Esperanza López Mateos (January 8, 1907 – September 19, 1951) was a Mexican translator, political activist, syndicalist, and mountaineer.

She participated in the strike by the miners of Nueva Rosita (1950–1951) and worked with Vicente Lombardo Toledano; together they supported many Jewish exiles fleeing European wars and seeking refuge in Mexico.

[3] The baptismal certificate of her half-brother Rafael Fernando López Mateos, born March 12, 1904, states that at that time Elena Mateos was a widow and Rafael Fernando was the son of her late husband Mariano Gerardo López; the vital records reveal that the father's death date was the same as the son's birthdate.

[4] Regina Santiago argues that the father of Esperanza and her younger brother Adolfo was Gonzalo de Murga.

According to a story told by Gabriel Figueroa in his Memorias, the Spanish Gonzalo de Murga had a daughter with an aristocratic English woman who left him; he later entrusted this child to Elena Mateos, who named her Esperanza.

Between April and June 1938, Esperanza provided shorthand transcription for a fine arts conference organized by the anti-Nazi Liga pro-Cultura Alemana en México (Pro-German Culture League in Mexico).

In 1946, journalist Antonio Rodríguez published a series of articles in the magazine Mañana which asserted that Esperanza López Mateos was the true author of the novels of B.

Later, the Mexican Jewish community built a school that bears the name of Esperanza López Mateos, as a gesture of appreciation for her work on behalf of refugees.

[17] On October 16, 1950, a strike broke out among miners of Nueva Rosita against Mexicana Zinc & Co., a subsidiary of the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO).

Shortly thereafter, Esperanza traveled to Nueva Rosita to deliver funds raised by the Comité de Defensa y Solidaridad con las Huelgas Mineras (Committee of Defense and Solidarity with the Miners' Strike), led by Felipe Sánchez Acevedo, Ángel Bassols Batalla, and herself in Mexico City.

Just two days before the strike began, Esperanza wrote to Henry Schnautz that she could walk perfectly; she told him that she was working "like a demon to earn our daily bread."

In Elena Poniatowska's interview with the family of Gabriel Figueroa, they argue that it was a suicide caused by conditions that Esperanza suffered from following her accident.

However they also reported that according to José Álvarez Amézquita, the doctor who attended Esperanza and prepared the death certificate, she was shot in the neck.