Figure 3: Birth Registration of Luisa [Concepción?

] Gomez

A short time later Amalia would become a great star in Mexico, initially with her
performances in the title role in Jacques Offenbach’s La Gran Duquesa de Gerolstein, and later
by introducing the scandalous French can-can to South American audiences.19 But her sister’s
career on the stage would be short. Her name disappeared from the theatrical reviews by 1874.
By that time Concepción had met and married Luis Jacoby. According to the civil petition and
the registration of her marriage in Mexico City, as well as the church record (April 6, 1873),20
Concepción Gómez y Bataller was born in Valencia, the legitimate daughter of Juan Bautista
Gomez y Molina [sic, Molines] and Anna Maria Bataller y Fort. She is listed as 23 years old (she
was actually 25) at the time of her marriage to Luis Jacoby, the son of Simon Jacoby and
Guillermina Goldstein. Luis is given as a 32-year-old native of Berlin, and a naturalized Mexican
citizen.
It was probably around 1867 when Luis purchased the Hacienda Obrajuelo, near the city
of Apaseo el Grande, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico (the Jacoby family would lose the
Hacienda Obrajuelo during the Revolution of 1914). He also acquired the plantation El
Horizonte in Tumbador, Guatamala on the line of the central railroad near the southern border of
Mexico21 (see Figure 4). Along with his brother Martin Jacoby, Luis turned these properties into
modern and highly profitable farming, cattle and mining concerns. In 1894 Luis and Werner
Hagnauer purchased land in the Sierra Madres to create the Argovia coffee plantation in the state
of Chiapas, north of Tapachula, Mexico.22 The surviving tokens used as payment in the Jacoby
plantations are collectibles today (see Figure 5). All of these properties are still operating.

19
For details on Amalia’s career see Anna Agranoff Ochs, “Opera in Contention: Social Conflict in Late
Nineteenth-Century Mexico City,” Ph.D. dissertation, the University of North Carolina, 2011.
20
Archivo de Registro Civil de Distrito Federal, Año de 1873 / Libro de copias de matrionios /juzgado del Estado
Civil de la Capital, 122v-123v, numero 158: Presentación del C.o [Ciudadono] Luis Jacoby y Concepcion Gomez;
125v-126: numero 161: “Matrimono del C.o Luis Jacoby con Concepcion Gomez.” Asunción Sagrario
Metropolitano, Matrimonios 1868-1891, 1873, Abril, 54v-55r. The marriage occurred at the Catedral Metropolitana
de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los cielos.
21
This photograph of Luis Jacoby’s estate on the Guatemala Central American Railroad is found in Pan American
Magazine 7 (1898), p. 96.
22
See Pan American magazine vi/6 (October 1908), p. 613-16.