Ynes Enriquetta Julietta Mexia
Who was Ynes Enriquetta Julietta Mexia?
What was Ynes Mexia’s first major botanical expedition?
What are some of Ynes Mexia’s notable achievements?
What organizations was Ynes Mexia involved with?
How did Ynes Mexia contribute to nature conservation?
Ynes Enriquetta Julietta Mexia (born May 24, 1870, Georgetown, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died July 12, 1938, Berkeley, California) or Ynes Mexia in short, was a Mexican-American botanical collector and explorer whose discoveries helped to clarify and complete botanical records.
Early life
Mexia was born to the Mexican diplomat Enrique Mexia and his wife Sarah Wilmer Mexia in Washington, D.C. She spent her early childhood in Limestone county, Texas. Her parents separated when she was very young. After attending schools in Philadelphia; Ontario, Canada; and Maryland, Mexia moved to Mexico City in the 1880s to assist her father in running his ranch. She was married twice while living in Mexico. Following the death of her first husband and the dissolution of her unhappy second marriage, she moved to San Francisco about 1908–09 to seek mental health treatment.
Career and contributions
While in San Francisco, Ynes Mexia engaged in social work and became involved with environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the California Botanical Society, and the Audubon Association of the Pacific. She became an advocate for nature conservation and was particularly active in efforts to save redwood trees, which were being heavily harvested for timber in the early 1900s. Her interest in nature inspired her to enroll in undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1921. She was 51 at the time and enrolled as a special student. A 1922 university expedition confirmed Mexia’s interest in collecting plant specimens—a vocation she pursued until her death.
Mexia’s first important botanical expedition was in 1925, when she accompanied Stanford University’s assistant herbarium curator, Roxana S. Ferris, on a plant collecting trip to Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico. Despite sustaining serious injuries in a fall, she managed to collect at least 500 specimens on this trip, including several species that were new to science at the time. She continued her botanical exploration of Mexico on her own over the next two years, collecting specimens from Nayarit and Jalisco in addition to Sinaloa.
In her 13-year career as a plant collector, Mexia went on eight botanical expeditions, visiting remote locations in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Alaska, usually solo or with a few local guides. She was the first person to collect plants from the area that is now Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. One of her noteworthy trips was a 3,000-mile (5,000-km) journey up the Amazon River, the accounts of which she published in a 1933 article titled “Three Thousand Miles up the Amazon” in the Sierra Club Bulletin.
On her travels Mexia collected some 150,000 botanical specimens, finding more than 500 new species of plants. Two new genera were described based on species from her collections: Mexianthus mexicanus, a genus of flowering plant in the aster family, and Spumula quadrifida, a rust fungus. Mexia did not describe her own collections but kept detailed field notes. She was known for her travel lectures, which featured evocative photos of the landscapes and plants that she had encountered and photographed. Accounts of her travels were published in The Gull (the newsletter of the Audubon Society of the Pacific) and Madroño (the journal of the California Botanical Society), as well as the Sierra Club Bulletin.
- Born:
- May 24, 1870, Georgetown, Washington, D.C., U.S.
- Died:
- July 12, 1938, Berkeley, California (aged 68)
Legacy and honors
As a more than 50-year-old Mexican-American woman embarking on solo botanical expeditions, Ynes Mexia defied traditional expectations of women. She once said, “I don’t think there’s any place in the world where a woman can’t venture alone.”
A lifelong supporter of nature conservation, Ynes Mexia left large sums to the Sierra Club and the Save the Redwoods League in her will. The league named a redwood grove in her honor at the Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve in Mendocino county, California. She was a member of scientific organizations such as the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, Peru, and the California Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Departamento Forestal y de Caza y Pesca de Mexico (Forestry, Hunting, and Fishing Department of Mexico). About 50 species of plants from her collections have been named in her honor. Among them is Mimosa mexiae, a flowering plant of the pea family that Mexia collected during her first major botanical expedition.
