ng the founding families of Aguascalientes, bearing the surnames Ruiz de Esparza, Alvarado, Tiscareno de Molina, Luebana, and Delgado.
The Registros Parroquiales (Parish Registers) for La Parroquia de la Asunción (Assumption Parish) in Aguascalientes are available through the Family History Library are contained on 458 rolls of film and range from 1616 to 1961. During the first decades that these registers were kept, dozens of marriages and baptisms were conducted for mestizos, negros, mulatos, and indios, who made up the majority of the population. It is interesting to note, however, that in some cases, the padrones (sponsors and godparents) at these marriages and baptisms of mixed-race and African persons were Spanish individuals, most notably the Ruiz de Esparza family.
The Ruiz de Esparza family is a well-known Basque family that settled in Aguascalientes at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century. The surname Esparza is said to mean one who came from Esparza (a barren place or a place where feather grass grew) in Spain. The word was derived from the Latin sparsus (spread abroad, scattered), probably referring to land that yields little. Esparza is the name of a village near Pamplona in Navarra (Navarre), España (Spain).
It is very likely that the Ruiz de Esparza family of Aguascalientes could trace its roots back to that small village. The patriarch of this family in Mexico was Lope Ruiz de Esparza, who is documented by the Catalogo de Pasajeros a Indias (Vol. III - #2.633) as having sailed from Spain to Mexico on Feb. 8, 1593. Lope, who was the son of Lope Ruiz de Esparza and Ana Días de Eguino, was a bachelor and a servant of Doñ Enrique Maleon. After arriving in Mexico, Lope made his way to Aguascalientes where, about a year later, he is believed to have married Francisca de Gabai Navarro y Moctezuma. In the following decades, the Ruiz de Esparza family intermarried extensively with other prominent Spanish
