A life shaped by more than one place.

I was born in El Salvador during its civil war. That sentence does a lot of work in a short space, and for most of my life I let it stay short. Writing Ana, Hija de la Guerra was the decision to stop doing that — to go back through my father's village, my mother's decisions, and the ordinary people who kept children alive in a country that had stopped being safe for them.

What I found wasn't a story about war. It was a story about what people build in spite of it. That's turned out to be the thing I keep coming back to in every part of my life.

What I actually do

I write. My first book is a memoir. The Spanish edition is out now; an English edition is on the way. I'm also writing shorter pieces about travel, memory, and the conversations you only have when you're far from home.

I build in Los Horcones. My father was born in a rural community in El Salvador called Los Horcones. Its school now has a library, a playground, and a basketball court that didn't exist a few years ago. I work with the teachers and families there — they decide what's needed, I help make it happen.

I run a company. I co-founded OptimaAI in Regina, Saskatchewan, where we build AI and automation tools for small service businesses. I came to technology the same way I came to writing: as a way of giving people back their own time and their own choices.

Everything I do is a version of the same question — what do people need in order to decide what happens to them next?

Where I'm going

I speak to groups about resilience, immigration, storytelling, and what it actually takes to run a community project from four thousand kilometres away. If any of that is useful to your audience, I'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch