Filmmaker, Editor, Visual Storyteller
El Palo Alto: Roots & Reflections
El Palo Alto: Roots & Reflection is a project I feel deeply and personally connected to. In 2024, I started developing this project about the historic El Palo Alto tree and I imagine it taking shape in different forms, including a documentary film.
More than 1,100 years old, El Palo Alto stands as a living witness to the many communities that have shaped this region: from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the original stewards of this land for thousands of years, to generations of newcomers, immigrants, students, technologists, and families like my own.
It has been fifteen years since my family and I moved to Palo Alto. Like many immigrants, our early years were shaped by survival and adaptation: learning a new system, navigating an unfamiliar culture, and creating stability for our child. Over time, as life became more settled, another experience quietly emerged, a growing awareness of what had been left behind. Family, language, traditions, and cultural memory slowly became an absence that expanded with each passing year.
That feeling led me to reflect more deeply on the meaning of home, not as a fixed place, but as something shaped through connection, memory, and shared stories. As I searched for a sense of rootedness in my new environment, I encountered El Palo Alto tree. Deeply connected to trees which I consider as guardians of Mother Earth, that encounter became a turning point for me: What does it mean to belong? How do roots form over time? Who has cared for this land, and who continues to shape it?
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Acknowledge
Palo Alto stands on the ancestral homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, whose people have lived, cared for, and remained connected to this land for more than 10,000 years. Despite their deep history, continued presence, and documented status as a previously federally recognized tribe, the Muwekma Ohlone are still denied federal recognition today and continue their long fight for justice and acknowledgment.
We invite you to learn more, stand in solidarity, and support the call to restore their federal recognition, not as a privilege, but as a basic and overdue right. They are still here!
