Alicia Dickerson Montemayor

Alice Dickerson Montemayor (August 6, 1902 – May 13, 1989) was an American civil rights activist from Laredo, Texas, the first woman elected to a national office not specifically designated for a woman, having served as vice president general of the interest group, the League of United Latin American Citizens. She was the first woman to serve as associate editor of the LULAC newspaper and the first to write a charter to fund a LULAC youth group. Montemayor urged the inclusion of girls and women into Latin American activism and also promoted the interests of middle-class Mexican-Americans. She is a designated honoree of Women's History Month of the National Women's History Project. She was of Irish and Hispanic heritage and was reared bilingual, a rarity in many La Raza homes at the time. In 1924, she graduated from the former Laredo High School, since Martin High School. In the editorial, Montemayor stated: "My honest opinion of those who think in that line, is that they are cowardly and unfair, ignorant and narrow minded." She ended the editorial by asking any member of LULAC to write an article favoring the suppression of ladies councils or supporting the denial of giving them equal rights. A children's reading text, Stories to Treasure/Cuentos para atesorar, documented some of her art.

In 1988, Montemayor was a focus of the 59th Annual LULAC Convention at the Smithsonian Institution. She died the next year and is interred at the Laredo Catholic Cemetery.

As a feminist

A prolific writer, Montemayor wrote more articles for LULAC than any other woman in its history. In her writing she stressed the importance of independent thinking for adults and youth. Her first essay was "We Need More Ladies Councils" where she called women to action to help reinvigorate inactive councils. She called her fellow female LULAC members "sisters", noting that at one annual convention there were seventy-one men's councils and fifteen women's councils, however, only twenty-six and four, respectively, attended. She believed that men engendered a competition between the councils based on allegations that the men were superior to women. However, Montemayor claimed women to be superior to men. She made public calls for women to join LULAC to empower themselves and help close the gender gap. She believed that women had common sense and were "able to see at a glance and penetrate into, in a second, what most men would not see with a searchlight or a telescope in an eternity." She believed women possessed a "super logic" and were more active in seeking the truth than men. She believed that LULAC would never fully flourish until women helped men. She supported women taking a lead in LULAC but also stressed the importance of women as caretakers of children.

Montemayor's involvement in LULAC was not without conflict. In 1937, conflict was noted in LULAC News, without little detail provided, about problems with the Laredo chapters. The Laredo LULAC men were described as not wanting the women's chapter to exist. Ezequiel D. Salinas, a state district court judge in Laredo and the president of LULAC from 1939 to 1940, reportedly hated Montemayor. According to Montemayor, Salinas and the local men's groups refused to vote for her at national conventions and questioned if their dislike was because of her as a person or because of her sex. Overall, Montemayor claimed that other men's groups and members were supportive of her work. She had strong business relationships with many well-traveled and college-educated men of LULAC.