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Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s next leader?

The granddaughter of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews who arrived in Mexico between 1920 and 1940, Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, (Mexico’s virtual president-elect) grew up in middle-class Tlalpan, the largest of Mexico City’s 16 boroughs. 

pg3Born June 24, 1962, she took ballet and dance classes as a child, and inherited her commitment to social causes from her parents, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist, and Carlos Sheinbaum, a chemical engineer and businessman, who both participated in the student movement of 1968.  According to biographers, she would often accompany her leftist parents on visits to their friends imprisoned for militancy.

Sheinbaum obtained a degree in Physics and a master’s degree in Energy Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she began her political activism, forming part of the University Student Council, a group of students that would become the founding youth movement of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).  She took part in the student strikes protesting the swing toward neoliberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s.

For her doctorate, Sheinbaum attended the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, where she met her first husband, Carlos Imaz, with whom she had her only daughter, and became fluent in English.

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