June 17 marks 10 years since Rubén Aguirre died, and the memory that still follows him is simple: Professor Jirafales. The actor, who died on June 16, 2016, is being revisited now because his place in El Chavo del 8 and the wider Chespirito universe never really left television memory in Latin America.
That staying power began in 1968, when Aguirre met Roberto Gómez Bolaños and started a partnership that would define much of his career. He worked on Los supergenios de la "Mesa Cuadrada" and Chespirotadas in 1968-1969, then moved into El Chapulín Colorado from 1970 to 1992 and El Chavo del 8 from 1971 to 1992. Those years turned Profesor Jirafales into one of the most recognizable figures in the cast, a role that outlived the programs themselves.
For viewers, the character is only part of the story. Aguirre, who emigrated from Monterrey to Ciudad de México at the end of the 1950s and was an agronomy engineer by profession, kept working after the main Chespirito run ended. The program stopped being broadcast in 1995, but he appeared in Soñadoras in 1998, published Después de usted in 2015 and had his legacy echoed again that same year with El Chapulín Colorado animado.
The harder part of his later life explains why his final years looked so different from the energetic teacher fans remembered. He retired in 2013 after a 2007 automobile accident in Ciudad de México left him with a serious spinal injury and chronic pain. His wife, Consuelo de los Reyes, lost one leg in that crash. Aguirre had already spent years living with health problems, including diabetes, and a pneumonia complication worsened his condition near the end. He celebrated his 82nd birthday two days before he died.
That is why the anniversary matters now: it is not only a date on the calendar, but a reminder that the man behind Profesor Jirafales kept carrying that role long after the cameras moved on. Recent references, including a Professor Jirafales action figure in 2019, Street Chaves II in 2022 and a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Bad Bunny and Jon Hamm, show how the character still travels beyond the original broadcasts. What remains unresolved is not whether Aguirre mattered, but how completely his work with Roberto Gómez Bolaños shaped the version of Professor Jirafales that still survives in memory today.
