Strategy and operations

He is Chief Operating Officer of Los Hijos de la Malinche, the strategic communications and narrative agency in Mexico City.

His specialty is processes and methodologies: turning a strategy into a system a team can carry out, measure and sustain over time. He runs the agency’s operations and designs how each project is planned, carried out and evaluated.

delamalinche.com

The agency

Strategic communications
Public relations
Crisis management
Political consulting
Social listening
Campaigns

His specialty

Processes and methodologies
He designs how a team plans, carries out and measures each communications project.
Communication workshops
He leads workshops for teams, companies and institutions that need to communicate better.
Communications strategy
He builds strategies and narratives for people, brands and institutions.

The agency has worked with Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Gustavo Dudamel, Alondra de la Parra, Bimbo, GNP, Bosque de Chapultepec, the Royal Opera House and Chanel, as well as governments in Latin America and Europe and presidential and mayoral campaigns.

Books

A poet and editor for more than twenty years. His poetry is full of animals, plants and landscapes: coyotes, hares, deserts, seas and asteroids that stand for desire, time and what never quite happens.

He has published poetry, a novel and a work of audio fiction.

Poetry · Buenos Aires Poetry, Pippa Passes series, 2025
La edad renaciente de las rocas
Poems written over fifteen years, gathered like a constellation.
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Poetry · Aliosventos Ediciones, 2021
De paso por lo que no acaba
“Mexicanized” haiku.
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Novel · Editorial Montea, 2017
Alfiler
His first novel.
More about the book

Other poetry books: Un verde hubiera (2005), Circo de dioses (2009), La historia de un no (2011) and Fuego con ascendente viento (2014). Audio fiction: Teología de un asesinato (Audiofilm, 2024), an immersive sound experience.

OpinionEl Universal

His column in El Universal

By David Guajardo Ruz

He writes an opinion column for El Universal, one of Mexico’s most widely read newspapers.

He has also published in Letras Libres, El Norte, Río Arga and The Orbital, among others.

The hand-flower tree

The hand-flower tree (Chiranthodendron pentadactylon), the Nahua macpalxóchitl, is an endemic, threatened species of the cloud forests of Mexico and Central America. Its red flower, with five stamens that look like fingers, made it an emblem. In Toluca, a specimen roughly three hundred years old still survives; Alexander von Humboldt visited it in 1803.

David founded Flor Manita, Mexico’s only Environmental Management Unit (UMA) dedicated to propagating this tree.

950trees a year: Flor Manita’s propagation capacity.
9/10seeds germinate in its nursery.
≈50trees mapped in the State of Mexico.

Its trees have gone to the Centro Cultural Mexiquense, to schools and to the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, where in 2023 Flor Manita donated a tree that was planted at the School of Agricultural Sciences. Since 2019 the tree has been propagated in nurseries and at the UMA, and it is increasingly planted in urban spaces.