We’ve heard a lot about Claudia Sheinbaum over the past months and years, but what do we know about her family?
The newly sworn-in president, who turned 62 on June 24, has one adult daughter from a nearly 30-year marriage that lasted from 1987 to 2016.
After meeting Mexican academic-turned-politician Carlos Ímaz Gispert in 1986, Sheinbaum married him in 1987 when she was 25. Two years later, Ímaz helped found the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and in the 2000s served as the party’s Mexico City head and also the Delegation Chief for the capital’s Tlalpan borough. During the same period in the 2000s, Sheinbaum was serving as Mexico City’s environmental minister under then Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In 1988, Sheinbaum and Ímaz had a daughter, Mariana. Mariana and Rodrigo — Ímaz’s young son from a previous marriage — were raised as brother and sister, and Sheinbaum continues to have a very close relationship with both; most of her biographies list her as having two children.
Sheinbaum has also been a grandmother for the past 16 months — as Rodrigo Ímaz Alarcón and his partner had a son, Pablo, in May 2023.
Mariana Ímaz Sheinbaum, 36, followed her parents on an academic path that included a master’s degree in literary theory and comparative literature from the University of Barcelona. She then taught history and sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Mariana was already familiar with Northern California, having lived with her parents in the San Francisco Bay Area while her mother earned a doctorate in energy engineering at University of California-Berkeley. Sheinbaum’s doctorate analyzed the use of energy engineering in the Mexican transportation sector.
Mariana is now the academic coordinator of humanities at UNAM-Boston, which organizes lectures and other programs to foster ties between UNAM and Boston-area academic institutions. She has kept a low profile regarding her mother’s political work, apart from a few brief appearances in “Claudia: The Documentary,” a 2023 film directed by her stepbrother, Rodrigo.
Rodrigo Ímaz Alarcón, 42, was very young when his father divorced his mother, Sandra Alarcón. He has studied at UNAM in Mexico City and earned a master’s degree in the arts in Valencia, Spain. He is now a visual artist who “uses drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, sculpture, film and installation as a means to critically question and represent contemporary events,” according to his personal biography.
His debut film, “Juan Perros,” is a 34-minute documentary about a forgotten man who lives with his pigs and a pack of dogs next to a garbage dump in the Mexican desert. It was shown in the 2016 Morelia International Film Festival. A reel of his film highlights can be seen on his website.
Claudia Sheinbaum was born in 1962 to a Mexican Jewish family in Mexico City, the second of three children. Her older brother, Julio, is a physicist and oceanography researcher, and her younger sister, Adriana, is a teacher living in the United States.
Adriana is married to Rodrigo García Barcha, son of the late legendary Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Their father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was a chemical engineer and businessman involved in producing chemicals for curing leather. He died in 2013 at age 80.
Sheinbaum’s mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, 84, is a molecular biologist who received Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 2023. Earlier this year, she was part of the 2nd International Symposium on Experimental and Translational Medicine.
Sheinbaum’s paternal Ashkenazi Jewish grandparents immigrated to Mexico in the 1920s from Lithuania, and her maternal Sephardic Jewish grandparents came from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust.
In a 2018 NPR profile, Claudia says she celebrated major Jewish holidays at her grandparents’ homes, but that “her home life was secular.”
At the same time that she legally separated from Carlos Ímaz in 2016, she began dating and eventually married Jesús María Tarriba Unger, a mathematician and financial risk specialist at the Bank of Mexico since 2017. The Sinaloa native turned 62 on Sept. 1.
Sheinbaum and Tarriba had reconnected in 2016 — rekindling a romantic relationship they had cut short during their student years — and were married in a small civil ceremony in November 2023 in Mexico City.
Tarriba holds a Ph.D. from UNAM and completed a doctoral stay at the University of California-Irvine. In 1994, he received the Weizmann Prize in Exact Sciences for the best doctoral thesis, awarded by the Mexican Academy of Sciences.
He worked as a quantitative analyst at Banamex from 1994 to 1997, then moved to Madrid, Spain, where he lived and worked in the banking industry for 18 years.
With reports from Expansión, Quién, SDP Noticias and Diario AS
