VILLEGAS DE MAGNON, LEONOR (1876-1955). Leonor Villegas de Magnon, founder of La Cruz Blanca, was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1876, the daughter of Joaquín and Helosia Villegas. She was educated in the United States and married an American citizen, Adolpho Magnon, in 1901. The couple had three children. Her father moved to the United States to escape the difficulties of the Mexican Revolution,qv and when Leonor and her children attended his funeral in Laredo in 1910, warfare prevented their return to Mexico. She remained in the city and opened a kindergarten in her home. Sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and nicknamed La Rebelde, Leonor Villegas de Magnon, with her friend Jovita Idar,qv wrote for La Crónica, a Laredo newspaper published by Nicasio Idar.qv When Nuevo Laredo was attacked in March 1913 the two friends and other Laredo women crossed the Rio Grande to nurse the wounded. To assure more organized assistance and to secure medical supplies, Leonor formed and financed La Cruz Blanca, the White Cross. After Nuevo Laredo was attacked again on January 1, 1914, she transformed her Laredo home, garage, and school into hospitals for wounded soldiers who crossed the river. More than 100 of Venustiano Carranza's men were treated in her wards during that January. When American army officials attempted to arrest and inter the Mexican soldier-patients, she refused to release them and organized the escape of several patients by having visitors secretly bring them clean street clothes. After nearly forty men were taken into custody at Fort McIntosh, she hired an attorney to seek their release. Their attempts to convince Governor Oscar B. Colquittqv to intervene in the soldiers' behalf were unsuccessful, but eventually Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan ordered the men freed. Later in 1914 Leonor Villegas de Magnon and twenty-five other nurses joined Carranza's army at Ciudad Juárez and traveled with them to Mexico City. The Mexican government awarded her five medals for her work during the revolution. She died in Mexico City on April 17, 1955. She wrote an account of her experiences that was published in Spanish in the Laredo Times in 1961.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Laredo Times, April 18, 1955, March 19, 1961. Mary Beth Rogers et al., We Can Fly: Stories of Katherine Stinson and Other Gutsy Texas Women (Austin: Texas Foundation for Women's Resources, 1983). J. B. Wilkinson, Laredo and the Rio Grande Frontier (Austin: Jenkins, 1975).
Nancy Baker Jones
