In order to keep financially afloat, her sister María del Carmen gave piano lessons, while Rosario, along with her older brother Guillermo, sold copies of the local newspaper El correo de Tabasco on street corners, for which they earned about 10 centavos a day.

In 1918, at the age of 19, she moved to Mexico City in order to continue her studies, during the day working as a primary school teacher and during the evening attending classes at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, from which she would obtain an M.A.

It was during this time that she succeeded in winning Barnard College's Lillian Emma Kimball Graduate Fellowship for Spanish studies at Columbia University.

Gutiérrez Eskildsen would go on to write more than a dozen books and many more articles on topics pertaining to grammar and linguistics in general, and dialectology, language pedagogy, phonetics, and prosody, in particular.

Nevertheless, she unexpectedly became the (adoptive) mother of a 17-year-old newly-orphaned teacher, Sergio Gómez Cabello, whose unhappy situation she learned about in 1953 while visiting the elementary school where he taught.