Quick Facts
Also called:
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo
Born:
June 24, 1962, Mexico City, Mexico (age 62)

Claudia Sheinbaum (born June 24, 1962, Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican politician and environmental engineer who is the President of Mexico. She is the first woman and the first Jewish person to be elected to the post. Sheinbaum previously served as mayor of Mexico City (2018–23) before stepping down to run in the presidential election in 2024 as a candidate for the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA). She won a landslide victory in June and began her six-year term on October 1.

Sheinbaum is also known for her scientific research and policy advocacy on matters of energy efficiency, sustainability, and the environment. She was one of the scientists and policymakers who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace for their work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Early life and education

Sheinbaum is the second daughter of Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and professor emeritus at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, and Carlos Sheinbaum, a chemical engineer. After spending her childhood in Mexico City, Sheinbaum enrolled at UNAM to study physics. For her master’s and doctorate degrees (also at UNAM), she studied energy engineering and conducted her doctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, U.S. Her dissertation compared trends in energy consumption in Mexico with those of other industrialized countries. Sheinbaum returned to UNAM as a member of the engineering faculty in 1995.

Political activism

Sheinbaum was politically active as a student and professor in the 1980s and ’90s. Although she helped found the student-led Revolutionary Democratic Party in 1998, she wouldn’t hold office until the turn of the 21st century. In 2000 she was appointed Mexico City’s environmental minister by Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with whom she shares strong political ties. In the role, she oversaw the introduction of the city’s bus system, Metrobus, and the construction of a second story of the Periférico, a beltway road that encircles Mexico City’s urban zone. After López Obrador lost his bid to become Mexico’s president in the 2006 election, Sheinbaum returned to UNAM, where she contributed to the climate change mitigation section of the IPCC’s fourth and fifth assessment reports (see also global warming policy) and continued her scientific research. The IPCC was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize following the fourth assessment’s publication in 2007.

In 2015 Sheinbaum was elected mayor of the Tlalpan district of Mexico City. In this role, she stressed the importance of water rights and fair usage. Although she received criticism for accidents occurring in the infrastructure she oversaw during her term of office, including several deaths that occurred during a magnitude-7.1 earthquake that struck Tlalpan in 2017, Sheinbaum’s political stock continued to rise. She was elected mayor of Mexico City in July 2018, receiving 50 percent of the vote in a field of seven candidates. Sheinbaum was the first woman and the first Jewish person to hold the office.

As in her earlier positions, Sheinbaum took on public transit and environmental issues. Her government expanded rainwater collection, reformed waste management, and began a reforestation program. She also announced plans to overhaul the city’s subway system—long in disrepair—with massive investments in modernizing trains and shoring up existing infrastructure. However, her critics have pointed to continued deadly accidents on the subway despite her attempted reforms.

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Presidential election of 2024

On June 12, 2023, Sheinbaum announced that she would step down as Mexico City’s mayor to seek the presidency, running as a candidate for MORENA. Many see her as an ideological successor to President López Obrador (2018–24), as she has embraced similar leftist positions, such as that all citizens have basic rights to health care, education, shelter, and jobs. Sheinbaum has rejected certain aspects of the ruling party’s approach to governing, however, particularly those pertaining to climate change and job creation. Whereas López Obrador stimulated economic growth by propping up Mexico’s petroleum industry, Sheinbaum rejects this policy. She has pushed for a transition away from polluting fossil fuels toward nationally subsidized renewable energy.

Roland Martin
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Nahuatl:
México
Spanish:
Ciudad de México or
In full:
Ciudad de México, D.F.
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Mexico City, city and capital of Mexico, synonymous with the Federal District (Distrito Federal; D.F.). The term Mexico City can also apply to the capital’s metropolitan area, which includes the Federal District but extends beyond it to the west, north, and east, where the state (estado) of México surrounds it on three sides. In contrast, the southern part of the Federal District sustains a limited population on its mountain slopes.

