Columba Bush was
born in León, Guanajuato, Mexico,[1] the
daughter of José María Garnica Rodríguez (1925-2013), a migrant worker and
waiter from Arperos, Guanajuato, and Josefina Gallo Esquivel (born 1920)
from León, who were married in 1949. Her father abandoned the family when she
was 3 years old in 1956.[4] Her
parents were divorced in 1963 when Columba was 10 years old.[5] She
remained in León with her mother while her father emigrated to the United
States.
She attended
Instituto Antonia Mayllen, a private Catholic school in the historic center of
León.
She met Jeb Bush in
1970 in León when she was 16 years old and he was 17.[1] He
was teaching English as a second language and
assisting in the building of a school in a small village outside of León, Guanajuato, Mexico,
(the village of Ibarrilla)[6] as
part of a class at Andover called Man and Society.[4][1]
They were married
on February 23, 1974, in Austin, Texas[7][8][9] at
the chapel in the Catholic student center on the campus of the University of Texas.[10][4] At
the time of the wedding, she did not speak English, therefore, a part of the
wedding ceremony was conducted in Spanish.[1]
Columba
has made about as vast a journey as any American immigrant ever could, from a
barely-middle-class girl raised by a divorced single mother in León, to
potential first lady of an American presidential franchise. Yet today, Columba
is no more a part of Jeb Bush’s Spanish-speaking political circles than she is
of his English-speaking ones. She did not develop a separate life in Miami’s
society pages, or become a well-known hostess on the Cuban scene. In fact, as
Jeb was smoothly going native, her own cultural transition to Bushland was
halting and bumpy. She became an
American citizen, in 1979, just so she could vote for her father-in-law for
president. “It was a difficult decision to make,” she later told a local paper.
