Rosario María Gutiérrez Eskildsen
Rosario María Gutiérrez Eskildsen (*Villahermosa, Tabasco, April 16, 1899 — Mexico City †May 12, 1979) was a Mexican lexicographer, linguist, and educator who is remembered for her studies on the regional peculiarities of speech in her home state of Tabasco as well as for her pioneering work as an educator and pedagogue in Tabasco and Mexico in general. She has at times been described as the first woman “professionist” from Tabasco.
She was born in Villahermosa (then known as San Juan Bautista) on what was then called Calle Grijalva, her parents were Antonio Gutiérrez Carriles, a Spaniard, and Juana Eskildsen Cáceres de Gutiérrez, a native of the place. She was left orphan at a young age when first her mother, and then her father, died; two of her five brothers would die young as well. In order to keep financially afloat, her sister Carmelita gave piano lessons, while Rosario, along with her older brother Guillermo, sold copies of the local newspaper El correo de Tabasco on street corners, for which they earned about 10 centavos a day.
Gutiérrez Eskildsen was a dedicated student throughout her schooling, the first part of which she concluded at the Instituto Juárez of Villahermosa, an advanced preparatory school which was founded by Manuel Sánchez Mármol in 1875. In 1918, at the age of 19 she moved tot Mexico City in order to continue her studies, during the day working as a primary school teacher, and during the evening attending classes at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, from which she would obtain an M.A. in Spanish Literature and later a doctorate in Spanish linguistics. It was during this time that succeeded in winning an internationally competitive scholarship to study at New York University.
Gutiérrez Eskildsen would go on to write more than a dozen books and many more articles on topics pertaining to grammar and linguistics in general, and dialectology, language pedagogy, phonetics, and prosody, in particular; the studies Substrato y superestrato del español en Tabasco, Prosodia y fonética tabasqueña, Cómo hablamos en Tabasco y otros trabajos (How we talk in Tabasco), were, along with the works of Marcos E. Becerra and Francisco J. Santamaría, pioneering studies on the subject of Tabascan dialectology. She was also known as an avid epistler who corresponded assiduously with colleagues and past students alike.
Rosario María Gutiérrez Eskildsen never married, explaining, whenever asked, that she wished to dedicate her life exclusively to her research and educational work. Nevertheless, she unexpectedly became the (adoptive) mother of a 17 year old recently orphaned teacher, Sergio Gómez Cabello, whose unhappy situation she learned about in 1953 while visiting the elementary school where he taught. She died in Mexico City in 1979 and was buried alongside her brother, Guillermo Gutiérrez Eskildsen.
Bibliography
- (Spanish) Delaval, Alicia, Vida y obra de la doctora Rosario María Gutiérrez Eskildsen. Tabasco: Secur, 1986.
- (Spanish) Chumacero, Rosalía, Perfil y pensamiento de la mujer mexicana. Mexico: Edición De La Aurora, 1961.
- (Spanish) Ocampo de Gómez, Aurora Maura, Diccionario de escritores mexicanos, siglo XX : desde las generaciones del Ateneo y novelistas de la Revolución hasta nuestros días. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Literarios, 1988