- Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox Quesada was the President of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. He was elected in the 2000 presidential election, a historically significant election that made him the first president elected from an opposition party since Álvaro Obregón in 1920. The 2000 election was also significant because it was the first presidential election since the end of the Mexican Revolution to be considered clean and fair. He was elected with 42 percent of the vote, …
- Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo (July 61907 - July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter who depicted the indigenous culture of her country in a style combining Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism. An active communist supporter, she was married to Mexican muralist and cubist painter Diego Rivera. She is widely known for her self-portraits often expressing her physical pain and suffering through symbolism. In the last three decades she has gained admiration in Europe and the US. In 2002, …
- Ernesto Zedillo
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León was President of Mexico from 1994 to 2000.
- Alaska
Alaska (born Olvido Gara Jova, in Mexico City) is a Spanish singer, famous in Spain and Latin America. Her father was a Spaniard exiled during the Spanish Civil War and her mother a Cuban exiled by Castro. Some years before Francisco Franco died, her parents decided to move back to Spain. Alaska was a big fan of Lou Reed, T-Rex, etc, but David Bowie was her biggest influence. She even told her mother that she would love to be a boy just to be gay.
- Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of cancer.
- Marco Antonio Barrera
Marco Antonio Barrera Tapia (born January 17, 1974 in Mexico City) is a Mexican professional boxer and former world WBC Super Featherweight champion. Barrera, whose brother Jorge Barrera is also a boxer, had a successful amateur boxing career where he won 55 out of 58 bouts, and then he turned professional. Barrera is a member of an affluent Mexico City family.
- Roberto Madrazo
Roberto Madrazo Pintado is a Mexican politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He was the candidate of the alliance between his party and the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) in the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Madrazo was born in Villahermosa, Tabasco to Carlos A. Madrazo and Graciela Pintado Jiménez. His father, was a reformist politician at a time when the PRI was the only viable party.
- Marcelo Ebrard
Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubón is a Mexican politician affiliated to the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who served as general secretary of the former Mexican Federal District Department, secretary of public security and secretary of social development of the Mexican capital. He is the current the Head of Government of the Federal District since December 5, 2006.
- Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Carlos Salinas de Gortari (born April 3, 1948 in Mexico City) was President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994.
- Diego Luna
Diego Luna (born Diego Luna Alexander on December 29, 1979) is a Mexican actor. Luna was born in Mexico City. His mother, Fiona, died during a car accident when he was only two years old. She had worked in the film industry and had made sure that this was a life Luna would be immersed in. He soon became involved in his father's passion, entertainment - his father is the most acclaimed living theatre, cinema and opera set designer in Mexico.
- El Angel
- Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano is a prominent Mexican politician. He is a former governor of Michoacán, former Head of Government of the Federal District and a founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)
- Santiago Creel
Santiago Creel Miranda is a Mexican politician. He is a member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). He earned a Law degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His career highlights include running for Head of Government of the Federal District in 2000 (a race he lost to Andrés Manuel López Obrador). After that he was appointed to the cabinet by President Vicente Fox to serve as Secretary of the Interior, …
- Luis Ernesto Derbez
Luis Ernesto Derbez Bautista is a Mexican politician. Upon assuming power in December 2000, President Vicente Fox chose him to serve as his Secretary of Economy. In January 2003, following the resignation of Jorge Castañeda, Derbez took over as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, a position that he held until President Vicente Fox's term ended on December 1, 2006.
- Paulina Rubio
Paulina Rubio Dosamantes (born June 17 1971) is a Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated Mexican singer and actress.
- Alejandro González Iñárritu
Alejandro González Iñárritu, born August 15, 1963, to Hector González Gama and Luz María Iñárritu in Mexico City, is an Academy Award-nominated Mexican film director.
- Alfonso Cuarón
Alfonso Cuarón Orozco is an Academy Award-nominated Mexican film director, screenwriter and producer. He is the son of Alfredo Cuarón, a cardiologist who worked for the United Nations' IAEA sector for many years. He has three siblings, Alfredo, Carlos and Cristina; and two half sisters, Christina and Elisa.
- Michel Jourdain Jr.
Michel Jourdain Jr. (born September 2, 1976, Mexico City, Mexico) is a NASCAR driver. Jourdain Jr. started racing cars in the Mexican Formula Junior series at the age of 12. He then moved to the Mexican Formula K and Formula 2 series. In 1996, Jourdain ran several races in the Indy Racing League (IRL) and the CART (now Champ Car) series, including the Indy 500. At the age of 19, he became one of the youngest drivers to race in both Champ Car and the Indy 500.
- Juan O'Gorman
Juan O'Gorman, was a Mexican artist, both a painter and an architect. O'Gorman was born in Coyoacán, Mexican Federal District, a suburb within greater Mexico City, to an Irish father, Cecil Crawford O'Gorman (a painter himself) and a Mexican mother. In the 1920s he studied architecture at the Academy of San Carlos, the Art and Architecture school at National University, Mexico. He became a well known architect, worked on the new Bank Of Mexico building, …
- José López Portillo
José López Portillo y Pacheco ("JOLOPO") was the President of Mexico from 1976 to 1982. Born in Mexico City, López Portillo studied medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) before beginning his political career with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1959. He held several positions in the administrations of his two predecessors before being appointed to serve as finance minister under Luis Echeverría, a close friend, from 1973 to 1975.
