Newsletter July 2026
From the Resolute Keyboard
One year has now passed since I began serving as Chapter President alongside the current Executive Board. Somehow, I still occasionally think of us as the “new board,” although after everything that has happened, we have clearly outgrown that label.
When we started, we presented a plan with a long list of objectives. I am very proud to say that we have accomplished almost all of them. The main item still pending is the creation of an Asociación Civil, or A.C., which would give the chapter a formal legal structure in Mexico.
We are approaching that decision carefully and without rushing. Establishing an A.C. is a serious and lasting commitment, with responsibilities that are not easy to reverse once assumed. We want to understand exactly what the chapter needs, what the structure would enable, and how to build it responsibly.
Part of that process means learning from other alumni organizations. On Thursday, July 30, we held the first breakfast for presidents of international alumni associations in Mexico City, with representatives from Wharton, Penn, LSE, Columbia, IMD, and, of course, The University of Texas at Austin.
The conversation focused on closer collaboration, sharing experiences, and identifying other alumni associations that should be part of this growing network. In a way, it felt like another Bring’em Back campaign, only this time for entire alumni communities.
As we begin our second year, the challenge is larger. We want to scale the chapter into a more efficient, ambitious, and diverse community, with more activities, stronger connections, and more people helping shape what comes next.
And if you have read this far but have not yet become involved in the chapter’s organization, I can already tell you that you are exactly who we need.
Drop me a line. Join us. Help us build the next stage of this community.
Hook’em!
José Antonio “Toño” Pedraza
President | Texas Exes Mexico City Chapter
Texas Exes | Life Member
Breakfast Brief
By the Editorial Staff.
Our July breakfast was a little different from the usual chapter gathering. Instead of welcoming a guest speaker, the current President took the floor for our first State of the Chapter, marking the completion of its first year of service.
The setting was also new. With Campo Marte complicated by the World Cup festivities, we moved to Jardín del Corregidor, a beautiful garden in San Miguel Chapultepec that gave the morning a relaxed atmosphere. It turned out to be a wonderful place to pause, look back, and have an honest conversation about the chapter.
Over breakfast, we reviewed the original plan presented by the board one year ago and the progress made across nearly every area of the chapter. That included our monthly breakfasts, Special Interest Groups, networking and social events, Project Worldwide initiatives, collaborations with UT, communications, partnerships, and the systems we have developed to help more Longhorns find and participate in the community.
The presentation also gave us a chance to recognize the many people who have helped make that progress possible. A chapter cannot grow through a board alone. Every speaker, volunteer, SIG organizer, partner, donor, event host, and engaged member has contributed something to what we are building.
Of course, the morning was also about what comes next. The chapter now has a much broader reach, stronger communication channels, and more activities than it did a year ago. Our next challenge is turning that reach into deeper participation and creating an organization capable of supporting an even more ambitious, efficient, and diverse community.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in the garden and shared ideas, questions, and honest feedback. Download an executive summary of the report here.
Don’t Miss It
- Aug 7 | Monthly Breakfast with Dr. Gaylen Paulson
Experience a live negotiation challenge led by Dr. Gaylen Paulson, Associate Dean and Executive Director of Texas Executive Education at McCombs. Test your instincts, learn practical tactics you can use immediately, reconnect with fellow Longhorns, and receive a memorable surprise takeaway available only in the room. - Aug 12 | Perfect Memories Speed Networking by Fight Club 🤫
An intentional speed networking evening in a hidden Polanco venue, with guided conversations every seven to nine minutes. Meet founders, executives, investors, creatives, and international professionals, then stay for a more relaxed round of conversations after the structured session. - Aug 22 | Sun in the Sky: Easy Networking Hike by Fight Club 🤫
An easy, family-friendly nature walk outside Mexico City with forest views, fresh air, local food, and plenty of time for natural conversation. Beginners, children, partners, friends, and dogs are all welcome. - Coming Soon | Art and Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Following the success of our first literary ateliers, a new four-session course will explore medieval bestiaries and mythology, Gothic architecture in Central Europe, the rise of humanism, and Renaissance art and architecture in Italy and France. More details and registration will be shared soon. - Sep 5 | Texas Longhorns vs. Texas State Bobcats Watch Party
Texas Football is back, and so are our watch parties. Join us for the season opener as the Longhorns host the Texas State Bobcats at DKR. This will be the first of many game days together, so wear burnt orange and help us start the season with a strong Mexico City crowd. Hook’em!
