Mexican playwright and puppeteer. Drama teacher at the Escuela Normal for teachers, Gilberto R. Alvarado began to study puppetry at the age of twenty-nine. He was responsible for launching famous Mexican puppet characters, among them Don Ferruco (which later became his nickname), which was inspired by the prints of the painter José Guadalupe Posada. The master Ramírez, known as “Don Ferruco”, hence travelled to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. He also participated with his educational, cultural, and social activist theatre as part of several government campaigns and in cultural missions launched by President Lázaro Cárdenas.

(See Mexico.)