Who I am

My architectural work and my social history are inextricably linked, so it is not possible to fully understand the former without understanding the latter.

The story of who I am begins with a handwritten note on a small piece of paper—a note that a man wrote to the family of his out-of-wedlock son. The boy’s mother, Pastora, had just passed away, and the note instructed the family to hand him over to an unknown woman. The family had no choice but to comply. The boy’s fate had been sealed with the stroke of a pen.

Mostly populated by Black Colombians, the Chocó forest is one of the areas of Colombia in greatest poverty. Paradoxically, it is one of the wealthiest in terms of natural resources. By the 1930s, when that fateful note was written, the Chocó was the site of a large-scale gold exploitation, carried out by an American company called Chocó Pacífico with the consent of the Colombian government. The labor of collecting the metal and loading the US-bound cargo ships was mostly carried out by impoverished Black Chocoans, like Pastora’s family.

One of the American administrators of this enterprise was the man who wrote the note, who apparently went by his initials J.D.1 Some of the oldest people in the village of Andagoya still remember him; he was muscular but not very tall, and he was so blond that his hair was almost white, despite his youth.

I have long wondered: who was this man I never met? I never inherited even a speck of gold from him, but I did inherit something I will always carry with me. Since I was a child, I have seen some of J.D.’s physical features reflected in the mirror and wondered who I am, because the way I feel inside doesn’t fully match the face in the mirror.

Pastora named her son Américo, perhaps hinting at his father’s origin. J.D. had no relationship with Américo and never recognized him legally, so Américo grew up as a Colombian kid with a Spanish surname. Yet J.D. did have a plan for Américo, which began with that handwritten note. He had given money to another woman to raise the child. Why did he not just give the money to Pastora’s family, who were taking good care of the boy after his mother died? That is something I will never know. J.D. didn’t have any relationship with the family, but he didn’t really have any relationship with the other woman either, other than a sex-for-money relationship.

Nicknamed “La Mona” (“The Blonde”), the woman was a white Colombian from the Antioquia department who worked as a female escort for the Americans. She convinced J.D. that, if he gave her enough money, she would raise the boy as he deserved. When he agreed, The Blonde took off with little Américo and the money, traveling through other American-settled mining towns in the country. At some point, she ran out of J.D.’s money and abandoned Américo.

Unable to trace the path back to his family, Américo became a homeless child in Bolívar, a village of Antioquia that had been one of the stops in his journey with The Blonde. He grew up there, supporting himself by doing odd jobs for pennies. At some point he changed his name to Gabriel.

The history of how my father raised himself was a source of constant fascination to me as I listened to his stories as a child. My favorite ones were about his fights. Historically, there has been a great deal of racism in Antioquia, and in Bolívar he was targeted by other kids because of his skin color. Just as I, through genetic chance, came into this world with some of my grandfather’s features, my father looked much more like his mother. He fought endlessly with the kids who taunted him, and (as he told it) he always beat them…

What I do and why

What my father certainly could not beat was the emotional weight of his experience as a homeless kid. He eventually was able to get out of homelessness and put himself through college. He became a chemist and worked for big American companies in Colombia, although he never made it to the United States. I wonder, though, if it was his overconfidence from surviving homelessness that made him unafraid of risks. He engaged in risky economic ventures, mostly agricultural, that landed him back in poverty when they failed.

By then, he already had a family of his own, and we experienced times of great scarcity just as he had in the past. When I was 15, he lost his job and never found a stable position again. By the time I was in college, he had become perpetually unemployed.

Just like my father had done, I put myself through college. My life has not been as heroic as his, but I do have a few stories to tell as well. When I left for the United States, I had only fifty dollars left on an overspent credit card. After landing in Miami and buying lunch and a phone card, I was left with only fifteen dollars; with this, I began my dream. Two decades later, I have much less than that: I have thousands and thousands in student debt. However, it has been worth it. I came to this country looking for the American Dream. My vision of the dream was academic, and I have fulfilled it.

Shortly after I started in the architecture SM graduate program at MIT, Professor Reinhard Goethert, an expert in low-income housing, mentioned to me his research on the Instituto de Crédito Territorial (Land Credit Institute, ICT). This was the most ambitious low-income housing program in Colombia’s history. My family’s economic situation made us unable to afford even an ICT house, despite their being the cheapest on the market, but we rented a few of them. It was in the ICT houses where I had done my school homework, forcing myself to focus despite the difficult circumstances. Unknowingly, it was in those houses where my path to graduate school in the United States had begun.

