He had a long name. Her name was María de la Soledad Leona Camila Vicario Fernández de San Salvador and she was born in Mexico City when it was still called New Spain. Born on April 10, she is different from the characters in Mexican history that we usually commemorate, not only because of her feminine condition but because she remained for many years, in a remote place of the pantheon of our national heroes and it was not until 2020 when the year was officially dedicated to her. Little was known with certainty about her person and she assumed herself a lot and she spoke badly to herself.
For a long time they said that our birthday girl today had been the author of a spy network to fight the Spanish crown; a rich girl who had pawned her jewelry to buy rifles for the insurgent bandits and who had nothing of ideology because she was the most foolish and romantic of all women and had risked her life, not for the independence of the country, but to continue the footsteps of her beloved, the lawyer Andrés Quintana Roo. Discerning which gossip turned out to be true, why she is recognized as the first Mexican journalist, was the work of researchers, historians, screenwriters and writers who have presented different versions of her life and searched through all of her writings. It remains a mystery. Or maybe not anymore. What is certain is that it is always worth it, dear reader, to retell her story.
The only daughter of the second marriage of Gaspar Martín Vicario and María Camila Fernández de San Salvador, that girl with a very long name would soon shorten it. She would be called Leona -because she wanted to be free like a wild beast- and her last name would only respond to Vicario. Her father, a native of Villa de Ampudia, a corregimiento of Palencia in Castilla La Vieja, had come to New Spain “to make America” and had magnificent luck. A lot had happened since the burning of the house of the god Huitzilopochtli, trade was promising, business was advancing, the city was a promise and there was nothing left but to settle. Very soon she would marry Petra Elías Beltrán for the first time, who would give her two daughters -Brígida and María Luisa- but she would die very young. However, they say that he used to say that the best thing that happened to him in New Spain had been: meeting María Camila, marrying her and receiving Leona, their daughter, in the spring of 1789.
Rebellious and with firm convictions, Leona, thanks to the considerable fortune of her parents, grew up very well dressed, educated, with access to books, libraries, newspapers, magazines and expressing her rejection of the Spanish from an early age. To such an extent that when she was going down the street and one of them gave way to her, she would get off the sidewalk and say that she “did not want to owe any favor to the gachupines” and, as soon as she could, she cheered Miguel Hidalgo from the balcony of her house, Plus fate, irrepressible and fatal, would impose itself as usual and, after the cholera epidemic that hit Mexico City in 1807, would leave her an orphan of both parents at the age of 18. Leona would remain in the care of her uncle, the anti-insurgent lawyer Agustín Pomposo Fernández from San Salvador, but in her office she would meet the young Yucatecan Andrés Quintana Roo, a law intern, with whom she would fall in love with her. Both would share the same ideas, they would work together for the cause, they would be persecuted, accused of conspiracies and separated only by death.
Leona, who was held captive for a time, never confessed that she was dedicated to collecting news of the movements that the Spaniards planned to fight the insurgents and communicated them through coded reports published in the newspaper “El Ilustrador Americano”. She never revealed that she had taken the names of his favorite literary characters to apply to the enemy conspirators and to refer to the insurgents on the battlefield.He also did not speak of the war pseudonyms of José María Morelos, Miguel Hidalgo and Ignacio López Rayón and kept silent about the news that Quintana Roo sent her from the battlefields and she transmitted in her secret heralds.
Journalist? Perhaps because of the letter that he published in the press responding to Lucas Alamán’s criticism of his true motives and which said the following:
“Confess that not only love is the motive of women’s actions: that they are capable of all enthusiasms and that the desires for the freedom of the homeland are not strange feelings to them. In all the nations of the world the patriotism of women has been appreciated, why have my countrymen wanted to ridicule it as if it were an improper feeling in them? What is strange in the fact that a woman loves her homeland and renders it the services that she can, so that they are given the title of romantic heroism as a mockery? I am convinced that this is how all women will be, excepting the very stupid and those who, as a result of their education, have contracted a servile habit. Of both classes there are also very many men.”
