Filmmaker, Editor, Visual Storyteller
It has been fifteen years since my family and I moved to Palo Alto. Like many immigrants, the early years were focused on 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 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.
This feeling led me to think more deeply about the idea 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 the tree El Palo Alto. Deeply connected to trees as guardians of mother earth, that encounter became a turning point: What does it mean to belong? How do roots form over time? Who has cared for this land, and who continues to shape it?
In 2024, I began developing El Palo Alto: Roots & Reflection, a multi-phase project exploring this tree as a living witness to the city’s diverse communities, from the Muwekma Ohlone people, the original stewards of this land for thousands of years, to waves of newcomers, immigrants, students, technologists, and families like my own. The story of Palo Alto is one of layered presence and continual transformation.
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Acknowledge and Support
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!