El Charco del Ingenio joins the mourning of the Velázquez Benavidez family and the town of Xichú, in the Sierra Gorda of Guanajuato, for the departure of Esperanza Benavídez Mendieta, Doña Pera, one of the last mountain women of the generation that came into the world in the twenties of the last century. In addition to a prodigious memory, she was the possessor of vast ancestral knowledge, and during her life she spared no effort to defend and care for the hills, plants, animals, rivers. Doña Pera had several children, highlighting among them Eliazar Velázquez, writer, chronicler and cultural promoter, and Guillermo Velázquez, legendary minstrel and troubadour, creator and mainstay of Los Leones de la Sierra de Xichú, who has revived and projected the Huapango Arribeño and Decimal Poetry beyond the horizons of the Sierra Gorda.

It fills us with pride to remember that back in 1992, the curator of plants of El Charco del Ingenio, the eminent cactologist Charles Glass, in his botanical explorations through the Sierra Gorda, met Doña Pera and was so impressed by her deep knowledge and personality, that he decided to pay tribute to her through a new botanical discovery of world significance. Thus, Glass gave the name Doña Esperanza to a subspecies of the cactus Strombocactus disciformis, being henceforth registered for the scientific world as strombocactus disciformis subsp. esperanzae Glass & S. Arias.

It remains, therefore, as an offering of the Botanical Garden of San Miguel de Allende, the name of this beautiful native plant of the Sierra Gorda to the memory of Doña Esperanza Benavídez Mendieta.