Biography

American social worker, botanical collector, and explorer. Ynes Mexia was a Mexican national born in Washington, DC, where her father was serving as a Mexican diplomat. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced and she went to live with her American mother in Philadelphia. Later, as a young adult, she moved to Mexico City to care for her ailing father, who died in 1896. She married twice while in Mexico: her first husband, a Mexican rancher, died in 1898, the second husband she divorced.

Her interest in botany developed in San Francisco, where she moved in 1908 and practiced as a social worker. She joined the Sierra Club and at the age of 51 enrolled as a special undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1925 she participated in a botanical expedition to Mexico sponsored by Stanford University. Once in Mexico, however, she decided she could accomplish more on her own; abandoning the group, she travelled the country for two years and collected more than 1,500 specimens, which she sent to the herbarium at Berkeley. Her success in Mexico assured her reputation.

In 1928 she was hired to collect plants in Alaska. The next year she went to South America and travelled by canoe down the Amazon River, covering 4,800 kilometres in two and a half years to its source in the Andes. She made another expedition to South America from 1934 to 1936 and another to Mexico from 1936 to 1938. During this last expedition she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died within a few months. In merely 13 years, she collected 8,800 numbers, or more than 145,000 specimens. They include two new genera, Mexianthus Robinson (Asteraceae) and Spulula Mains (Pucciniaceae), and about 500 new species, 50 of which are named after her.

Sources:
P.D. Netzley, 2001, Encyclopedia of Women's Travel and Exploration.