Mireles, Edmundo E.

Jovita González was born near the Texas-Mexico border in Roma, Texas on January 18, 1904. Her father was a teacher and her mother a housewife. Her family moved to San Antonio so that the children could be educated in English. After high school, she earned a teaching certificate and taught in Rio Grande City while earning money for college. She attended the University of Texas at Austin for a year, but because of lack of funds she returned to San Antonio to attend Our Lady of the Lake college where she was able to obtain a scholarship. In the summers she continued to study Spanish at the University of Texas, and it was in the summer of 1925 that she met J. Frank Dobie. Dobie shared González’s interest in the folklore of the Texas-Mexican border people and encouraged her to write down their stories. She did so, and some of them were published in the Folklore Publications and the Southwest Review . Dobie was not only supportive of Ms. González’s writing, but he provided references for her scholarships, underwrote bank loans for her, and he and his wife invited her to dinners in their home. Ms. González was also very involved with the Texas Folklore Society which Dobie helped to resurrect in 1922. She gave several lectures at their annual meetings and published articles in some of their journals. With Dobie’s endorsement, Ms. González was elected to served as the Texas Folklore Society’s vice president in 1928, and as president for two terms from 1930 to 1932. After receiving her B.A. from Our Lady of the Lake in 1927, she taught for two years at Saint Mary’s Hall, an Episcopal school for girls, until she was awarded the Lapham Scholarship to do research along the border, and to work on an M.A. at the University of Texas. Her M.A. research resulted in a Rockefeller grant award in 1934. It was during this time that she may have started work on her novel Caballero which was published in 1996, after her death.

While at UT Austin, Ms. González met her future husband, Edmundo E. Mireles. Edmundo E. Mireles was born in La Ciudad de Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico on December 28, 1905. He was raised by his grandmother in Sacramento, Coahuila, Mexico and came to the United States at the age of seven to live with his father in San Antonio. He later returned to Mexico with his father to fight in the Mexican Revolution, and was wounded. Back in Texas he attended the San Antonio Junior College, and the University of Texas at Austin where he received a B.A., majoring in Greek and with a minor in Latin. He obtained his masters in Spanish in 1953 from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.

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