Hop Backstage

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1934, Elena Zelayeta was an up-and-coming chef of Mexican cuisine expecting her second child when her eyesight began to falter. She visited a doctor, who told her there was no hope: A mature cataract and detached retina would ultimately leave her blind.Her disability forced her to step away from Elena’s Mexican Village, the San Francisco restaurant she had been operating for four years, serving chili swimming with ground beef and soups simmering with cheesy mounds of fluffy dough in a tomato-rich broth. In the absence of its figurehead, the restaurant was soon crushed by debt, to the point of closing. Zelayeta herself fell into a depression so ...

Federal Reserve officials are contemplating whether they will need to raise interest rates again to cool the economy and ensure that rapid inflation will fully fade, and minutes from their meeting earlier this month laid out the contours of that debate.“Participants noted that further tightening of monetary policy would be appropriate if incoming information indicated that progress toward the committee’s inflation objective was insufficient,” according to minutes from the central bank’s Oct. 31-Nov. 1 meeting, which were released Tuesday.Fed officials thought that the “data arriving in coming months would help clarify the extent to which the disinflation process was continuing.”Central bankers voted to leave interest rates unchanged in a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent at their gathering earl...