Historic Laredo

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Above: “La Rebelde,” Leonor Villegas
de Magnon, and Aracelito García
posed for this Cruz Blanca photograph
during the Mexican Revolution.
COURTESY OF LEONOR M. SMITH
Below: Leonor Villegas de Magnon is pictured
with members of La Cruz Blanca at
Monterrey, June 28, 1914, including (standing
left to right) Jesús Pérez Fierro, Captain
Rodolfo Villaba, María Morales, Col. Eugenia
Canales, Don Faustino García, and Eduardo
Idar. Seated are María Villarreal, Villegas de
Magnon, Lilly Long, and her son Robert.
COURTESY OF LEONOR M. SMITH
months of lull in the action, Leonor
established a kindergarten in a hall
owned by her brother, the first kindergarten
in Laredo.
On New Year’s Day, 1914, the
Carrancistas again attacked Nuevo
Laredo in a terribly fierce battle
which caused great alarm on the
American side. The International
Bridge was closed. Leonor and volunteer
nurses María Villarreal, Bessie
Moore, and Lily Long, went into
action. That night, one hundred
wounded soldiers, brought across the
river in skiffs, filled the emergency
hospital. When Laredoans heard of it,
mattresses, bed linens, food, dressings,
and medicine began to pour in from
neighbors, friends, and sympathizers.
Americans and Mexicans worked side by side
taking care of the wounded.
Leonor’s kindergarten was transformed into a
makeshift hospital and her young pupils
became involved in the revolution, too. As she
described it, “Their work tables had been made
into beds, their little chairs, into bed tables.
Each child was introduced to the reality of the
Revolution at the sight of wounded soldiers who
resembled the toy soldiers they had used in
counting games.”
(Credits: Bessie Lindheim’s La Rebelde; literature of
the Webb County Heritage Foundation.)
LA DOCHA
Long before the advent of Loop 20, María
Rodriguez, eluding all modern encroachments,
lived like a holdout frontier woman on a tiny
parcel of land northeast of Del Mar subdivision.
People called her La Docha. She was archaic and
uneducated, a tender of goats, and a woman
utterly wise to the cycles of life and death,
weather, the seasons, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and
human nature.
There was a tendency in do-good circles in
Laredo to pity La Docha charitably for she was
nearly 80 and lived alone in a tiny two-room
shack that had no plumbing.
La Docha, however, felt she lived in bounty.
She said she was rich on the inside, and frequently
cited what made her so—her health, an
expanding herd, a comfortable house, friends,
cheese, and milk. She said she was blessed and
gave thanks often to a framed Virgin Mary and a
variety of plaster santitos (figurines of saints)
that decorated her home.
A small, round woman who wore a bandanna
and a broad-brimmed straw hat adorned
with plastic flowers and leaves, La Docha was
exuberant and upbeat about her circumstances.
She was grateful for the days that allowed her to
enjoy her productive life as caretaker of sanchas,
chivos, and cabritos (goats). She walked her herd
daily to adjoining tracts for grazing. In a pink
housedress, sweater, thick socks, and slippers,
La Docha ambled at daybreak alongside the
paved road, calling to the herd which followed
obediently behind her in single file. She
returned for them at day’s end and repeated the
maneuver in reverse.
She spoke convivially with her goats, calling
them “Sancha, Pingo, Payasa” and other endearments.
Clearly the animals were not simply
sources of revenue and food—they were her
dear companions, friends on the hoof. La
Docha’s goats—all 70 of them—behaved like
pets who responded to their individual names
and to her commands, chastisements, and
endearments.
“I am as old as the year,” she said in 1978.
“Which one are we in?”
Walking with a wooden staff and with her
goats in tandem like a dappled ribbon of browns,
grays, and blacks, La Docha, in a flowered
housecoat, ornate gold earrings, and striped
24 ✦ HISTORIC LAREDO