The Women the History Books Left Out

Andrea Villarreal stood on a stage in San Antonio in 1909 alongside legendary labor organizor Mother Jones. The local newspaper called Mother Jones a person “of national fame.” Villarreal, a Mexican feminist and activist, was called a “Mexican ‘Joan of Arc.’” Today, Mother Jones remains a household name. Andrea Villarreal, who founded the newspaper La Mujer Moderna in 1914, has been almost entirely forgotten.

Maria Remedios del Valle fought in the Argentine War of Independence, earning the rank of captain. When she tried to rescue wounded troops against orders, her general forbade her. She went anyway. Her entire family was killed during the war. Afterward, denied a pension, she was forced to beg in the streets. Today, her face appears on Argentina’s 10,000 peso note, but how many history books include her name?

Felicitas Mendez, a Puerto Rican activist, challenged school segregation in California alongside her husband Gonzalo. When their children were turned away from a white school because of their Mexican surnames, the Mendez family sued. Their case, Mendez v. Westminster, ended school segregation in California in 1947, seven years before Brown v Board of Education and on whose precedent it drew. A federal courthouse now bears their names, the first in U.S history names after a Latina. Yet mainstream narratives about educational equity rarely include her.

Luisa Moreno, a Guatemalan immigrant, became one of the most influential labor organizers of the 1930s. She founded the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples, building one of the first pan-Latino political movements in the United States. The FBI monitored her for years. Federal authorities eventually sought her deportation. She left the country, her work largely unrecognized in mainstream labor history.

Carmelita Torres, a young Mexican woman, refused in 1917 to submit to forced disinfection at the U.S.-Mexico border. Public health authorities were stripping Mexican workers and dousing them with toxic chemicals. Torres’s refusal sparked the Bath Riots, a little-known rebellion against racialized border violence that echoes in every challenge to immigration policy today.

The Problem of the Achive

Why don’t we know these names?

Partly because women’s letters and diaries were not preserved with the same care as men’s papers. Partly because families held onto documents without environmental controls, and materials deteriorated. But mostly because official histories document the past from the perspective of those with privilege.

As historian Vicki Ruiz, who spent years editing an encyclopedia of Latina history, put it: “I wanted these women to reveal themselves in their own words and on their own terms.” That work of recovery requires detective work. Following footnotes. Tracking down descendants. Reading against the grain of archives created by institutions that enforced erasure.

Building Our Own Archive

Recovering Latina history requires active work. Researching the scholars who have dedicated their careers to this recovery, like Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. Preserving our own family documents. Teaching these stories to the next generation. Telling our own stories now so that future historians will not have to recover us.

This Women’s History Month, we honor not only the women in textbooks, but the ones deliberately excluded. The ones whose stories were never written down.

We honor them by learning their names and ensuring our own will not be lost.

Because the history of Latinas in this country is not a footnote. It is the story itself.