Zócalo Public Square | She Was Mexico’s First, Forgotten Congresswoman

When Aurora Jiménez de Palacios took her seat in Mexico’s Congress in 1954, the country’s women still hadn’t been able to vote in a national election. The 28-year-old, showered with confetti and joined by her young daughter, climbed the steps of the Chamber of Deputies, becoming Mexico’s first congresswoman—and opening the door for seven decades of women’s rising legislative power.

In October 2024, Mexico inaugurated Claudia Sheinbaum as its first woman president. I started uncovering Jiménez’s story around that time, while doing research on the country’s path to political gender parity. Today, Mexico has an equal number of men and women in Congress, and among the highest global rates of women’s political representation. But gender equity in Mexican politics is paradoxical: If measured only by the share of women in political leadership, Mexico’s story is one of success; if measured by Mexican women’s lived experiences of violence and economic gaps, it falls short. Perhaps this paradox also explains why Jiménez’s rise to power, lauded at the time, was then largely forgotten in the decades before Mexican women gained their political foothold.

Mexican women gained the right to vote and be elected in 1953—but they weren’t able to exercise those rights in a national election until the 1955 midterms, and they didn’t get to elect a president until 1958. In the middle of it all, Jiménez won a 1954 special election in the state of Baja California. Her story caught my attention not only for its unexpected timing or because she broke a barrier that connects directly with Mexico’s political present, but also because her life story was—and is—unconventional for a woman’s rise to political power. 

Rather than coming from a family of influence, Jiménez was born into poverty in the Pacific coast town of Tecuala in the state of Nayarit; soon after, her mother, an Indigenous woman of Cora descent, moved them north to Sinaloa. An excellent student, she met her future husband, José Cruz Palacios Sánchez, as a teenager in the city of Culiacán. They wed just as they finished their studies at the University of Guadalajara. In 1947, they moved to his hometown, Mexicali, where they built a law practice and their political careers by working with unions, an important base for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that governed Mexico for most of the 20th century. In 1948, Jiménez’s economic research helped striking Tecate brewery workers secure higher salaries. 

Despite Jiménez’s impact, the limited chronicles of her life are littered with gaps and contradictions. This isn’t just the case for Jiménez—the histories of many of Mexico’s women leaders are undocumented. “There isn’t enough research, there aren’t enough books to cross-check,” Gabriela Cano, an expert on women’s history at El Colegio de México, told me in an interview.

Scavenging for more information, I found a lead in a brief biography that mentioned Jiménez’s granddaughter, Karina Vildosola, whom I tracked down through social media. Now a strategic advisor to several congresswomen, Vildosola inherited her grandmother’s penchant for politics—along with her personal archives. Vildosola began sending me occasional materials about Jiménez’s life over WhatsApp; between government documents, news archives, and Vildosola’s accounts, I patched together many of the missing pieces.

I discovered how deeply Jiménez’s political career was interwoven with Mexican women’s long-fought struggle for political rights. In 1937, then-President Lázaro Cárdenas championed a constitutional reform to grant women suffrage. Congress approved it, but the law never took effect. Why it was left to die on the vine has long been a matter of debate, but some argue that the emerging PRI believed women—seen as more Catholic and traditional—would back the conservative opposition.

By the early 1950s, the PRI had consolidated power, and presidential candidate Adolfo Ruiz Cortines promised women the right to vote. When Ruiz Cortines campaigned in Mexicali, Jiménez helped organize a rally of 10,000 women in the city’s bullfighting arena to remind him he would need to make good on the promise. Within the first year of Ruiz Cortines’ 1952 election, the reform went through.

By then, Jiménez was active in the PRI, a well-known union advocate, and a local radio host. When Baja California, a newly minted state, gained a second congressional seat, she ran unopposed to fill it. Vildosola told me the workers and farmers who backed Jiménez didn’t consider her gender. “They looked at her and said, ‘She can be our voice in Congress, because she’s qualified, because she knows what we want.’”

In office, Jiménez focused on social issues supporting children, women, and workers. But while she was focused on policy rather than political symbolism, she was aware of the significance of her position. “I’ve been granted […] a privilege that will stand as the most meaningful legacy I leave my children: to be the first woman in Mexico’s history to address the nation, with emotion and pride, as a deputy in the Congress of the Union,” she said during a speech on October 12, 1954. “I share this historic honor with all the women of my country.”

But Jiménez’s time in Congress was short-lived. Because she won a special election, she served only a year. Back in Mexicali, her political fate shifted. She was passed over as a mayoral candidate and eventually took a role as municipal trustee in 1956.

Then, on April 17, 1959, she boarded a small plane bound for Mexico City. The flight never arrived.

Vildosola says that during her grandmother’s time as a local official, Jiménez uncovered proof that the state’s governor was involved in corruption. Her family suspects foul play in the plane crash that killed the 32-year-old former deputy and 25 other passengers. After her death, the family faced threats and temporarily relocated to California.

For decades, Jiménez’s story was largely unknown. Then, in 2008, a congressional auditorium was named after her to mark 10 years since the founding of the legislature’s Gender and Equity Committee, established to advance policies that level the playing field for women and marginalized groups. In March, I visited the space with Vildosola, who told me she had been there for its inaugural ceremony, just as her own mother attended Jiménez’s inauguration decades before.

Vildosola is working on a book that she hopes will give her grandmother’s story new life. “She was way ahead of her time,” she told me. Indeed, for years after Jiménez held office, the number of women in Mexico’s Congress grew by a trickle before their recent leap to parity. Vildosola heard the echoes of her grandmother’s words when, 70 years later, Sheinbaum’s inaugural remarks celebrated the moment as one belonging to all women. “My grandmother was the first to say, ‘I’ve arrived. And all of Mexico’s women arrived with me.’”

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