Hook’em: A World Cup Mexico Will Remember
By the Guillermo Gonzalez.
Mexico’s World Cup ended against England, but the strongest memory may be everything that happened around the team.
For several weeks, the country allowed itself to believe. Every match became a national event. Offices adjusted schedules, families gathered around televisions, bars filled early, and Paseo de la Reforma became a river of green shirts, flags, songs, and nervous optimism.
After years of approaching the national team with equal parts hope and skepticism, something changed. The question spreading among fans was simple: “¿Y si sí?” What if this time they really could?
The team gave people reason to ask. Mexico played with confidence, composure, and personality, producing its strongest World Cup run in decades. The excitement grew with every match, until the celebrations filled Reforma and the Ángel de la Independencia with crowds that seemed to include the entire city.
Of course, Mexican fandom also lives online. Every victory, goal, substitution, and moment of suffering immediately became a meme. AI added a completely new visual language to the tournament. Among the best were the anime-style images that transformed the Mexican players into heroic warriors, England into the final boss, and each match into the next episode of an increasingly dramatic series.
Some were beautifully produced. Others were gloriously ridiculous. All of them captured the same thing: the mixture of hope, humor, anxiety, and national creativity that follows Mexico wherever football is involved.
England ultimately won 3–2 and ended the dream before the quarterfinals. There was sadness, of course, but the final feeling was different from the frustration that has followed other eliminations.
This team had competed. It had made the country believe. It left with honor, appreciation, and the sense that the fans had received something worth remembering.
For one unforgettable stretch, Mexico did more than host the World Cup. It lived it completely.
Horns & Hobbies: From Bestiaries to the Renaissance
By the Editorial Staff & Claudia de la Piedra.
After the success of Narradoras Fantásticas Latinoamericanas, we're opening the door to a much broader journey through art, history, architecture, literature, mythology, and the ideas that shaped European society from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
The new four-session atelier, led by Dr. Claudia Gil de la Piedra, will begin with medieval bestiaries and mythology, move through Gothic architecture in Central Europe, explore the rise of humanism, and conclude with Renaissance art and architecture in Italy and France.
What makes the course especially interesting is the way Claudia will connect these subjects. We will look beyond a sequence of historical events and examine how society was organized, how people understood religion, nature, power, fear, knowledge, and the unknown, and how that environment appeared in the stories, buildings, images, creatures, and symbols they created.
A cathedral can tell us something about authority and faith. A fantastic creature in a medieval bestiary can reveal how people tried to explain the world around them. The rise of humanism can be seen in philosophy and literature, and also in the changing proportions of a building, the subjects chosen by painters, and the growing attention given to human experience.
Our previous atelier offers a surprisingly good introduction. The unsettling short stories of Amparo Dávila, Guadalupe Dueñas, Silvina Ocampo, and other Latin American women writers showed how literature can make ordinary life strange and allow us to see familiar realities through different eyes.
As Claudia explained after that course, literature gives us “a different perspective on daily life” and helps develop empathy, sensitivity, and a deeper understanding of other experiences. The writers she selected often approached family life, solitude, fear, childhood, and social expectations through the eyes of ghosts, outsiders, disturbed characters, widows, and children.
The same curiosity will guide this new atelier across a much larger historical canvas.
We will explore how worlds are built, how societies imagine themselves, and how their deepest beliefs survive in art and storytelling. It promises to be a delightful conversation, full of history, strange creatures, beautiful architecture, and new ways of looking at the past.
Dates are TBD but if you are interested click here.
Know Your Longhorn: Alana Kalin
By the Editorial Staff.
This month’s Know Your Longhorn features Alana Kalin, a founder, advisor, angel investor, and UT Austin alum who brings together entrepreneurship, technology, games, community, and a very healthy tolerance for adventure.
Alana earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from The University of Texas at Austin and has built a career around communication, engagement, and new technologies. She is the founder of FanTrivia Live and co-founder and CEO of
De Kabeza, a platform that helps brands, media, and entertainment companies create engagement through live interactive trivia games.
