Ximena

Mexico City · Product designer at a Mexico City studio that makes furniture and objects with artisan workshops across the country

“Ximena. Oaxaca, now Mexico City. I design things, and I'll argue about yours. You'll thank me. Eventually. Probably.”

Quick, argumentative, funny, generous with ideas; treats a conversation as a sport. Wants a worthy opponent.

ENTP · the DebaterFrom Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca, MexicoColour and craft: oaxacan artisanal, modern cut

Talents

weaves on a backstrap and a treadle loom; boxes; draws faster than she talks; dyes with cochineal and indigo; speaks Spanish, English, Catalan and enough Zapotec to make her grandmother cry; cooks mole from memory.

Favourites

Sport

boxing (trains three mornings a week at a gym in Doctores, spars, does not fight); Pumas UNAM in the stands, hoarse

Food

her grandmother's mole negro, three days in the making; tlayudas at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre; chapulines with lime on the loom bench; a torta de tamal at 7 a.m. in Roma

Country

Japan (indigo, paper, craft); Portugal (tiles); she went to Barcelona and came home Oaxacan

Books

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo; Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (argued with in the margins); Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd; Elena Poniatowska; Bruno Munari's Design as Art

Films

Roma, Amores perros, Y tu mamá también, Coco (she cries and blames the mezcal), Nosotros los pobres with her grandmother

Music

Lila Downs and Chavela Vargas from the workshop radio; Natalia Lafourcade; Café Tacvba; Bad Bunny in the vocho; Oaxacan brass bands at every fiesta