Rio Grande Boots · History

History

Rio Grande Boots (Calzado Río Grande) is a boot manufacturing company based in León, Guanajuato, Mexico. Its own history page says founder Delfino Muñoz Becerra was born in León in 1902, began working as a shoemaker at 18 in one of the city's first shoe factories, and at 40, together with his wife Petra Rodríguez, started a small cowboy-boot workshop at home in 1942.

Later milestones on the same page include a later director general, Miguel Muñoz, developing Mexico's first roper boot in 1987, and the opening of the company's first store at Gran Plaza in León in 1991. The page gives two different years for the company's first flexible boot — 1988 in one part of the text and 1991 in the timeline — without resolving the discrepancy. A separate company, Botas Jaca, traces its own founding to the very same 1942 workshop of Delfino and Petra, with the Jaca name becoming official in 1970; Rio Grande's page does not mention Jaca, and no source ties the two companies together as one business.