[5] She was also active in the Primer Congreso Mexicanista, an organization that brought Mexican-Americans together to discuss issues such as their lack of access to adequate education and economic resources.

In the book Marching to a Different Drummer, Robin Kadison Berson explains that "Growing up, Jovita was an imaginative, spirited girl; eager student, she won prizes for her poetry and enjoyed reciting before an audience.

[7] The reality of her first years teaching was frustrating, "There were never enough textbooks for her pupils or enough paper, pens or pencils; if all her students came to class, there were not enough chairs or desks for them.

Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which lasted a decade from 1910 through 1920, Idar turned from teaching to journalism as a means of working towards making a meaningful and effective change.

She returned to Laredo, Texas, where she began to work alongside two of her brothers, Eduardo and Clemente Idar, for her father's newspaper, La Crónica ("The Chronicle").

"[7] In 1911, La Crónica established a "fraternal order", the Orden Caballeros de Honor to "discuss the troubling social issues at the time".

"[15] The women within this league worked to transform these injustices into a plan of action and focused on relieving social problems through actively making changes within their communities.

An editorial published in El Progreso criticizing President Woodrow Wilson's order to dispatch U.S. military troops to the Mexico–United States border[2] had offended the U.S. Army and Texas Rangers.

[2][7] After her father's death in 1914, she became the editor and writer at La Crónica,[20] where she continued to expose the conditions that Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants were living under at the time.

[23][4] In 2018, Gabriela González published her book Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights, which was based on her PhD dissertation in which she provided the historical, political, and socio-economic dimensions of la raza during Jovita Idar's lifetime, including an in-depth description of the role Idar's family played over several generations.

"[18]: 225–248  She reflected an ideal of feminism that was not completely against Victorian concepts, but she did challenge ideas and break boundaries of the patriarchal society of her time.

[18]: 225–248  The New York Times included Idar in a series of obituaries called Overlooked, about people whose accomplishments in their lifetime deserved to be acknowledged in the media when they died but were not.