University of the Incarnate Word alumni

Josefina Niggli (1910–1983; birth name was Josephine) was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Critic Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez has written that Niggli should be considered on a par with such widely praised Spanish-language contemporaries as Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello. She is thought to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her, the Niggli Studio Theater at Western Carolina University.

Blanca Margarita Magrassi Scagno (November 29, 1923 – October 9, 2015) was a Mexican women's rights activist, civil and pro-democracy activist, politician and leading figure within the National Action Party (PAN). Magrassi Scagno, the wife and political partner of Luis H. Álvarez, the former President of the National Action Party, served as a member of PAN's national executive committee from 1988 to 1990. She was considered a moral authority within PAN and Mexican politics.