Mexía, Ynés, 1870-1938

Ynés Mexía was born May 24, 1870 in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where her father, General Enrique A. Mexía, was serving as a representative of the Mexican government under President Porfirio Díaz. Her grandfather, José Antonio Mexía, was also a Mexican general, serving under President Antonio López de Santa Anna. Her mother, Sarah R. Wilmer of Maryland, was a descendent of Samuel Eccleston, Fifth Archbishop of Baltimore. Ynés Mexía spent her early childhood in Texas on a land grant where the town of Mexía, Limestone County, is now located. She attended private schools in Philadelphia and Ontario, Canada; St. Joseph's College, Emmetsburg, Maryland; and the University of California, Berkeley. As a young woman she lived in Tacubaya, Mexico, where she married Herman E. Laue in 1898. After his death, she married Agustín Reygadas. This second marriage ended in a divorce.

Her first collecting expedition was to Mexico in 1922, as a member of a group led by E. L. Furlong, Curator of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley. The important collecting began in 1925 on her second trip to Mexico, with Mrs. Roxana S. Ferris, Dudley Herbarium, Stanford University. On subsequent collecting expeditions she went three more times to Mexico, once to Alaska, and twice to South America. She collected for the University of California and the United States Department of Agriculture. One trip to South America, lasting two and a half years, was initiated by her, and included a trip down the Amazon. Her contributions to botany included a total of 8,800 numbers. She collected approximately 145,000 specimens. Two were new genera, Mexianthus mexicanus Robinson (Compositae) and Spulula quadrifida Mains (Pucciniaceae). The collections included approximately five hundred new species, primarily spermatophytes. Fifty species were named after her. Her plants were widely distributed and are now in leading botanical museums in the United States and Western Europe.

She was a member of the Sierra Club, California Botanical Society, Audubon Association of the Pacific, California Academy of Sciences, Sociedad Geografica de Lima, Peru, and an honorary member of the Departamento Forestal de Caza y Pesca of Mexico. In 1951, part of the remainder of her estate was given to the Save-the-Redwoods League, which purchased land in Northern California, west of Prairie Creek, containing a beach and Home Creek Canyon.

In 1938, during a collecting trip in the mountains of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, she became ill. She returned to San Francisco in May, and died on July 12, 1938, at the age of 68.