Spanish conquistadors founded Mexico City in 1521 atop the razed island-capital of Tenochtitlán, the cultural and political center of the Aztec (Mexica) empire. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements in the Western Hemisphere, and it is ranked as one of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas. One of the few major cities not located along the banks of a river, it lies in an inland basin called the Valley of Mexico, or Mesa Central. The valley, an extension of the southern Mexican Plateau and, is also known as Anáhuac (Nahuatl: “Close to the Water”) because the area once contained several large lakes. The name México is derived from Nahuatl, the language of its precolonial inhabitants.

Mexico City’s leading position with regard to other urban centers of the developing world can be attributed to its origins in a rich and diverse environment, its long history as a densely populated area, and the central role that its rulers have defined for it throughout the ages. Centralism has perhaps influenced Mexico City’s character the most, for the city has been a hub of politics, religion, and trade since the late Post-Classic Period (13th–16th century ce). Its highland location makes it a natural crossroads for trade between the arid north, the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico (east) and the Pacific Ocean (west), and southern Mexico. The simple footpaths and trails of the pre-Hispanic trade routes became the roads for carts and mule trains of the colonial period and eventually the core of the country’s transportation system, all converging on Mexico City. Throughout the centuries, the city has attracted people from the surrounding provinces seeking jobs and opportunities or the possibilities of comparative safety and shelter, as well as a myriad of amenities, from schools and hospitals to neighborhood organizations and government agencies. Area Federal District, 571 square miles (1,479 square km). Pop. (2020) city, 8,843,706; Federal District, 9,209,944; metro. area, 23,146,802.

Character of the city

Mexico City is a metropolis of contrasts, a monument to a proud and industrious country also faced with many problems. Some observers have fixated on the city’s dangers, horrors, and tragedies—views that were reinforced by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes when he called the city “the capital of underdevelopment.” In the late 20th century the writer Jonathan Kandell retorted, “To its detractors (and even to a few admirers), Mexico City is a nightmare, a monster out of control.…And it just keeps growing.” Others have acknowledged the capital’s drawbacks while holding that it is a true home to millions—a bustling mosaic of avenues, economic interests, and colonias (neighborhoods) that are buttressed by extended family networks, reciprocity, and respect.

By itself the Federal District (the city proper) is comparable in many ways to New York City, Mumbai, and Shanghai. But the capital’s huge metropolitan population constitutes some one-fifth of Mexico’s total, representing one of the world’s most significant ratios of capital-to-national population. Moreover, its dense population has yielded an unparalleled concentration of power and wealth for its urban elite, though not for the denizens of its sprawling shantytowns and lower-working-class neighborhoods.

Catedral at night on Plaza de Armas (also known as plaza mayor) Lima, Peru.
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The city’s rich heritage is palpable on the streets and in its parks, colonial-era churches, and museums. On the one hand, it includes quiet neighborhoods resembling slow-paced rural villages; on the other, it has bustling, overbuilt, cosmopolitan, heavy-traffic areas. Its inhabitants have sought to preserve the magnificence of the past, including the ruins of the main Aztec temple and the mixture of 19th-century French-style mansions and department stores that complement its graceful colonial palaces and churches.

Yet the city’s residents also embrace modernity, as evidenced by world-class examples of the International Style of architecture and the conspicuous consumption of steel, concrete, and glass. Contemporary high-rise structures include the Torre Latinoamericana (Latin American Tower) and the World Trade Center, the museums and hotels along Paseo de la Reforma, and the opulent shopping centers of Perisur and Santa Fé. Supermarkets have sprung up around the metropolis, but traditional markets such as the Merced are still bustling with hawkers of fresh fruits, live chickens, tortillas, and charcoaled corn on the cob. Chapultepec Castle, the Independence Monument, the Pemex fountain, and numerous other monuments and memorials attest to past dreams and future aspirations amid the chaos of congested avenues and endless neighborhoods built on the dry bed of Lake Texcoco.

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