Two Places I Call Home
San Francisco, Ukraine, and the long way back.
I was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District.
My parents immigrated from Mexico and Nicaragua. I grew up around two versions of the Mission at once: the beauty, culture and community people celebrate, and the harder realities that don’t blend well with nostalgia. Violence. Gangs. Drugs. Shootings. People the system seemed to forget. But I also saw neighbors look out for one another. Resilience wasn’t an abstract idea. It was just something people did.
In 2012, I moved to Odesa, Ukraine.
What started as another chapter became a life. I taught. I coached. I met the woman who became my wife. We had our son. Ukraine became home too. Oh, the stories and life there are truly priceless.
Then came 2022.
War displaced us, and eventually we returned to San Francisco. I was in my late 30s, back in the city where I’d grown up, except now with a wife and child and the strange experience of essentially starting over. Telemundo covered part of our story during that period.
At the time, we were too overwhelmed by what had happened to keep talking publicly about it.
It took years for life to feel stable again.
I still coach Ukrainians online in the mornings. Some are living through the war. Others are rebuilding their lives elsewhere in Europe. In a small way, that keeps part of my life there connected to the one I have here.
And now I’m building again too.
The rest of my working time goes into Keel, a small AI startup I’m building on my own yet… I understand the contradiction.
AI and the technology industry are complicated subjects in San Francisco, especially in neighborhoods like the Mission, where people have experienced displacement and watched enormous wealth arrive without always feeling that they had a place in it.
I’m not interested in pretending that tension doesn’t exist.
But I also don’t want people from neighborhoods like mine to conclude that whatever comes next belongs to somebody else.
We should get to build it too.
If I ever succeed, I want some of that success to find its way back to the communities that shaped me, here and in Ukraine.
When my family was at its worst, people helped us.
I haven’t forgotten that.
San Francisco was my first home. Ukraine became another.
Somehow I came back carrying both.