I went to Mexico City on vacation about 10 days ago, and on my first day, I was wandering around the Zocalo, when at one point I noticed a crowd of people surrounding other people behind a metal barricade. When I noticed people taking pictures of this person, the woman shown above, it made me curious – who was this?
Of course the obvious thing to do would be to just ask someone – but I hate to admit that my command of Spanish is so poor, I didn’t bother trying to start a conversation with anyone.
So I’m back home now, and decided to take a shot at solving this mystery borne just out of my own curiosity. My first attempt involved isolating just the central face below and uploading it to a Google image search. It seems Google doesn’t utilize facial recognition software, as the only results I got were similar shirts with butterfly motifs, as seen being worn by this woman.
Next, I did a quick search for “free facial recognition image search,” and saw something promising in a site called Facecheck. I dropped my image in there, and sure enough, they found a lot of matches – the result said “Searched 990,668,353 faces, Search completed in 19.5 seconds, 50,876,343 faces per second.” Amazing! They found about 60 results, and they were definitely all the same woman. But while this search was free, getting the name was not. I wasn’t so curious to be willing to pay, so I tried one more step.
Back to Google, I did a search for “significant women political figures in Mexico,” and eventually got an answer – pictures of Clara Brugada, the Head of Government of Mexico City since 2024, matched up with both my own pictures and the images in the facial recognition search result. So there you have it – of course I could have tried this last search first, but what can I say? On an unrelated note, I like her fashion flair for a politician!