Born in the military port of Loreto, Baja California, Dona Eulalia Perez de Guillen de Marine traveled to Alta California as a soldier’s wife and as a widow served as the llavera (keeper of keys) for Mission San Gabriel. Capable, clever, and disciplined, she oversaw all that was not secular or military at the mission.
After winning a cooking contest, she was hired by the San Gabriel friars as a cook. But her duties expanded, and soon she was the manager of the mission. She concocted a famous lemonade, and the demand was so great that she began bottling the beverage, and the friars sold it. Soon they were shipping bottled lemonade to Spain. It became one of Los Angeles’ first exports, and an enterprise that helped fill the mission’s coffers. Along with her daughters, she supervised cooking, sewing, nursing, soap, and candle making, the winery and the olive oil presses.
Eulalia also watched over the Indian women working at the Mission and tried to keep the soldiers away from them. When her efforts didn’t succeed, she delivered the babies.
In 1834, when the Mission lands were secularized, Eulalia, out of a job, was compensation for her 14 years of service with 14,000 acres of Rancho San Pascual—which later became Pasadena, San Marino, parts of La Canada, Sierra Madre, and South Pasadena.
The land granted to her had been part of the homeland of the Tongva-Gabrieleño Native Americans for thousands of years. In Alta California, a woman was unable to have ownership of property, so she married retired Mexican artillery lieutenant Juan Mariné (d. 1836). “Although Marine won the land, he lost the woman. Unwilling to live with her husband’s tyrannical ways, she walked out and moved into a small adobe…near the mission” in San Gabriel. [i]
There are various narratives of this land’s future ownership but the LA Times says that “Marine didn’t stock the property with livestock or make improvements required by the land grant. After he died, his son sold it for a mere six horses and 10 head of cattle.” [ii]
Eulalia's lived in numerous places, including the still standing Adobe Flores, near the South Pasadena City Hall, on the southern slope of Raymond Hill. (on the National Register of Historic Places).
She died on June 11, 1878. Her death certificate, located in the Santa Ana courthouse, records that she lived to be 140, but descendants for the most part agree on more conservative figures like 110 or 112 years old.
Eulalia Pérez de Guillén Mariné is one of only two non-clergy buried with the priests in the San Gabriel Mission courtyard cemetery. Eulalia being honored in this way (was a highly unusual honor at that time for a woman: a marble bench inscribed with her name marks the spot. She was one of the few interviewed for Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, in 1877, who was not an aristocrat or a man.
Source: Latinos in Pasadena by Roberta H. Martinez 2009 and Wikipedia