Secondary Source
“A bilingual and bicultural family, the Idárs participated as journalists in early twentieth-century transborder political movements focused on the procurement of rights for ethnic Mexicans. In Texas, they reported on the rise of Juan Crow segregation in schools and places of public accommodation. Sympathetic to the plight of labor, patriarch Nicasio Idár organized workers in Mexico in his youth. Years later, his eldest son, Clemente, worked for the American Federation of Labor, organizing ethnic Mexican workers in the United States. Nicasio’s daughter Jovita trained as a schoolteacher and worked briefly in this capacity. Exasperated by the segregated and substandard education afforded to ethnic Mexican schoolchildren in the early years of the twentieth century, she decided that she would be of greater service joining her father and brothers Clemente and Eduardo in the family newspaper, La Crónica. A muckraking paper, La Crónica exposed the underbelly of Texas society where ethnic Mexicans regularly experienced racism, discrimination, segregation, and increasing violence during a period known as La Matanza (the massacre) from 1910 to 1920.”
- Gabriela González, Historian, “Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow,” 2023