María Jiménez’s life has been marked by flamenco, abuse and the loss of her first daughter, whom she had when she was only 17 years old. Rocío died in a traffic accident in January 1985, which plunged the artist into a deep depression that kept her away from the stage.
“I had a beautiful daughter, and I don’t like to talk about this topic because it makes me very sad, because just as God gave her to me, he took her away from me,” Jiménez explained in a recent interview on RTVE’s Lazos de sangre.
Her friend Lola Flores was the one who told her that she was pregnant. “One day I came to sing in Seville. When I finished, she approached me and told me that she was pregnant. Indeed, later I checked and she was right,” she says in that same interview.
The singer had a hard time accepting the news at only 17 years old, because she says she suffered rejection from many of those she considered her “friends,” and she even says that the public stopped going to her concerts. She was young, her career had just started and she was going to be a single mother.
The lack of support led her to go to a clinic to have an abortion, but while on the doctor’s table “she felt something,” as she herself explains to this media outlet. That made him continue with her pregnancy, which ended with the birth of Rocío.
After her loss on January 8, 1985, Jiménez took refuge in her son Alejandro, the result of her marriage to actor Pepe Sancho. The interpreter’s support was also essential for the artist to mitigate her pain. That approach led to her reconciliation and ended in her second wedding, although the couple would break up again a few years later.
