My full name, following Mexican usage, is David Eduardo Tavárez Bermúdez. I was born in 1968, and attended mostly public schools in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Both of my parents (upper left, with my in-laws on the left) worked as secundaria (junior high) schoolteachers until their well-deserved retirement a few years ago. My father taught Spanish language and literature; my mother was a chemistry teacher. My only brother, Arturo (lower left), is a chef at a steak house/ranch/movie set location not far from El Paso, Texas. He has two boys, Irving (left) and David (right).
My father comes from a peasant family who had some land and a small dry goods store in Santa María, Chihuahua; my father's father, David Tabares García (upper row center) worked as a bracero for a few years in the 1950's. The last name Tabares (in the original spelling) is a common Portuguese surname; I don't know when my paternal ancestors moved to northern Mexico, but some potential seventeenth-century forebears include the relatives of a Franciscan friar, and a man investigated by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism clandestinely. Both my maternal grandfather Julio and my great-grandfather Julián Bermúdez (upper right; Julián is shown with his mother and sisters in the 1880's) were lawyers and local notables in the city of Durango.
I met my wife Elisabeth (née Weinberg) in college (lower right). After a career in corporate communications, she joined the academic tribe and became the special assistant to Dr. Dennis Murray, president of Marist College. We adopted our dog Shayna in 2007, and our daughter Eva Isabel, a beautiful, feisty, and very active baby girl, was born in February 2010.