Starting after World War II, some of the most important low-income housing programs in the so-called Third World, such as ICT’s, were planned and designed in the United States. By sheer coincidence, I had ended up attending one of the universities where those programs had been invented and, thus, where vital decisions had been made for faraway unknown people like me and my family. Paradoxically, years later I found myself in the same position: being charged to make housing decisions, in the United States, for faraway people in the Third World. However, I decided to take a path different from the norm in those programs.

Taking that different path was largely possible because I never dreamed of becoming an architect, so I was not trying to pursue the ideal of a sophisticated artist-architect often celebrated in architectural schools. Also, I had always felt like an outsider in this discipline, and this ultimately enabled me to look for alternative ways to think about it.

I felt socially disconnected from architecture school from day one. Even at a public university, like the one I attended (Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia), architecture school was generally a territory of privilege. I remember once taking a class called “The City” and the professor handing out an exercise asking students to list the cities they had visited or lived in throughout their lives. My list was pretty short: Cali, where I had been born and was now attending school. Some of the other students’ lists were fascinating: Chicago, New York, Paris, Florence, Tokyo…

Many of my peers in architecture school, young Colombian students like me, were incredibly well-traveled. Having been exposed to so much of the Euro-American culture gave them a spatial experience I lacked. It was hard for me to personally relate and “feel” concepts such as “the sensorial quality of a space,” “the atmosphere of the place,” or “the temperature of the light.” I had never experienced those things in the tiny and overcrowded ICT houses where I had lived.

Instead, most of my spatial experience had been of poverty and space, and that experience seemed to have no place in architecture school. It took me years to understand that, rather than trying to improve my spatial education and become a high designer, my best contribution to architecture could be based on the experience from my own social history. I ultimately embraced social work through architecture (or social design in short) because my own spatial experience allowed me to understand, and thus effectively contribute to, this area of work.

My Position on Architecture

My relationship with architecture has been complicated from the moment I became engaged with this practice. I have long been personally troubled by issues of implicit racism and classism in architecture, because those issues marked my family history. In a more general sense, I have been troubled by the encompassing issues of power and hegemony, which on a geo-political scale translate to colonialism and imperialism. In the end, the story of my father, whose fate in life was sealed by a short note by an American gold miner, is a living example of how these global forces work and the effects they can have on subaltern people: Ultimately, my father was a child of imperialism.

When seen through a critical lens, the architectural profession reveals itself as problematic because, historically, it has been in the service of actors who support and reinforce existing power and hegemony structures. This is particularly true for high design, which is the most glorified form of architectural practice.

However, architecture still offers a fascinating source of opportunities, because it is deeply connected to the act of making. Making ultimately enables practitioners like me to reimagine the profession in their own way. The act of making allows us to use architecture’s own means to confront not only imperialism but also privilege, another issue deeply embedded in architectural practice. The act of making allows an architectural practitioner to propose new ideas, materialize them, see how they work, and improve them.

Thus, I see in the act of making the possibility to produce a type of architecture that challenges the combined issues of hegemony and privilege and, in so doing, challenges a host of connected issues that conventional practice has historically overlooked. In fact, it has been through the act of making, and seeing its impact, that I ended up abandoning the idea of being the maker of things myself; that is, of being a designer, at least in the classical sense of this term. Instead, I have become a facilitator of community design processes through which people design their own buildings and spaces, using an approach I call ethnoarchitecture (“ethno” here meaning from the people’s own perspective).

In my professional bio page, I define ethnoarchitecture as a type of architecture that relies upon human agency and people’s own vision of a better life—architecture in the people’s own terms. As a form of architectural practice, ethnoarchitecture challenges the all-too-powerful figure of the designer, embracing instead a positionality shift where designers place themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of a given design process, rather than being the drivers of the process. In that intentionally lower position, the designers defer to people’s design decisions and become supporters and advocates of those decisions.

In my professional portfolio, I explain my journey to embracing this approach to architectural practice. The portfolio explains how, from making architectural objects, I shifted to becoming a supporter of the making of others, thus shifting from focusing on objects to focusing instead on people.