María de López

Maria Guadalupe Evangelina de Lopez was a California suffragist from Los Angeles school teacher. She campaigned and translated at rallies in Southern California where suffragists distributed tens of thousands of pamphlets in Spanish. On October 3, 1911, the Votes for Women Club held a large rally at the plaza which featured Maria de Lopez giving her speech in Spanish.

Education

It was hard for Mexican American women to be able to become successful teachers due to several factors. A women usually needed both financial and familial support to get the training required for a white-collar job like teaching. In society Mexican and Mexican-American women were not taken into account as part of Southern California’s economic and political future. Potential employers may have not taken Mexican and Mexican American job applicants seriously possibly could be because of ethnic discrimination. She was the President of the College Equal Suffrage League.

Teaching career

Maria de Lopez was a longtime educator. She was a teacher at Los Angeles High School, focusing on English as a second language. She was the youngest professor at USC in 1902 and worked at UCLA as a translator.

Suffrage work

Member of the Los Angeles based Votes for Women Club alongside Mrs. Cora Lewis, Mrs. Martha Salyer, Clara Shortridge Foltz, and Mary Foy which was formerly known as the Equality Club. She was a member in Women’s College club, Women’s Business Club, Executive Board of the high school teachers’ ass’n of Los Angeles. She was the president of college Equal Suffrage League of Southern California when suffrage was won in 1911.

Translation

She “Instituted a campaign among the Spaniards and the Mexicans and toured the state giving suffrage lectures in Spanish”. Maria de Lopez was the first person to make speeches in California on equal suffrage in the Spanish language also spoke in english

University career

In 1902, she became the youngest instructor at the University of California, she was a Spanish-language translator for the suffrage movement during the 1911 state-wide campaign. She eventually taught at the UCLA, making her possibly the first Latina ever to do so.

Personal Life

Ever since she was a child she lived in San Gabriel, Los Angeles. Her father was a blacksmith, Juan Nepomiceno Lopez and her mother was Guadalupe. She had a sister named Ernestina de Lopez whom was also educated. The eldest daughter in her family, Belen, lived at home and worked as a seamstress and was not able to seek further education because she had to help at home. By the 1890s, all of the older children in her family had left out of the house and two sisters of Maria de Lopez had married and left home. This made it financially easier on the parents and made it possible for Maria and Ernestina de Lopez to stay in school. In 1897 she graduated from Pasadena High School and then she graduated from the Los Angeles Normal School, a teaching college. She later became a lecturer in Spanish at University of California, Southern Branch (now known as UCLA). When father died in 1904, both sisters returned home to San Gabriel to live with their mother. They financially supported their mother by both working as Spanish teachers. Since 1903, she was a teacher of Spanish in Los Angeles High School and teacher of English for foreigners in the Los Angeles Evening High School, training for citizenship. She was married to Hugh Lowther, a professor at Occidental College. After marriage, she became Maria de Lopez Lowther or sometimes Maria de Lopez de Lowther. During WWI, Maria de Lopez temporarily gave up her teaching job and moved to New York City. There she trained as an ambulance driver and even learned to fly a plane and she served in the ambulance corps in France and was later cited for bravery by the French government. La casa vieja de Lopez or La casa de Lopez de Lowther Adobe was a home Juan Lopez, Maria de Lopez's father, moved into in 1849. Members of his family occupied the house until 1964 and when retired she lived in her ancestral adobe and today it is closed to the public. She had a Master of arts and BS. Her other names are known as Lupe, Eva, Maria, and Marie