Estela Ruiz - Early Life

Early Life

Ruiz grew up in Lordsburg, New Mexico, the daughter of Mañuel and Delfina Aguilera. Her father was a sometimes-unemployed alcoholic, and her mother's business supported the household. Her father verbally and emotionally abused her mother, who in turn vented her frustration on Ruiz, on whom she relied for support. When Ruiz was sixteen, her mother made a promesa to the Virgin of Guadalupe that if her eldest son Inocensio, Ruiz's older brother, survived his illness, she would scale Mount Cristo Rey in pilgrimage. Inocensio recovered and Aguilera took Ruiz along on this climb, where Ruiz felt a "mysterious force" lifting her up the mountain despite her fatigue. Though the family was Catholic before, following Inocensio's recovery the household devotion to the Church and to the Virgin of Guadalupe grew even stronger. While in her thirties, her mother developed and recovered from endometrial cancer, which she interpreted as her "cross to bear". The anthropologist Kristy Nabhan-Warren views Delfina Aguilera's "physical and marital suffering" as an enactment "in her own relationship with Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe." The relationship between suffering and religion had a profound impact on Ruiz's understanding of life. A car accident twenty-five years later that led to her father's recovery from alcoholism allowed him to have a better relationship with her mother and to be a grandfather to Ruiz's children.