The beginnings (Part 1)

Josefina was born in 1899 in the hacienda El Pabellón, in Aguascalientes, a state 260 miles north of Mexico City named after the abundance of thermal waters in the area, Josefina was the oldest of the four daughters of Juan Luis Velázquez de León, an engineer, and María Peón Valdez, the heiress of a prominent family from Guadalajara.

Josefina and her sisters. From left: María Luisa, Josefina, Dolores and Guadalupe.

Growing up in the hacienda, and later, in a comfortable home in Mexico City where they moved to in 1905, Josefina received an education with emphasis in penmanship, respect for the Catholic Church, and French cooking, a common practice with the Mexican elites at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, it is fair to say that Josefina’s culinary career was the result of the tragic events that her family and her country were destined to experience.

Mexico was ruled at the time by Porfirio Díaz, a man who got elected in 1876 as president of a democratic republic but who became a dictator that remained in power seven consecutive terms. By 1910, the political model maintained by PorfirioDíaz had become impossible to sustain, and the Mexican Revolution started on November 20th. During the next ten years, Josefina would witness the spread of the armed conflict, live the hardships of 1915, the “year of the hunger,” and loose the family hacienda as a result of the agrarian reform. In 1921, the same year the Revolution ended, Josefina’s father died of heart failure.

Post-revolutionary Mexico was not an easy time for women. The new Constitution of 1917 gave them legal equality, with the same rights and duties as men, including signing contracts and managing their own businesses. However, married women still needed their husbands’ permission to work, and they were still required to carry out domestic chores and care for their children. In this environment, and approaching her thirtieth birthday, Josefina married Joaquín González, a businessman twenty years her senior.

This blurry photograph of her wedding day is one of the few memories left from the union that ended abruptly eleven months later with Mr.González death.


More to come...