User:Gabyhanze/Leonor Villegas de Magnón

Leonor Villegas de Magnón (June 12, 1876 – April 17, 1955) was a Mexican-American political activist, teacher, and journalist who founded a brigade of the international Mexican American relief service, La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross), during the Mexican revolution.

As a Mexican Revolution leader, Magnon documented her experiences as well as the contributions of many other women and revolutionary leaders in her autobiography, La Rebelde (The Rebel).

Early Life
Leonor Villegas de Magnon was born in Nuevo Laredo, a town close to the U.S.-Mexico border. Magnon and her family eventually moved to the United States to escape the fighting in Mexico.

Magnon’s family was fairly wealthy because her father, Joaquin Villegas, was a businessman involved in ranching, mining, and the import-export business. It is her father who gave Magnon the nickname, La Rebelde, at the very beginning of her autobiography. After the death of her mother, Valerianna Rubio, Magnon’s father remarried and Magnon was subsequently sent to various boarding schools in the United States. By 1895, Magnón had received her bachelor's and teaching certificate at New York's Academy of Mount St. Ursula. She married Aldopho Magnón, an American citizen, in 1901. They settled in Mexico City to teach kindergarten out of their home. The couple had three children. Magnón also began to write articles criticizing then Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in La Crónica, a Spanish-language newspaper founded by the Idar family (of Jovita Idar) that exposed injustices against the community.

Career
Magnon taught kindergarten in Mexico City and Laredo, Texas. After the Mexican Revolution ended, she founded the first bilingual school for kindergarteners in Laredo. Being politically active, Magnon wrote for the newspapers, El Progreso, La Cronica, y El Radical, criticizing Porfirio Diaz and demonstrating support for Francisco Madero. Magnon wrote in these newspapers under her maiden name Villegas.

La Cruz Blanca (The White Cross)
Magnon founded, organized, and led the nursing corps known as La Cruz Blanca, or The White Cross, in 1914. This corps of men and women provided medical aid to the soldiers from Carranza’s Constitutionalist Army. The White Cross formed in the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico, in Laredo, as a response to the already established National Red Cross’ partiality toward the Federals. As leader of this organization, Magnon was a prominent figure during the Mexican Revolution, some comparing her role to that of a general. After the revolution, Magnon’s efforts were recognized, and the post-revolutionary government awarded her five different medals. Despite this, Magnon’s and the role of women during the revolution went largely ignored if not actively erased from the official history.

For Magnón, The White Cross was a symbol of integrity and patriotism for the Mexican people and envisioned it expanding and continuing even after the revolution.

During and after the revolution, Magnon actively documented her activities regarding The White Cross among other things. The most notable example is her book, La Rebelde (The Rebel), but she also saved many photographs and documents from the revolution which was eventually passed down to her granddaughter. The US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project from University of Houston recovered these artifacts in 1994 and 2007. Her book as well as photographs demonstrate that she was in close contact with leaders of the Constitutionalist Army, including Venustiano Carranza himself, further evidencing her significant role as a revolution leader.

La Rebelde (The Rebel)
Magnon wrote about her participation in the Mexican Revolution in her autobiography, La Rebelde (The Rebel). This dramatized account of Magnon’s life reveals much about her operation of La Cruz Blanca as well as networks of female spies. Clara Lomas, in her preface to The Rebel, writes about the importance of preserving a novel that self-documents the contributions of women during the Revolution, citing their noticeable absence from official history. Lomas, in her work writing about borderland literary texts, also praises the ways in which The Rebel challenges the gender and class norms of early 20th century Mexico.

The struggle to publish her work spanned several decades and involved the creation of two versions of her novel: one in Spanish and one in English. The original Spanish version, La Rebelde, was serialized in the year 1961 by The Laredo Times, but was continuously rejected to be published as a novel. Due to this failure, Villegas de Magnon wrote a second version of her autobiography all in English which was also rejected by American publishers. Up until the year of her death, Magnon made 26 attempts to publish her book. It was only in 1994, thirty-nine years after Magnon’s death, that her granddaughter, Leonor Smith, was able to publish her grandmother’s novel through Arte Público Press.

Despite the novel being autobiographical, Magnon writes in third person and refers to herself by the titular epithet, “The Rebel.” Currently, The Rebel contains a preface and introduction by Clara Lomas, nineteen chapters, and five appendices. Magnon begins the novel with her birth and ends with Venustiano Carranza’s death.

Death
Leonor Villegas de Magnon died in Mexico City on April 17, 1955 at the age of 78. In recognition of Magnon's work, a monument was erected in Nuevo Laredo in 2010, ninety years after the end of the Mexican Revolution.