Who was Josefina?

Abraham González Street in downtown Mexico City has seen better days. Stores selling auto parts line the busy road. Groups of men flash counterfeit stereos at potential customers driving by. On every corner, children play next to silver pyramids made of wheel rims while their mothers sell warm tamales out of baskets to pedestrians rushing to work. Across the street, run-down condos still show signs of their once-amazing interior patios, their sturdy cast-iron gates, and their beautiful facades. They share their old glory with shabby fondas (eateries), old bodegas, and an Internet cafe that hangs cotton sheets from floor to ceiling as partitions separating one computer from another. However, the most emblematic sign of the decline of this street is the two-story building, number 68, which splits its space between an auto-parts business and a sketchy massage parlor. On the side of the auto-parts business the storeroom still shows signs of the space that once housed Mexico’s premier cooking academy, while vinyl-covered beds on the side of the massage business have erased all traces of the woman who once lived inside those walls and ran the cooking school for 40 years: Josefina Velázquez de León.
It is hard to imagine that this was Josefina’s home and the heart of a cooking enterprise unparalleled in Mexico. But it was in these rooms that Josefina spent most of her life, teaching during the day, writing cookbooks at night, and planning journeys to every corner of the country to research and collect traditional family recipes, indigenous ingredients, and centuries-old techniques. It was also here that Josefina started her own imprint, Ediciones Josefina Velázquez de León, a one-woman enterprise that published over 140 titles of Mexican and international cuisine.

Josefina Velázquez de León was born in 1899 in Aguascalientes, a state 260 miles north of Mexico City. She was the oldest of four daughters of Juan Luis Velázquez de León and Maria Peón Valdez. When Josefina turned 11 years old, political mayhem broke out in Mexico and thus the Mexican Revolution, a conflict that tore the country apart from 1910 to 1921, became a turning point in the lives of the Velázquez de León family. By its end, the family had lost their hacienda. That same year, Josefina’s father died of heart failure. Years of hardship followed for the Velázquez de León and Josefina approached her 30th birthday unmarried and devoted to help her mother and sisters. However, life changed for Josefina when she met Joaquin González, a businessman 20 years her senior who she married against her family’s wishes. The matrimony was short lived and Mr. González died 11 months later. As a widow, Josefina gained independence from many of the rules and restrictions that ruled the lives of Mexican women in the 1930s, and she would use her cooking skills and passion for teaching to become a savvy businesswoman: by 1933, Josefina opened the “Academia de Cocina Velázquez de León” (Velázquez de León Cooking Academy) and began writing food columns in local magazines. A few years later, she published her first book, Manual Práctico de Cocina y Repostería (A Practical Manual of Cooking and Cake Confectionary), and soon she was in charge of her own imprint. By the end of her life in 1968, Josefina had become a respected culinary personality, working side by side with the government in nutritional programs, starring in her own radio and TV shows, and drawing the culinary map of Mexican cuisine.