My name is Humberto Aguirre. I am Mexican. My professional and personal life is crossed by multiple interests. I studied journalism at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, when the careers taught there had a common core based on a tedious but solid and useful Marxist education. Those were the times of the Consejo Estudiantil Universitario and the neoliberal experiments in Latin America. Since then, I began to collaborate as an article writer, illustrator and political cartoonist (or “monero” as they are called in Mexico) in different publications, many of them now extinct.

Attracted by the manifestations of visual language, advertising, caricature, and semiotics, I developed a thesis that classified the origin and function of fictitious characters appearing in advertisements and packaging. I relied on a rather eclectic theoretical body, which included “The Semiotics of Advertising, by George Peninou, “The Semiotics of Nature” by Worringer, and Marxist principles such as “Commodity Fetishism,” among others.

After a very brief stint in public administration (under the orders of a sociopathic boss) and in the context of the criminal destruction of Iraq by the United States and its allies under the pretext of the “fight against terrorism,” I became interested in activism and peaceful civil resistance for justice and peace. I was a guinea pig in the very new second generation of the Master's program in International Cooperation for Development at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. I proposed a project that made me the beneficiary of an academic exchange scholarship at the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution (Austria). During this time, I obtained the inputs to understand diverse worldviews and to analyze Mexican peace movements in a master's thesis.

Back in Mexico, I enrolled in an international cooperation program sponsored by the Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social (CENCOS), which took me to Santa María Quiegolani, a town located in the southern “sierra” of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. There, I worked with a Zapotec community to establish the basis for a community radio project, which included fostering an approach, on the part of the villagers, to the dissemination of local issues and interests, planning, research, and scriptwriting tasks.

In October 2001, the Mexican federal government issued expropriation decrees to build an airport in Texcoco, Mexico, which was opposed by the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, deploying, through direct action, a rich symbolic arsenal of identity expressions at the service of political protest. I was interested in this phenomenon, seen in the light of the theories of social movements, theatrical performance, and play. The result of this analysis was crystallized in a PhD thesis supervised by the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza.”

While I was doing all that, I also worked as a journalist and columnist in newspapers; I was also a professor of the subject “Comparative Public Policies” at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO).

Although my work consists primarily of political cartoons, I have also explored the world of comics as an author and as a scholar. I opened a Youtube channel that talks about comics and cartoonists, their history, their cultural context, and their authors. Comic books hide surprising universes that go far beyond Manga or Marvel.

I like to study, and I feel satisfaction when I reread a text or look at a well-made cartoon or comic, despite the fact that more than once in the editorial offices of newspapers I was told that my articles were “too dense,” and in academic circles they were “too light.”.

I am proudly anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, and anti-Zionist; I am solitary and lazy; creative, contradictory, libidinous, and milonguero. I have a thousand personality traits that I don't like; what I do like is cinema. Supported by the Mexican Institute of Cinematography, I made a modest film that won a couple of awards about a lady who has daydreams, like you and me.

I don't have any allergies that I know of, and friends, just a few.