Born: 3 October 1898, Mexico
Died: 31 March 1974
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40. For more on her story, check out Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.
In her late 30s, Mexican-American chef Elena Zelayeta had everything going for her, with a successful business and pregnant with her second child. Then she began losing her eyesight in 1934; a cataract and detached retina would eventually leave her completely blind. Unable to continue running Elena’s Mexican Village, the San Francisco restaurant she’d built up over the previous four years, she was soon swimming in debt and forced to close. For two years, Zelayeta was lost to a deep depression, contemplating suicide. But it was cooking that eventually brought her back to herself, using her other senses to navigate the kitchen again.
Born in 1897 in Mexico, she helped her mother in the kitchen from a young age, both before and after the 1910 Mexican Revolution turned what was meant to be a family vacation to San Francisco into a permanent stay. In the midst of the Great Depression, Zelayeta finally pursued her dream of opening a restaurant, serving food out of their own apartment at first before moving to a building downtown. Her success was particularly impressive given that the racism her family had experienced in earlier years was only heightened as Americans blamed immigrants—particularly Mexicans—for their inability to find jobs in those times of great hardship. The U.S. government conducted raids and forced as many as 1.8 million people of Mexican descent, most of them born in the U.S., “repatriating” them “back” to Mexico.
Initially ashamed of her blindness, Zelayeta came to find pride in her new identity. Her friends encouraged her to compile her recipes in a cookbook, which would be published in 1944 as Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes. Dictating instructions to her friends, they transcribed them on a typewriter, asking for clarification when needed. It would go on to sell a half-million copies over the course of her life. She also published a memoir, Elena, in 1960 and even wrote a self-help book, Elena’s Lessons in Living (1947). Zelayeta also starred in a weekly cooking show, It’s Fun to Eat with Elena, broadcast across California in the early 1950s, and published three more cookbooks, with 1958’s Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking being particularly acclaimed. Elena’s Favorite Foods California Style (1967), published when she was 70, was a celebration of the different styles of food immigrants had brought with them to enrich the state’s cuisine, from Mexican to Japanese to Italian. She was also an early entrepreneur in the emerging frozen foods industry, selling Elena’s Food Specialties—enchiladas, tacos, and Spanish-style meatballs—throughout northern California.
Like Norma Shirley, Zelayeta changed the way people viewed the food of her homeland. “Mexican food was thought of as kind of a low-level party food,” her granddaughter, also named Elena Zelayeta, later said. “I don’t think it was thought of as a cuisine.” One piece of advice from Elena’s Lessons in Living holds true regardless of the passage of time: “Of all the handicaps that afflict us, the greatest by far is fear. All of us have it. All must work to conquer it.”