- Cantinflas
Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes (August 12, 1911 - April 20, 1993) was a comedian of the Mexican theatre and film industry. He earned wide popularity with his interpretation of the character Cantinflas, an impoverished "campesino" cum slumdweller that originated in the "pelado". The character came to be associated with the national identity of Mexico, and allowed Moreno to establish a long, …
- Jorge Castañeda
Jorge Castañeda Gutman is a Mexican politician and academic who served as Secretary of Foreign Affairs (2000 - 2003). Castañeda was born in Mexico City. He received the French Baccalauréat from the Lycée Franco-Mexicain in Mexico City. Then after receiving his B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-La Sorbonne) he worked as a professor at several universities, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico, …
- Luis Echeverría
Luis Echeverría Álvarez served as the President of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Echeverría joined the faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1947 and taught political theory. He rose in the hierarchy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and eventually became the private secretary of the party president, General Rodolfo Sánchez Taboada. Echeverría served as Interior Secretary under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz from 1964 to 1970.
- Lydia Cacho
Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is a Mexican journalist and feminist and human rights activist. She is a member of the "Red Internacional de Periodistas con Visión de Género".
- Gustavo Díaz Ordaz
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños Cacho served as the President of Mexico from 1964 to 1970. After Díaz Ordaz Mexicans did not elect a president who had previously been elected to an office until the presidential election of Vicente Fox in 2000.
- Conlon Nancarrow
Conlon Nancarrow (born October 27 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas; died August 10 1997 in Mexico City, Mexico) was a U.S.-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955. Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond human performance ability.
- Guillermo Ortiz
Guillermo Ortiz Martínez is the current governor of the Bank of Mexico, Mexico's central bank. Ortiz Martínez is the son of Gen. Leopoldo Ortiz Sevilla and Graciela Martínez Ostos and received a B.A. in Economics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and both a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in the United States. He joined the public service in 1971 and has been Mexico's ambassador to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
- Luis Mandoki
Luis Mandoki (born in 1954 in Mexico City) is a film director of the Cinema of Mexico and Hollywood. Luis Mandoki studied Fine Arts in Mexico and at the San Francisco Art Institute, the London College of Printing, and the London International Film School. While attending this last institution he directed his first short film "Silent Music" which won an award at the International Amateur Film Festival of Cannes Film Festival in 1976.
- Hermann Bellinghausen
Hermann Bellinghausen is a Mexican physician, poet, writer and editor. He obtained his MD degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has served as collaborator on the Mexican weekly magazines "En Solidaridad" and "Mundo Médico" and as an editor for "Ojarasca". He is an editorialist for "La Jornada" in Chiapas. He wrote along with Alberto Cortés the script for the movie "Ciudad de ciegos" ("City of the blind").
- Ilan Stavans
Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky on April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is an American intellectual, essayist, lexicographer, cultural commentator, translator, short-story author, TV personality, teacher, and man of letters known for his insights into American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures.
- Alfonso Arau
Alfonso Arau is a Mexican director of such films as "Zapata: The Dream of a Hero", "Like Water for Chocolate" (adapted from the novel written by his wife Laura Esquivel), "A Walk in the Clouds" with Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn, and the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production "A Painted House", adapted from the John Grisham novel of the same name.
- Laura Esquivel
Laura Esquivel is a Mexican author. She was born the third of four children of Julio César Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife Josefa Valdés. In her first novel "Como agua para chocolate" ("Like Water for Chocolate"), released in 1989, Esquivel uses magical realism to combine the ordinary and the supernatural. The novel, taking place in nineteenth century Mexico, shows the importance of the kitchen in Esquivel's life.
- Carlos Slim Helú
Carlos Slim Helú Aglamaz is a Mexican businessman. Slim has a substantial influence over the telecommunications industry in Mexico and in much of the rest of Latin America as well. He controls "Teléfonos de México" (Telmex), Telcel and " América Móvil " companies. Though he maintains an active involvement in his companies, his three sons Carlos Slim Domit, Marco Antonio Slim Domit and Patrick Slim Domit and his son in law Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, …
- Arturo Ripstein
Arturo Ripstein is a Mexican film director. Ripstein got his break into movies working as an uncredited assistant director for Luis Buñuel. In 1965, he directed his first feature, "Tiempo De Morir". Written by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, it began a tradition of making independent films written by high-profile Latin-American authors. In 1997, Ripstein won the Mexican National Prize for the Arts, the second filmmaker after Buñuel to do so.
- Porfirio Muñoz Ledo
Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega is a Mexican politician. He is one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Muñoz Ledo studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1951 to 1955 and later pursued graduate studies at the University of Paris. He served as a member of the cabinets of presidents Luis Echeverría as Secretary of Labor (1972-1975); and Jose Lopez Portillo as Secretary of Education (1976-1977).
- Guillermo Arriaga
Guillermo Arriaga Jordán is an Academy Award-nominated, award-winning Mexican author, screenwriter and producer. He received the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay Award for "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada". Arriaga was born in Mexico City and spent his childhood in one of the most violent sectors of the metropolis. At the age of 13 he lost the sense of smell after a brutal street fight that would later serve as inspiration for some of his work.
- Carlos Monsiváis
Carlos Monsiváis is a Mexican writer and journalist on the "El Universal" newspaper. He writes political opinion columns in other leading newspapers and is considered to be an opinion leader within the country's progressive sectors. Monsiváis studied economics and philosophy in the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His writings, some of which are written with an ironic undertone, …
- Agustín Carstens
Agustín Carstens Carstens is a prominent Mexican economist and current Secretary of Finance of Mexico since 1 December 2006. Previously, he served as Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 1 August 2003 to 16 October 2006 and as Treasurer of the Bank of Mexico.
- Miguel de Icaza
Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. He started writing free software in 1992.
- Rosario Castellanos
Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 - 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the generation of 1950, she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, …