Bryan Museum Exhibit: La Cruz Blanca
A special exhibit at Galveston’s Bryan Museum features items from the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections’ Leonor Villegas de Magnón Papers. A digital collection is available online.
Leonor Villegas de Magnón in front of a mirror, 1895. From the Leonor Villegas de Magnón Papers.
Magnón, a Mexican citizen and life-long resident of Laredo, Texas, was a trailblazer and leading force on a variety of issues related to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Among her many accomplishments, Magnón founded and financed La Cruz Blanca (The White Cross) to provide more organized medical assistance to soldiers wounded in the Mexican Revolution. More details on this work can be found in her autobiography, La Rebelde (The Lady Rebel). In the years after the Revolution, Magnón opened a bilingual school for children and contributed to female civic organizations in the US and Mexico, traveling back and forth from Laredo until her death in 1955.
“It’s fantastic that more people are getting to know about the Magnón Papers and women’s contributions to history, said Lisa Cruces, Hispanic Collections archivist. “We hope that with the increase in awareness, more scholars will visit our archives and make use of this rich material.”
The new exhibit, which opened June 18, also includes artwork by Mexican painter Diego Rivera and other artifacts pertaining to the Mexican Revolution, loaned by museums, historical societies, and private collections.