Mexico City

The Mexico City scene

Mexico City’s rope scene appears in press reports from the late 2010s. In December 2017 Time Out México described the Instituto Mexicano del Shibari, which held workshops every two weeks at the Centro Cultural de la Diversidad in Roma Norte, open to everyone and requiring no experience. In May 2018 VICE wrote that riggers were beginning to appear in Mexico, largely because the internet gave them references from historical Japan to the present, and profiled Tengu Shibari Dojo, a school run by two partners, one of them Roqueved Zagal. Its introductory workshops covered history and knots, cost about 200 pesos with a set of rope to take home, and used rope the teachers treated themselves from locally bought jute. ShibaritxsMX, a mainly LGBTTTI workshop group that Time Out México profiled in 2021, is described in Kinbaku in North America.

Small teacher-led spaces

Most teaching today happens in small spaces built around one teacher or a collective. Arte Shibari in Colonia del Valle is led by Charles Ilcóatl, whose site points to his training in traditional therapeutic disciplines and body awareness. It teaches private classes with step-by-step progression and offers a guided dojo experience for individuals or pairs. Once a month its dojo holds a rope jam for its community: an evening that opens with a warm-up to ground the body and then brings surprise technical challenges meant to break mechanical routines.

Shibari México was founded by Blue, a sex-positive activist and educator originally from the desert of the United States. Her site says that when she arrived in Mexico she could not find a rope community or a space where she felt safe practicing, so she created one. Its workshops include fundamentals and beginner classes in semenawa and predicament bondage, and its site stresses that no experience or particular body type is needed.

Estudio Jorogumo describes itself as a trans-dissident space for learning and as a self-managed collective. It offers private classes and invites guest teachers from abroad, such as Mosaic Cat, also known as Mao Mao, from Shanghai, and it is the official Mexican distributor of the rope brand Learn Shibari. Mukade Kinbaku Dojo presents its teaching as that of Sensei Roqueved Zagal, with workshops, performances and private sessions booked through an online calendar and a student registration and consent form.

Rope in a cultural center

Rope is also taught in less obvious settings. Hotaru Centro Cultural, a center for learning Japanese that holds that learning a language means engaging with its culture, offers a shibari workshop alongside language classes and dojo arts. The workshop focuses on rope as a tool for bodily connection and is open to beginners.

Languages

Classes and websites in Mexico City are in Spanish; Arte Shibari also publishes an English version of its site. For ways to compare teachers and spaces, see Choosing a teacher.