The beginnings (Part 2)

[To read the first part of this post, go to The beginnings (Part 1)

The kitchen may have seemed a natural way to Josefina to support herself and her family after these shaky years. Teaching cookery, however, was a risky endeavor for Mexican women who had almost no presence in the workforce in the Mexico of the 1930s. At the time, only one cooking school catering to the upper middle class was in operation in Mexico City, managed by a Spaniard, Alejandro Pardo. To complicate things further, Josefina didn’t have any formal training in cooking, nor receive an academic education beyond high school. In an interview she granted to a newspaper in the 1950s, she mentions an Italian cooking teacher, but acknowledges that her skills came from her mother and her own domestic experience.

This didn’t stop Josefina who started building a reputation writing cooking columns for magazines such as Mignon, la revista de la mujer, a publication that educated socially privileged women. By the time she opened the school, at the end of the 1930s, the place became a primary destination for women from different barrios. But beyond the culinary curiosity, the academy fulfilled a prominent role in the social dynamics of the city. For Mexican women, attending Josefina’s classes was also one of the few acceptable ways to leave their homes.


Josefina, second from right, during a cooking class on her cooking academy. Circa 1953


By the end of the 1950s, Josefina’s classes were so popular that she rented a second location to accommodate the increasing number of students. Soon two of Josefina’s sisters joined the business, Guadalupe, her second sister, as bookkeeper and typist, and María Luisa, the youngest, in charge of shipping, and other administrative chores.

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...