Strong Women: Soledad Chávez Chacón

Today, I'd like you to meet one of the most significant people in New Mexico political history that almost no one's ever heard of:  Soledad Chávez Chacón.

Why one of the most important?

Because she was the first Hispanic woman in New Mexico to be elected to statewide office, the first woman in the state to serve as Acting Governor, and the first woman in the entire country to be elected as her state's Secretary of State. In 1922.

Born Soledad Chávez in Albuquerque in 1890, into an old Norteño familia that could trace its roots in the U.S. to the Oñate invasion of 1598, she was the daughter of Melitón Chávez and Francisca Baca. She attended public school in Albuquerque, graduating with honors in 1908, and earned an accounting degree from Albuquerque Business College. In 1910, she married a local store manager named Ireneo Eduardo Chacón. By the time New Mexico became a state in 1912, the couple had a daughter and a son.

Some eight and a half years later, the U.S. ratified the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. The following year, in 1921, New Mexico voters approved a state constitutional amendment enabling women to hold elective state office. Now that the "women's vote" had the potential to sway elections, both major political parties sought to influence their voting decisions and gain their support, and New Mexico was no exception. In 1922, five male Democratic Party officials visited Sra. Chávez Chacón — while, the story goes, she was supposedly doing that most domestically feminine of activities, baking a cake — and asked her to run For Secretary of State.

The accounting of her decision to run is both emblematic of its time and place and thoroughly infuriating through a contemporary lens, since it notes that, despite being 32, she sought permission to run for the office from not merely one man, but two: her husband; and her father. Nonetheless, both clearly granted it, and she was the one who assumed the burdens of her decision, which, at the time, must have been considerable.

She ran as a Democrat, and joined her fellow state candidates in sweeping statewide offices in 1922. Two years later, she blazed yet another new trail for women, Hispanic and otherwise, in New Mexico and across the country: She served as Acting Governor for two weeks. 

The state constitution provided that whenever the Governor physically left the state, for any period of time, the Lieutenant Governor became Acting Governor. In June, 1924, then-Governor James Hinkle took a two-week trip to attend to Democratic Party business. Lieutenant Governor José Baca had just died, and no successor had yet filled the office. The Secretary of State was next in the official line of succession, making Soledad Chávez Chacón the Acting Governor of New Mexico for two weeks in the summer of 1924.

She continued to maintain a public life, and a political one: In 1933, she traveled to Washington, D.C., as a member of the Electoral College that elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his first term as President of the United States. The following year, she ran for the New Mexico House of Representatives, won, and was appointed Chair of the Rules and Order Business Committee.

In 1935, the state lost a trailblazer and role model far too soon when Soledad Chávez Chacón died of peritonitis after undergoing surgery, at age 45. Nonetheless, her legacy lives on in the diverse political culture of a state whose public affairs have always been marked by the equally public presence of strong women.