Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz is an amphibian character. Those who rack their brains these days trying to place her into a party or an ideology, wondering if she is white or local, whether she was a poor or wealthy girl, will find an answer by traveling to her town , Tepapepec, in Hidalgo. The Gálvez live on Francisco Madero Street, to the left, PRD and Morenistas; with Rosales the Ruiz, further to the right, i.e. “apolitical”, maybe from the PRI, maybe from the PAN. The family home of the brilliant presidential candidate with no political affiliation is in Rosales… but not quite, on the corner.
Xóchitl Gálvez gives a speech in Tepatepec (Hidalgo) in his youth. With kind approval
Indigenous? In Madero Street it is said that it was good that the paternal grandfather, Amador, the mason, spoke Otomi, but that he was “like a Spaniard, tall, with a mustache and bright eyes”; On Rosales Street, people close to the PRI responded: “Today nobody wants to call themselves indigenous, even if they are”; The most conservative look at the black-and-white photos of uncles and grandparents hanging on the wall and vehemently deny that copper-colored heritage. Those on Madero Street consider it “progressive”; that of Rosales, “right”. You can make a basket out of these wickers, but who knows where the water will come out. A trip to Tepatepec only confirms one thing: Xóchitl Gálvez is an amphibian, as only one who grew up and lives in a city can be.
A photo showing Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz’s maternal grandfather operating the first tractor in his town: Iñaki Malvido
It is even more difficult to determine whether his family was poor or wealthy. As a girl, Gálvez shared a room with her four brothers, “all crammed together,” says one cousin, pointing to the window: “It was here. This other one is the parents’ bedroom and this one is the kitchen.” At that time there was a latrine toilet and a swing hanging from the tree. But others didn’t even have that. One classmate, a Morenista, claims the PAN candidate constantly lies, saying she’s rich, that she carried a backpack and a lunch box of food to school. “We, clean bag.” “And look at how big the house the family lived in was and what the walls were. That it was made of leaves and sheets, a lie,” continues retired teacher Cutberto Díaz. “The school is there, two blocks from the elementary school, what’s the point of walking barefoot for miles?” She’s never lived in Dengantzha,” says Díaz.
The vehicle sets the GPS on the way to Dengantzha, one of the towns of the municipality, a few kilometers from Tepatepec. “No, no, she never lived here,” says a woman at the school. “Never. She came here often, she was received like the Three Kings because she gave out toys to the children, that’s true,” she affirms. He doesn’t want to give his name. “If you want to know, go back to Tepatepec.”
Girls play at the Francisco I. Madero public elementary school in Tepatepec, where Gálvez studied. Inaki Malvido (EL PAÍS)
Back in the square, the Morenistas gathered to protest the mayor accuse the senator of fabricating her origins and nearly being responsible for the ozone hole. One of his Gálvez cousins, who also declined to identify himself, will later say: “He has intellectual ability and personal and political ambitions. She went to town and excelled, no one can take that credit away from her. She is not indigenous, but she took care of the indigenous people there in Dengantzha. He should have said he’s an Indigenist, yes. And he comes from a village and is progressive. If nobody here understands what he is doing with PAN and PRI, how can he live with them? He doesn’t participate because it’s comfortable for him to swim between two bodies of water,” he assures.
The amphibian girl dropped out of elementary school and attended high school in Mixquiahuala. Every morning he drove in the vehicle of his uncle Camilo Gálvez, who worked in this city and brought the students closer. Then she was in Mexico City and at UNAM, where she became an engineer and later runs a smart building engineering company, High Tech Services, as a businesswoman, where two of her nieces work, daughters of the sister who is currently in prison for kidnapping : Xóchitl welcomed them and enabled them to study, they are also engineers.
According to his relatives in the city, he nurtured Trotskyism and Marxism during his student days. “She was always a rebellious young woman,” a girl who inherited leftist genes and nurtured them in a conservative family. In fact, the Gálvez family lived with the Ruiz in this house divided into rooms, where there was never a shortage of cousins, even the “virgin who hit and pinched”, where all the newlyweds had a bedroom until they could manage on their own. “The Ruizes were always creative,” says a cousin from Xóchitl. And another of them, Vicente, says even more: “We carry the business and the improvement in our blood.”
Vicente Ruiz, cousin of Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, in the office of his home, on July 6 in Tepatepec (Hidalgo). Inaki Malvido
The Ruiz all went to college, did well and left town, many of them, but some keep businesses, are public servants or run pharmacies. Xóchitl’s grandfather bought a tractor, the first in town, here are the photos, not everyone had one, and a threshing machine, which he used to rent out his work as a harvester. This gave him the opportunity to save. His grandson Vicente, Xóchitl’s cousin, has a cream-colored 1980s Mercedes at home that he gave to his wife and runs a business with five trailers that haul perishable goods. Mole is also made in the house, in the old mill of the creative uncle Beto, who lived there and about whom more will be known later. You are rich? The house is big but without luxury. The family, the country, from the city. The Ruiz are prosperous compared to the poverty of millions of their countrymen, but half a century ago they lived only in the humility of those years and these cities. Cousin Vicente keeps the machine Xóchitl learned to sew on. He was tutored by his aunt Manuela. The candidate can also cook because her mother, Ms. Bertha, had good seasoning.
