A&M-Central Texas Welcomes Maj. Azucena Avalos Towne as First Female Leader of the U.S. Army ROTC Program

Long before she was a major in the U.S. Army, well before she could conceive the direction her life would take her, Azucena Avalos Towne, 36, was proving her mettle without even knowing it.

The youngest of five children, she grew up in San Bernardino County, California, on a farm south of State Route 18 and northeast of State Route 138. Situated anonymously in a windswept, tiny, unincorporated town nestled just north of the Mojave Desert and west of the San Gabriel Mountains, her parents, Ruben and Maria Dolores Avalos, coaxed a home, a farm, and a family out of the loamy soil where nothing else would ever grow. All five children were taught to prioritize each family, hard work, and education.

Towne shrugs a little bit when she repeats her given name for the record, tilting her head while simultaneously spelling and saying it aloud – graciously and patiently, even though it might be the zillionth time she has had to account for being named something not familiar to mainstream ears.

Still, she smiles, her name is a gift inspired by the two people who shaped her entire life, and their abiding love for each other and where they came from.

“My parents grew up in different towns, and my father walked long distances to see her,” she began. “During those walks, he saw Easter lilies growing wild alongside the road, and he would pick them for my mother when they were courting. In their language, the flower is named ‘azucena.’ So it will always be special. Both to them and to me.”

For 17 years, she witnessed to her parent’s acts of love and sacrifice, although whether or not she recognized them as such at the time, she isn’t entirely sure. Her father’s ingenious ‘make it

“My dad’s grader was an old cow guard he probably found in a junkyard or alongside a road somewhere,” she said, laughing. “He attached it to the back of his 20-year-old Nissan Datsun truck just as proud of it as if it were new and got his work done.”

Her enduring love and respect for her parents never waned over the years. The grit her parents had to have in order to hustle a farm out of actual nothingness, she thinks, is their legacy. Although calling it a farm, she concedes, might be overly generous.

There was land, but no crops. Its relatively small size limited its economic relevance. But, she adds, it provided bare bones economic stability for a family of seven where there was always food and shelter, and no small amount of work to do. Even for the children.

While she was very young, their house was simple. Oil lamps for light in the evening and constant laundry washed by hand outside in repurposed concrete washboard sinks. A single propane tank powered a stove, a water heater, and a refrigerator. No running water until later.

There, in the high desert, where the days are long and hot and the nights are cool and clear, the night sky above the farm was illuminated with a kaleidoscope of stars unobscured by the glare of city lights.

“I spent a lot of nights sleeping outside under those stars,” Towne said. “All of us kids did. We’d drag our camitas outside where it was cooler and fall asleep to the sight of them. For us, it was like paradise.”

In this paradise, however, work was still work. Laundered clothes hung on a line outside. Cows and goats were milked, and her mother made homemade queso fresco relying on an abbreviated assembly line of her children’s little hands.

Using fresh milk from cows and goats, toallas as thin as onion skin, and an empty menudo can sliced horizontally and repurposed to make enough circular molds to pour and form their own cheese, their labor was purposeful. And yummy.

Towne’s sense of duty began at a young age. In elementary school, before she even went to school, she had chores. Feeding the animals, washing up, and grabbing a taquito, and a two-mile walk to the bus stop. Then the whole thing in reverse at the end of the day.

Even still, she worked hard in school. In elementary school, she did her homework before going home because classroom fluorescent light instead of the oil lamps at home was not a thing to be taken for granted.

The work ethic she developed – along with the discipline, faith, and an appreciation for the small things – are still with her, as much a part of her DNA as her Mediterranean Sea green eyes or the thick wafts of spiral curls that frame her face and fall over her shoulders and down her back whenever she is out of uniform.

But how she came to wear that uniform is a separate journey. Before she graduated from high school, she decided to follow in her sister, Catalina’s, footsteps and join the Army – against the strong objection of her mother.

When she informed her mother of her plan, the result, she added, may or may not have involved a swift and silent response involving corporal maternal discipline – right there in between the aisles of their local grocery store.

And so, she began at Cal State-San Bernardino. But, by the time she had completed her freshman year, she struggled to stay motivated about a degree. Especially since it excluded the potential of military service.

For reasons not entirely known, except to God and fate, she was sent a sign. Literally. A. sign: a banner promoting the university’s ROTC program. Right then and there, she says, she signed up with the full intention of making her commitment to the Army official in her junior year.

Fine, she remembered with a nostalgic smile. Fine until her formerly relaxed morning schedule shifted to accommodate the required physical training that occurred at what military folks refer to as “zero-dark-thirty.

Running the gamut between one parent’s partial approval and the other parent’s strong disapproval for her first year in college was one thing. But there was hardship and tragedy ahead that would again test her mettle.

Her beloved father died suddenly, and out of grief and loss, she simply did not have the strength to focus on goals or the work required to fulfill them. Perhaps for the first time in her 21years of life. She failed. And this failure could have cost her the career she wanted in the Army.

“Intellectually, I knew I had to do it, and I wanted to do it.,” she said. “But there’s the kind of commitment that get the laces tied up and ready, and there’s the kind that dissolves when your heart is already heavy and the scale and the two-mile run try to tell you that it can’t be done.”

Not always, but sometimes, people show up for each other. Not because they are told, but because they know: We are what we do together, Towne said while retelling what unfolded next. When a person is a part of a unit, she said, that unit is only as fast as its slowest member.

During a practice runs, she said, they put her out front of the rest of the company. Not to humiliate her, but so that she knew that they had her back. And also at the gym, in the weight room, on the treadmill. And not out of suspicion, but out of support.

“Their faith in me reminded me of my father,” she said. “He never faltered in that. He always told me that committing to something meant we give it our all.”

Towne is not the kind of leader who is comfortable crediting herself. What she has accomplished, she knows, is a reflection of many – not the least of which is her mother, Maria Dolores, who once adamantly refused her daughter’s request to join the Army with a resounding and irrevocable no.

Still, when her daughter received her commission the following year, it was she who stood before her daughter and affixed the second lieutenant rank to her daughter’s dress blues with a proud smile and a whispered bendicion.

To this day, Towne says, her mother has been there for her daughter and her daughter’s family through multiple deployments and relocations. She would prefer all of her daughters were nearer to her, and still, she sacrifices without complaint.

Which happens a lot, Towne says, because she and her husband, Major Jonathan J. Towne, 38, both actively serve. A dual career military family.

They arrived at Fort Hood in the summer of 2022 with their two children. She as the 48th Chemical Brigade logistics officer and later, as support operations officer for the Army Field Support Battalion. He as a 35A or military intelligence officer.

Earlier this year, Azucena Towne was notified that she would become assistant professor of military science, making her the first woman leader of the U.S. Army ROTC program at A&M–Central Texas, arriving on campus right before the beginning of the Fall 2025 Semester.

And the girl who’s work ethic literally grew out of the loamy soil where nothing else could have taken root looks back in gratitude for all of it. And literally cannot wait to do for today’s cadets what was done for her.

“My younger self would have never imagined making it this far in my career – much less that I would be chosen to lead an ROTC program,” she admitted without guile.

“I could not have imagined how much ROTC would do for me over the years: a career, a degree, a chance to serve as an active-duty officer. Now, everything I have learned, and everything I was given in my own training, becomes all that much more valuable when its given back to the cadets I’ll serve.”