A large part of my passion for social advocacy stems from my parents’ academic journeys as well as my family’s cultural narrative and contradiction of gender norms. Being a person of Mexican heritage to parents of socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, a woman striving in a field predominated by men, and family to members of the LGBTQ community, I have grown up understanding the challenges that diversity encounters in public environments. Public spaces are too often designed to accommodate a general type of person rather than to provide for the variety of specific needs within large user populations. I believe that architecture should facilitate the interaction between people and their surrounding social, physical, and economic environments. I aim to pursue a career in architecture to advocate for a more inclusive world.
To me, architecture is about understanding the aspects which make us human. It is a process of gaining perspective. Architecture should always nurture human activity because it is often through architecture that we come to understand the world around us. It is an extension of ourselves, and as such every person in the world deserves a place within it.