Ernestine Mojica Kidder
By Haley Dawson
Ernestine Mojica Kidder vividly recalls one of her earliest memories as a young child in Taylor, Texas. Her father lifted her into his arms and pointed to a schoolhouse in the distance. “That’s where you’re going to school as soon as you’re old enough,” she remembers him saying. “When you’re 6, you’re gonna go to school.”
A child of the World War II era and a woman of the Civil Rights era, Mojica Kidder was among the first Hispanic women for whom a higher education became both a possibility and a reality.