on June fifteenth, nineteen
forty six, at the age of sixty. In addition to
being honored with a Google Doodle and covered in the

(34:38):
New York Times Overlooked series, Laredo's Jovita Edar's El Progresso
Park was renamed for her in twenty twenty. She was
also included in the American Women Quarters series in twenty
twenty three. Other Quarters in this series have included the
subjects of several prior episodes of our show, including Nina Otero,

(34:58):
Warren Besie Coleman, Maria Talchief, and doctor Mary Edwards Walker.
Quarters that are forthcoming in twenty twenty five include other
people we've talked about, including I B. Wells and Juliette
Gordon Lowe.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
The Jovita Adar quarter features a depiction of her with
her blouse made of words. Some of them are the
language that's usually on a US quarter, like United States
of America and e pluribus unham, but there are also
words making up her blouse that include things like astrea, nurse,
la cruz blanca, la liga, fumani, mehig nisida, and Mexican

(35:33):
American rights. That is hopey to dar. I think I
actually stumbled across her name for the first time looking
at that list of women quarters, because it came up
and for some reason, relatively recently. Do you have a
listener mail? I do have listener mail. We've gotten a
number of great emails from people about Mammoth Cave and

(35:54):
the Kentucky Cave Wars, so we're going to read one
of those today that is from Kim. Kim wrote, Hello
and Tracy, I just finished your episode on the Kentucky
Cave Wards and was so excited to share some of
my personal experiences of Mammoth Cave with you. I grew
up in Barren County, Kentucky, which is right next door
to Mammoth Cave. Because of that, it was a yearly
occurrence to take a school field trip to the cave.

(36:17):
I'm pretty sure we went every year from first grade
up through senior year. We also took countless trips there
as a family, both to visit the cave and to
hike in the surrounding park, which is beautiful. Every time
we had family or friends visit, we would go to
the park, tour the cave, and picnic in one of
the picnic areas. To this day, I know most of
the older cave tours by heart, especially the historic and

(36:39):
Frisen Niagara tours, and I can recite all the fun
facts told by the guides right along with them, and
pretty much every tour there's a time where they turn
off the lights and you can experience the pure, total
darkness That really is something completely strange. You can sit
there for hours and never see anything because of the
total lack of light. It is both beautiful and terrifying.

(37:00):
It is true that there are still many signs on
your way to the park that try to mislead, slash
waylay unknowing tourists into taking the quote shortest route to
Mammoth Cave, which is not at all the shortest route,
so that you drive by their cave slash rock shop
slash gift shop. Locals know to avoid these routs, but
love to laugh at the unwitting out of town folks

(37:21):
who do not. And all of the non Mammoth show
caves will claim to be the most beautiful, most wonderful,
or world's best. Many of them are nice to visit
as well, but nothing beats the original Mammoth Cave in
terms of diversity of formations and history. The TB Hospital
was always a favorite area of the cave, as it
is the location where they still I think called shirt

(37:42):
services a few times a year, with a naturally elevated
place for the pulpit and great acoustics. As a child,
my neighbor and elementary school principal was one of the
most senior cave guides.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
In the park.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
He worked on summers and school breaks and it was
always fun to see your principal lead your cave tour.
He was one of only two people to know the
final resting place of one of the indigenous mummies that
was found in the early days of the cave, displayed
in the visitor center for years, and then finally returned
to the cave once society realized that was not an
okay thing to do. Supposedly, he and another guide took

(38:17):
the mummy back into the cave and placed it in
a hidden location where it would not be disturbed and
only those who knew where it was. He passed away
about a decade ago, and I never knew who the
other person was, so I have no idea if anyone
knows the location of the mummy today, although I imagine
the National Park would have some sort of records. He
once took me and my college friends on a tour
as his special guests when they came to visit, even

(38:37):
though all the tickets were sold out. I still remember
him patting his breast pocket and telling the ticket taker
at the cave entrance, I've got the tickets for these
ladies right here in my pocket as we went into
the cave. This, of course, gave me some great street
cred with my college friends. You can still take a
hike up to the entrance of Sand Cave and see
some memorial plaques and signs that tell the story of

(38:57):
Floyd Collins. It was one of my favorite heikes to
do as a kid because the sandy mouth of the
cave was a great place to have a picnic. I
was also really interested in the story of Floyd and
the terror of getting stuck in the cave. It was
and still is hard to reconcile the idea of this
beautiful location being the site of such an awful thing. Anyway,
I have so many stories of Mammoth Cave, both the

(39:18):
cave and the park, but I'll just leave you with
some pictures of my furry babies. First, my sweet boy
Malcolm the flame Point. We lost him about a year
ago to lymphoma, but he was and is my heart kitty,
but never fear. Last November, we adopted two new fur babies.
The beautiful Torty and her total torty Tude is Jupiter,
who had fallen in love with my husband and loves

(39:39):
to play fetch with her mylar balls, the gray and
white kitten. And Calypso, who is a total toddler in
kitten form and is into everything and makes me wonder
why we keep on bringing these tiny furry terrors into
our house, Spoiler, because they are cute and sweet too.
Thank you for the excellent podcast. You keep me company
at work and on my commute and are one of
the few podcasts I can listen to with my kids

(40:00):
in the car. I always learn something new and come
away with new things to think about. Kim, thank you
so much for this email. Like I said, we've gotten
a bunch of emails about Mammoth Cave and other caves
in the area and they've all been great. We'll probably
read some others of them. Man, what incredibly cute kitty cat.

(40:25):
This little tory definitely has the face of like, I
am inquisitive and smart and you better be careful what
you try to keep me from doing, because I'll figure
it out. And then we have a little kitty with
a little gray and white face with a white stripe
down to a pink nose and then kind of making
like a little a little white mustache, lying with feed up,

(40:52):
like on the back with feed up like uh, I
don't know, I don't even know what it is. Super
cute tummy time. Yeah. Also a cute white kitty only
halfway in the box. The box does not quite fits
trying to sit anyway, So thank you so much for this.

(41:13):
I am kind of curious about the story of the Mummy.
We did talk in the episode about how the National
Park Service has tried to work with indigenous communities to
like lay people to rest in a respectful place that
is not accessible. So it's not clear whether this was
part of that effort or not, but it is still

(41:34):
an interesting story to know that that was, you know,
something that was kept that secret to keep people from
stumbling in quotation marks back across it. So thank you
for this email. If you would like to send us
a note, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com

(41:55):
and we're on social media ad Mission History, which is
where you can find us on places like the thing
that used to be called Twitter. You can subscribe to
our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History

(42:15):
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

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