Mexican-American women played important roles in the settlement and development of the United States. They were women who lived traditional and nontraditional lives. They were individuals whose reputations were built as pioneers or who were deeply involved in the criminal justice, labor and education achievements and battles of their times. They were forceful women with vision and commitment.
They were women like María Juana Briones y Tapia de Miranda, a San Francisco pioneer and rancher who built her reputation as a shrewd businesswoman and humanitarian during the 1800s. They included women like the pony-riding mail carrier Doña Candelaria Mestes in northern New Mexico and a faith healer like Teresa Urrea, who traveled throughout the United States and Europe and eventually built a hospital with donations from her work in Clifton, Arizona.
The early 1900s produced women like Lucía Eldine González of Johnson County, Texas, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. There was Jovita Idar, a leader of the Liga Feminil Mexicanista, which was created in 1911 to educate, instruct and support women and children in Laredo. There was María Hernández of Lytle, Texas, who in 1929 co-founded the Orden Caballeros de America, a civic and civil rights organization, and went on to become a strong advocate for Chicanos and a prolific writer on a range of social and political issues.
In San Antonio, there was Emma Tenayuca who in the late '30s led 1,000 pecan shellers on strike over pay. Isabel Malagrán González organized the first strike ever by pea workers in New Mexico. As an independent, she later ran for a Denver City Council position and was involved in the Progressive Party, whose national convention she attended as a delegate in 1948.
In the '60s, there were women like Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers; María Moreno, an organizer for the Agricultural Workers' Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO; Alicia Escalante, a leader in the field of welfare rights who organized the Chicano National Welfare Rights Organization; and journalists like Betita Martínez and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez, editors of El Grito Del Norte in Española, New Mexico, and Francisca Flores, editor of Regeneracion, founded in Los Angeles.