As a woman of her time, it is not surprising that young Xóchitl learned to sew and cook. But years later, his life in the capital was shaped by politics. President Fox appointed her to head the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples’ Development, an issue with which she has been associated for much of her political career. In 2010, always under the protection of the PAN, she ran for governor of Hidalgo but did not get it. In fact, in 2015 he achieved the mayoralty of Miguel Hidalgo in the capital. And she was a senator until she embarked on this adventure for the presidency. From this recent period, she is known for a few appearances in the House of Lords, where she dressed up as a dinosaur, or for chaining herself to the President’s chair in protest. Her voice has often leapfrogged the discipline of the party she hosts, and she proclaims herself a feminist and pro-abortion advocate. “They criticize her when she says nonsense…” Cousin Vicente ponders seriously. And does he say them? “Yeah, that says a lot,” he laughs with familiar complicity. She defends her cousin’s humanity: “She has always helped the townspeople with their medical problems, her parents and Aunt Manuela,” she says. “But she has never favored anyone in the family because of her political position, you can’t expect her to do that.” If she ran for president, Vicente would vote for her. Other cousins around town might not. It depends on the street you live on.
Xóchitl Gálvez’s house on the corner of Rosales and Emilio Carranza in Tepatepec (Hidalgo). Inaki Malvido
Nuvia Mayorga, a PRI member, was not only her political ally in the Senate, they were very good friends with the town and her families as little girls. “I knew she would have a great career both professionally and in politics, which she liked from a young age. He worked in the registry office with my father, who was mayor of Tepatepec in the 1980s, and with my mother, who ran the DIF. She and all her siblings were excellent students. Even as a young girl, she gave speeches and was always restless and seeking favor with her people. Mayorga remembers that her friend made the school uniforms for her. “His family has always been very hardworking from top to bottom.” Do you see her as President? “Yes”.
Xóchitl Gálvez (in black) with Nuvia Mayorga and Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, in a file photo. With kind approval
Is Xóchitl Gálvez qualified to occupy the National Palace? Same response again: “Compared to who?” This time uttered by Jorge Castañeda, the former Fox Secretary of State who worked with her at the time. “If you compare them to Obama, Felipe González or Macron, then maybe, I don’t know. But with the presidents we’ve had in Mexico in the last 40 or 50 years, I think so,” says the fellow New York University professor and writer. She mentions the various public offices she has held, but above all she highlights two circumstances that surround her today and that might facilitate her goal. “One of these is the narrative: in it the messenger is the message. I don’t know what she will propose later when she designs a program or if she already has it, but right now the message is very powerful and it is.” She references her rural origins and her now widespread career as a self-made woman . And that is the second reason why he sees a good political perspective in her. “A few years ago it was not taken into account whether Fox was the son of a Spanish mother or had a foreign surname; whether Díaz Ordaz was more brown or less native, whether a president was Creole or mestizo. There was everything. But López Obrador introduced that: the fifis against the people, the powerful against the people, the corrupt against the people. And now it turns out that the Morenista aspirants are both white, both with foreign surnames, relatively upper-middle class and with studies abroad. Away, between quotes, from the city,” he mentions as a contrast to the vital qualities of Gálvez. And he recalls his old partner’s “good humor and agility.” Castañeda and Gálvez in this Fox administration are “the least serious,” says the former official. That gave them affinity. “I particularly liked him.” “She was playful but not frivolous.”
Castañeda also seems like he would vote for her if need be. But what about your city? “I don’t know,” says a cousin. She doesn’t go there often anymore. Shortly after the dead, maybe at Christmas, when the brothers all get together in the house that belonged to their parents and now belongs to the senator. The same cousin claims that people didn’t like everything that came to light about their poor and indigenous origins, which seems like an exaggeration. The Morenists gathered on the square don’t want to hear anything about it. Hidalgo failed to win, but if he should run for president…there’s still a long way to go.
A photograph found in Vicente Ruiz’s house showing Bertha, Xóchitl’s mother. Inaki Malvido
The darkest side of the candidate told it herself and the whole town knows it: the father’s fondness for the glass and the way he raised his hand to the mother. “Uncle Lalo had a bad character,” admit the nephews by blood and marriage. Tepatepec is a teacher factory. There are four normals who have been trained as teachers to tend to all of Hidalgo. The candidate’s father was also present. They nicknamed him Guanajuato because he practiced in that state. Back in town, grandfather Amador gave him a plot of land on Francisco Madero Street so he could build a house like any of the brothers, but there was never more than a few concrete blocks for Xóchitl and his Gálvez cousins to build on played. Children. The family lived on Rosales Street and the candidate grew up with the Ruiz family. When the father beat the mother, the Gálvez family picked up the brother to take him back to their street until the violence subsided, but after two days he was back, Xóchitl’s cousins explain. Over time, the father became an education inspector and bought his first car. did they have money Compared to who, according to Ruiz, alcohol didn’t contribute much to wealth. But others didn’t even have a car. And so everyone tells about the fair in the city as they saw it. Nowadays PAN candidate’s anecdote that she sold jellies in Tepatepec to finance her studies has become very famous. The Morenistas protesting in the square deny it, a cousin of Gálvez shakes his head: “I’ve never seen them.” The Ruiz explain it: “Uncle Beto had a stall in the market and Xóchitl’s mother made biscuits and jellies, to sell her to her brother. The girl took them to the market, of course it is not surprising that she sold some along the way.”
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