Victor Manuel Orozco

Victor Manuel Orozco, 77, of Florence, Texas, joined his ancestors under the wings of his Lord and Savior Jesus on Tuesday, February 15, 2022. Memorial services will take place on Monday February 21 at 2:00 pm at The Gabriels Funeral Chapel in Georgetown, Texas. Victor was born on January 29, 1945, in Huasca, Mexico to Antonio Orozco Orozco and Consuelo Orozco Jimenez. A Mexican citizen with residency in the US, Victor came to the United States in 1981 with his US-born wife, Gloria Gale Orozco (Shaffer), and their three sons. He was a business owner and serial job creator in the distribution and enjoyment of Mexican food products, founding Orozco Distributing of Belton, Texas, now under the ownership of his son Antonio. He also consulted on the establishment of many of the finest Mexican restaurants in Central Texas, assisting them with business plans and design and permitting processes. While untrained in architecture, he was a masterful building designer, and he brilliantly designed and built his brick-vaulted, two-story home out of his sheer love of modernist architecture, Mexican building crafts and the happiness of his soul. As a 16-year old, Victor also drew up the plans that became the basis of the design for what is today the Evangelical Baptist Church on Mexico City’s Hortensias Street.

Partially impressed by the architectural clarity of Victor’s vision for the Hortensias church, and his natural talents and charisma for sharing the Gospel, Mr. Ernesto Wong, a mobilizer of evangelical missions to the rural areas Mexico and the owner of the chocolate-making business Wong’s in Mexico City, took Victor under his wing and mentored his early path in life, both spiritually and vocationally. Victor would go on to establish a distributorship based on Wong’s products in his 20s after earning a B.A. in Economics from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. With unstoppable, creative energy, he pursued similar entrepreneurial projects throughout his life in his serial (and often simultaneous) ventures in Mexico and Texas. Shortly after moving to Texas in the early 1980s, Victor began to distribute for East Austin’s El Lago Mexican Foods, expanding that company’s territory outside of the Austin area into portions of greater Central Texas. He established its distribution center in Hewitt, Texas in the mid-80s. In the 1990s, he continued distributing with other Mexican food producers, eventually founding Orozco Distributing.

At the time that Victor was first introduced to Mr. Wong in his early teens, his family was living in a house made of wooden crates and experiencing the biting poverty that reflected life in the informal colonias of Mexico’s capital city in the 50s. Perhaps due to this experience, Victor lived his life with deep empathy for those who needed a lift, and he would often gear his business ventures to finance someone’s step up in life. As an Evangelical, he saw that practicing God’s loving-kindness toward others meant that he had a responsibility in his ventures to support his workers and clients’ long-term path to a dignified livelihood. While he never formalized this attitude of putting God’s grace into action, he practiced it in every venture as a natural consequence of the Lord’s Spirit grafted onto his soul. He likely inherited this mission for life-giving Christianity partially from Mr. Wong but also his deeply pious Methodist aunt, Aurora Orozco Zapata, affectionately known as “Tia Boba”, a beloved Mexico City educator. She had played a key role in the education of Victor and his siblings, opening their paths toward higher education. Victor was likewise strategic and resourceful in the attainment of high-quality education for his three sons, who would go on to earn degrees from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford.

Victor is survived by his wife, Gloria, of Florence, his three sons, Eric Orozco of North Carolina, Antonio Orozco of Belton, and Victor Orozco, Jr., of Florence, and by all of his siblings, Elvira McIntosh of Australia, Luis Orozco of Happy, Texas, Amada McIntosh of Australia, and Elizabeth Sharp of Australia (and Chad), and all their families.