This collection contains 146 photographs and postcards related to Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s personal life, political activism with the international relief service La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross), and the Mexican Revolution. Photographs highlight Magnón’s pioneering work along the Mexico-Texas border as well as her relationships with fellow activists, participants of the Revolution, and friends and family.

Items in the collection include portraits, landscapes, and miscellaneous illustrations dating from 1894 to 1918. Notable individuals in the collection include Venustiano Carranza, Jovita Idar, Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, and Pancho Villa.

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 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 U.S. and Mexico, traveling back and forth from Laredo until her death in 1955.

The original materials are available in UH Libraries' Special Collections in the Leonor Villegas de Magnón Papers.