Josefina Velázquez de León was born in 1899 in Aguascalientes, a state 260 miles north of Mexico City named after the abundance of thermal waters in the area. She was the oldest of the four daughters of Juan Luis Velázquez de León, an engineer from a somewhat illustrious Mexican family, and María Peón Valdez, the heiress of another prominent family from Guadalajara. Josefina and her sisters Dolores and Guadalupe grew up on a hacienda, something that was considered an aristocratic lifestyle at the time. Although some research place’s Josefina’s birthplace in the Hacienda El Pabellón and some point to the Hacienda Los Cuartos, there is no doubt that the Velázquez de León daughters enjoyed a privileged upbringing. This situation became only more sophisticated in 1905 when the family moved into a fashionable home in Mexico City where the fourth child, María Luisa, was born.

Josefina’s mother was eager to educate her daughters with the appropriate domestic skills for the elite women of the time. The girls’ education emphasized penmanship, drawing, and respect for the rituals of the Catholic Church. They also received instruction in cooking, with a strong focus on French cooking.

At the time, Mexico was ruled by Porfirio Díaz, a man who had come to power in 1876 as president of a representative, democratic, and federal republic, but who became in practice a paternal dictator for life of an absolute and centralized government. Díaz, a mestizo of Mixtec Indian and Spanish ancestry, reelected himself seven times in a period of Mexican history known as the porfiriato (1876–1911).

The porfiriato’s slogan was “Peace, Order and Progress,” but, in a time when the nation was growing and presidential banquets featured lavish European haute cuisine, life expectancy in Mexico was only 30 years. A 1900 survey in Mexico City showed that 15,000 families (16 percent of the population) were homeless. In 1910, the economic and political model of the porfiriato had come to a point that was impossible to sustain, and the Mexican Revolution started on November 20 of that same year.

Josefina and her family survived the fighting, but they lost their hacienda as a result of the agrarian reforms. In 1921, the year the Revolution ended, Josefina’s father died of heart failure. (MORE COMING SOON)