Chamber of Commerce - Xalapa

Emilio Léycegui Nuñez was born in 1864 the son of Lucian Léycegui, from Gordejuela, Vizcaya, Spain. He worked for the Compañía Cerveceria Toluca y México from 1898^{Municipio Libre, Tomo XXIV, Núm. 209, 6 September 1898}. By November 1902 was manager of the Xalapa branch^{El Diario del Hogar, 16 November 1902}.

In April 1907 he became president of the newly-formed Cerveceria “La Estrella” of Xalapa^{Diario Oficial, 19 April 1907} though still with the Cerveceria Toluca y México.

In June 1911 there was political unrest in Xalapa over the nomination for provisional governor. A demonstration in favour of Francisco Delgado took place but was quickly countered by another equally fervent demonstration in favour of Léon Aillaud with his supporters bursting into the Palacio del Gobierno and breaking windows. In the evening yet another demonstration took place, also against Delgado, but this time in favour of Emilio Léycegui. The crowd went to his house and made him accompany them in their parade around the city, and apparently forced him to accept their nomination as a candidate.

On the night of 21 June the rivalry among the various rebel bands came to a head and many innocent lives were lost. The incident started when federal arrny troops under General García Peña removed several cases of ammunition from the governor's palace. They were opposed by several Maderista groups, although one group, under Esteban Márquez (the first rebels to enter Xalapa), assisted them. In the evening, another group of Maderistas tried to free one of their number from the jail. They opened fire on the police, killing and wounding several. Unfortunately, that evening the park beside the governor's palace was filled with people celebrating Aillaud's nomination at a band concert. They were caught in the crossfire, and between sixty and one hundred were killed. The regular army was able to restore control eventually, and the Márquez faction hurriedly left town.

On 22 June, the legislature was still reported as favouring Léycegui, while the revolutionary troops under Aguilar, who was also acting on the orders of the chief of the revolution in Veracruz, Gabriel Gavira, were supporting Aillaud. Aillaud arrived that evening amidst a tumult and El Diario reported that the demonstrations in his favour were the biggest seen in years. From the various newspaper reports, one can only conclude that there were huge groups of supporters for each candidate. Madero then decided to accept the wishes of the stronger and more insistent revolutionary forces and ensure Aillaud's nomination by asking Léycegui to withdraw. He praised the latter to the hilt, explaining that Léycegui was not at all responsible for recent events. Madero maintained that he had not opposed the decision to nominate Aillaud, but that he had had the best reports of Léycegui's ability to calm the state. With Léycegui's obliging withdrawal, Madero's task was made easier. He was grateful to Léycegui for this polítical gift and counselled Gavira to treat Léycegui well because his "situation is quite abnormal." By 23 June order had been restored and the next day Aillaud was appointed provisional governor.

Léycegui was president of the Càmara in 1914.

He died in 1938 in Veracruz.

Julio Ollivier was a merchant of French origin who by 1890 had established a clothing store on the corner of calle Enríquez and calle Leandro Valle. In 1898 he was the agent for the Banco Nacional de México.

By 1903 he was already well-known in Xalapa, accompanied by his brother Andrés, selling clothes and as owners of "El sombrero de copa", a distinguished shop in the city centre, under the name Ollivier Hnos.

Ollivier was tesorero of the Càmara in 1914.

Luis Caraza Landero was born in Xalapa in 1871. He was the owner of the hacienda Paso San Juan and the La Concepción (or La Concha) sugar cane mill, on the road from Jilotepec to Actopan.

Caraza was comisario of the Càmara in 1914.

Rafael Fuentes Vélez was born in Xalapa in 1862. He was manager of the Veracruz branch of the Banco Nacional de México^{La Opinión, Veracruz, Tomo II, Núm. 194, 22 January 1905} and elected mayor (alcalde) in 1906 ^{La Opinión, 19 October 1906}. He then went on to be the manager of the Xalapa branch.

He was the grandfather of the renowned author, Carlos Fuentes, who records this reminiscence. “My great-grandfather went to Veracruz, and immediately fell in love with the town and lagoon of Catemaco. He went on to establish a prosperous coffee business there, had three daughters (my grandmother, Emilia and my great-aunts Maria and Luisa), integrated his little mulatto daughter Ana (born to another woman) into the family, and forbade his family to speak German. He wanted to be Mexican, to leave the Old World behind.
My paternal grandfather, Rafael Fuentes Vélez, was the son of Carlos Fuentes Benítez, a businessman who had emigrated from the Canary Islands; and who entered into matrimony with a beautiful criolla woman, Clodilde Vélez, who would later be assaulted on the Camino Real. A bandit asked her to hand over her rings and when she refused to give them up, she lost them in the barbaric slice of a machete. My grandfather grew up in the port of Veracruz and met my grandmother at the Candelaria festivals in Tlacotalpan. He was forty years old; she was seventeen. The photographs reveal a short man with an aquiline nose and penetrating eyes beneath a pair of extraordinarily arched brows, like twin circumflex accents, that made him appear as though he were permanently angry, even diabolical. My grand­mother Emilia, on the other hand, was like a Gothic statue: tall, thin, severe and blessed with a profile that was perfect and straight, bestowing a noble, eternal symmetry upon her face.
They had three sons: the eldest, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger, made a name for himself very early on as a poet. Tall, blond and slender, he was the favored disciple of the poet Salvador Díaz Mirón. At the age of twenty-one he went to study in Mexico City, though he would never return, for he fell victim to one of the typhoid epidemics that in those days swept through Mexico, backward, unhealthy and chaotic country that it was. Still, the family enjoyed many years of happiness, first in Veracruz, where my grandfather was the manager of the National Bank of Mexico, and later on in Jalapa where he held the same post and watched his health slowly deteriorate, having succumbed to a progressive paralysis that would eventually leave him mute and confined to a wheelchair with no discernible expression on his face other than that afforded by his monstrous eyebrows. Through my father I learned that this ancient man, whom I did get to know, had been a voracious reader in Spanish, French, Italian and English. From my grandfather Rafael I still have some beautiful old editions of Dante, Swift and Walter Scott, printed in the nineteenth century in such a tiny typeface that they must have required a magnify­ng glass to read. My father used to tell me how every month my grandfather would take him by the hand to the port, in anticipation of the mail boat from Liverpool and Le Havre that arrived at Veracruz with the illustrated magazines - The London Illustrated News, La Vie Parisienne - and the novels that were in vogue at the time.
Having lost all hope of her husband's health improving, my determined grandmother Emilia Boettiger moved to Mexico City, where she established a guest-house high up on the corner of Mérida and Alvaro Obregón, that was frequented by many Veracruz residents passing through the capital. They were part of the great exodus of so many families spurred on by the devastation of the revolutionary movement, who came to Mexico City in droves from the provinces. A woman of extraordinary energy and will, my grandmother Emilia took care of her incapacitated husband, reigned over a delicious jarocha kitchen of Veracruz cuisine like the beef dish known as manchamanteles, the rice and black beans known as moros y cristianos, fried plantains, ropa vieja and octopus in its ink”^{Carlos Fuentes, This I Believe: An A-Z of a Writer's Life, Bloomsbury, 2004}.