Ynes Mexia

Ynes Mexia was born in 1870 in Washington DC. She was the daughter of a Mexican diplomat and American woman named Sarah. Her parents separated when she was young and her father returned to Mexia. She remained in the US attending private schools and only moved to Mexico when her father took ill. She married a Spanish-German merchant and also took up fighting her father’s mistress for his fortune after his passing. She eventually won control over her father’s money and set up a poultry company. Her husband died in 1904. She married again and this second husband was apparently an idiot and drove her business into the ground. As a result, she had a nervous breakdown and left to seek help in San Francisco. Instead of getting well and returning she got well and stayed. And soon started taking trips with the Sierra Club.

It’s not interesting that she went on to catalog hundreds of plants. However, it is damn interesting that she became interested in botany at the age of 50 in the early part of the 1900s. She started college at Berkley at the age of 51 and went on her first expedition not long after. Soon she’d be traveling alone and would travel and collect plants from Alaska to South America. Her career was short-lived because she passed away 13 years after starting it but she made a lasting impact by documenting over 145,000 plants and also being an outlier in botany. Botany and really sciences as a whole haven’t been known for their abundance of middle-aged Mexican-American female divorcees. It seems that when some botanists said it was impossible for a woman to travel on her own in South America, she took it as a dare.

50 species are named for her, but over 500 were collected by her. She’s credited with being the first to collect plants at what’s known as Alaska’s Denali National Park.

While her name hasn’t been well known, her contribution was made larger after her death by leaving the majority of her estate to the Sierra Club and the Save the Redwoods League.