Historian Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara passed away at 60

Historian Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, one of the leading specialists in New Spain and the national independence, as well as a great critic and activist against open-pit mining, died at the age of 60 as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) from which he had been suffering for almost five years.

The death, as announced yesterday, occurred on Thursday in the Mexican capital, where this distinguished specialist and social and political fighter was from, who was a professor-researcher at the Colegio de San Luis and a collaborator of The Day.

According to a profile in the digital newspaper Astrolabe, During the last 23 years of his life, without neglecting his productive career as a historian with global recognition, he contributed to the state of San Luis Potosí an intense and committed activism that helped to make the ecocide of the San Xavier Mine visible on a national and international scaleowned by the Canadian company New Gold Inc, on the emblematic Cerro de San Pedro.

He was also, together with his partner, the Italian Sonia Deotto, one of the key players in the direction taken by the fight to declare the Sierra de San Miguelito a protected natural area, when it was on the verge of being consummated with the large extensions coveted by real estate developers excluded from the final polygon.

born researcher

Born in 1963, Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara lived as a student in the struggle for free education in the 1980s, led by the University Student Council (CEU), according to the aforementioned profile. After graduating from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he completed a master’s degree in history at the Colegio de Michoacán and then a doctorate in social sciences with a specialty in history, at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology of the West.

He settled in the capital of Potosí as a professor-researcher of the history program at the Colegio de San Luis in 2001, the year in which he joined the National System of Researchers.

A born researcher, he traveled to all the regions of the state, and it did not take long for him to identify with the seriousness of the Canadian mining project in Cerro de San Pedro, where he immediately recognized that it was an attack on history, culture and the environment.points out that digital media outlet, to which the historian gave his last interview.

In addition to dozens of historical publications in books and specialized magazines, including the one entitled The never-ending search for ancestors: African blacks and their descendants in the Hispanic world, Written in collaboration with Rafael Castañeda García, the historian and activist distinguished himself for his opinion articles published in The Day, from which he criticized both the political uses of history and neoliberalism, in addition to waging a fierce battle against Minera San Xavier.

The last text in The Day

His last collaboration with this newspaper, published on December 8, 2023, was shocking, as he claimed the right to euthanasia by giving his testimony as a person suffering from ALS, a progressive degenerative neuromuscular disease, which affects the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord.

Titled ELA: If you don’t have money, let yourself die, In this article, the author takes up the case of the Italian Silvia Battini, who was diagnosed with this disease in 2009, in order to reflect on the fact that in Mexico, as in many other countries, those who suffer from this illness become an unsustainable economic burden despite remaining active in the workforce, to which he added the lack of political interest and alternatives to escape this situation.

After listing what life with ALS entails, which, although it is a disease that It does not cause physical pain, but instead causes deep emotional pain and a critical economic situation.stated that, in his case, he could collapse at that moment or take months to die.

In any scenario, those of us who suffer from ALS, including our families, must win the right to care and to decide about our death, rights that we hope will form part of the self-proclaimed Fourth Transformation, second-floor version.he wrote on that occasion.

In the extensive interview with Astrolabe, Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara spoke of the dangers of history, specifically its political use, stating that “it feeds too many fantasies, especially of a nationalist nature, and that is very serious, because this political use of history has led to wars and terrible disagreements.

“Nationalist history interests me as an object of study, but I do not practice it or disseminate it, it does not interest me.

I think that if we studied history and could transmit it well, without all those nationalist effluvia, we could understand things much better and live better, without the schizophrenia of feeling that they came and raped us 500 years ago when you were not even there, nor had anything to do with it.