She also advises startups on product, gamification, positioning, and go-to-market strategy, with a special interest in supporting underrepresented founders. Before De Kabeza, Alana was part of the early U.S. team at Blippar, an augmented reality platform, where she helped launch the New York office and build partnerships with major brands.
Her path has also included emerging-market research and consulting where she lived in Kazakhstan, Malawi and Ghana, the On Deck and Latitud founder communities, Y Combinator Startup School, and, in what may be one of the best résumé details we have seen, a year driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile across the United States.
Outside work, Alana loves reading, skiing, kitesurfing, gardening, playing all sorts of games, and, more recently, walking endlessly with her baby Perry because it is the best way to get him to nap. She is also building a couples question game based on research from her favorite relationship psychologists, and yes, she says to let her know if you want the beta.
Alana recently had baby Perry and is open to suggestions for his Spanish name, since “Perry” is proving a little difficult for locals to say. So please bring ideas. She is also bringing ideas for the chapter. Alana wants to help find more Longhorns closer to her age, bring more international alumni to events, and explore a monthly matchup where members opt in to be connected for coffee, Zoom, or whatever works best, based on work, interests, life stage, or curiosity. As she put it, networks become stronger when individuals get to know each other.
That sounds exactly like the kind of energy we want in the chapter.
Hook’em, Alana!
Project Worldwide
By José Antonio Pedraza Pérez.
The Spring Concert & Art Show at Fundación Hogar Dulce Hogar was one of the most moving experiences our chapter has shared this year.
The children welcomed us with songs, artwork, performances, and introductions in English that reflected the dedication of Isabelle “Izzy” Director Maris. They proudly showed us what they had learned and created. Then the evening became a celebration, with tamales, atole, piñatas, conversation, and plenty of laughter.
They sat among us. We spoke with them. For a few hours, we were allowed to see their personalities, humor, curiosity, and joy beyond the difficult circumstances that brought them to the home.
Izzy’s parents were there too, visibly proud of the impact their daughter is having. Texas Exes appeared on the donor board, and Hogar Dulce Hogar surpassed its USD 20,000 fundraising goal, reaching USD 24,000 in total support. We were grateful to have played a part, but the strongest feeling I carried home was the desire to do more.
That feeling brings us to the next chapter of Project Worldwide.
Richard Hanson, a UT Austin graduate, has spent years building Tejiendo Alianzas, an initiative rooted in long-term relationships with communities in Oaxaca, particularly Indigenous communities. His work brings together education, technology, social enterprise, market access, and sustainable community development, always grounded in local knowledge and real human relationships.
Richard’s personal journey into this work is as remarkable as the projects themselves. The more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that this is a story our community should know.
We will soon invite Richard to share that story directly with the chapter. Our first goal is to listen, understand what has already been built, and begin imagining where the experience, networks, and talents of Texas Exes Mexico City could be useful.
Hogar Dulce Hogar reminded us how powerful it can be simply to show up. Tejiendo Alianzas may help us discover another meaningful way to keep showing up.
Bring’em Back
Our chapter gets stronger every time a Longhorn finds their way back in. If you know a UT friend who has gone a little off the radar, bring them back.
The easiest way is to use the “Invite a Friend” option after registering for any Luma event.
And yes, we are keeping score:
- 1 point for every new person you bring back through the "Invite a Friend" option
- 💸 1 point = 20% off any chapter event
- 🎁 3 points = one free breakfast
- 🤘 More points = official Co-op merch straight from Austin
When someone joins through your Luma invite link, we can see who brought them in, so every successful comeback counts. You can also send them straight to our official chapter registry at https://bit.ly/texasexescdmx
Let’s #BringEmBack together, one Longhorn at a time.
Click Here
Subscribe to our Luma calendar. If you received this newsletter by email, you are already subscribed. If not, click here and hit Subscribe.
Join the official Texas Exes Mexico City registry. Register at https://bit.ly/texasexescdmx to become an official chapter member. This will also subscribe you to the calendar, so it is the easiest one-stop shop.
The above already complicated? New to the chapter? Start with The Guide. We have an official chapter guide to help you get oriented. Click here.
Visit The Official Texas Exes website. Check out the main Texas Exes Mexico City Chapter home page here.
Questions, comments, or feedback? Email us at mexicocitychapter@texasexes.org
Previous issues: April 2026, May 2026, June 2026