Jovita González (January 18, 1904 – 1983) was a well-respected Mexican-American folklorist, educator, and writer, best known for writing Caballero: A Historical Novel (co-written with Margaret Eimer, pseudonym Eve Raleigh).
González was also involved in the commencement in the League of United Latin American Citizens and was the first female and the first Mexican-American to be the president of the Texas Folklore Society from 1930 to 1932.
After finishing high school, she enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin but she returned home after her freshman year because she did not have the funds to pay for her education.
While she was there, she met J. Frank Dobie, the man that encouraged her to rewrite Mexican folktales that would later be published in his anthology Pure Mexicano as well as the Folklore Publications and the Southwest Review.
[5] After graduating from Our Lady of the Lake with a Bachelor of Arts (1927) and teaching at Saint Mary's Hall for a couple of years, she was awarded the Lapham Scholarship to fund her education to get her master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
[8] Since the society consisted mainly of white male Texans, it was a big deal that Gonzaléz, a Mexican-American woman, was president.
[6] Her early published works include “Folklore of the Texas-Mexican Vaquero” (1927), “America Invades the Border Town” (1930), “Among My People” (1932), and “With the Coming of the Barbed Wire Came Hunger,” along with other pieces in "Puro Mexicano" with Dobie as an editor.
[6] In the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, González, in collaboration with Margaret Eimer (pseudonym Eve Raleigh), wrote the historical novel Caballero.
[12] Caballero is “a historical romance that inscribes and interprets the impact of the US power and culture on the former Mexican northern provinces as they were being politically redefined into the American Southwest in the mid-nineteenth century”.
[13] Eimer and González had originally met in Del Rio, Texas, and continued to collaboratively write the novel through mailing the manuscripts after the two relocated to different cities.
[11] González spent twelve years compiling information for Caballero from memoirs, family history, and historical sources while conducting research for her master's thesis at the University of Texas.
The "Don Jose Maria" section is about an affluent man in Río Grande valley that threatens to commit suicide whenever one of his daughters gets married.
[18] In "Don Tomas," the last section of the tale, she tells a story of how a ranchero is in search for a pastor after his daughter-in-law used witchcraft to ruin his entire family.
[19] After her retirement, she attempted to write her autobiography, yet was unsuccessful due to her diabetes and chronic depression, and eventually left the project unfinished as a thirteen-page outline.