Two pieces of bacon, two scrambled eggs, and one third of a Cuban (or Italian, or French if you must) baguette. That’s the breakfast sandwich I have every single day. And, to be honest, it’s the best part of my day. When I think of “home,” that’s one of the things that comes to mind.
I’m one of those people with an annoyingly long answer to the question “where are you from?” I’ve tried to give the short answer (“New York”) but that version is usually followed by the always-endearing “No, where are you really from?”
Sigh
Takes deep breath
“I was born in Cuba, grew up in Costa Rica, and moved to the United States when I was sixteen”
I’ve said that sentence countless times. So many that it has lost all meaning by now. Like other people who grew up moving around a lot, I don’t quite feel like I’m from any of those places. When people ask me about Cuba, Costa Rica, or the USA, I answer with a bit of detachment, like a person who got a backstage pass to a concert but isn’t part of the band.
It’s tempting to think of my home as the liminal space between spaces. The coming and going is more comfortable than the arrival itself. This attitude has helped me navigate the constant change I’ve been exposed to and, ironically, is also directly responsible for its perpetuation.
I’ve grown to love Change, especially when it comes unexpectedly. Planning, on the other hand, isn’t my favorite—it takes away what makes Change so thrilling: improvisation.
This week, Change handed me the perfect opportunity to improvise. In an unexpected turn of events, I found myself boarding a flight to Shenzhen, China—a place I hadn’t even heard of 72 hours earlier. Yet there I was, downloading WeChat and awkwardly practicing “Nihao” in front of my phone’s black mirror.
My job, which in some ways productizes change for startups, led me to work with a company developing AI hardware (more on that soon, probably). As it turns out, Shenzhen is “the Silicon Valley of the East” where your favorite hardware products are manufactured. And so I was asked to fly there to assist with our own manufacturing process, which I eagerly accepted before googling the flight duration.
Twenty five hours after kissing my wife and son goodbye (nobody warns you about the unique pain that is traveling solo while you have a family), I landed in China. A small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a Valdivia.
What followed was five intense days of touring factories, discussing tradeoffs (“if we change this color we save this much money but delay production by these many days”), and learning about Chinese culture through the eyes of my Chinese chaperone: Reni, the company’s Founder and CEO.
The flight there was long and I didn’t have WiFi for a big portion of it, which made it even longer. I downloaded a few shows to watch on the flight but the universe had other plans for me that day. HBO Max had a super fun “unexpected error” that turned the iPad into the world’s largest paperweight. All of a sudden, I was left to my own devices in the longest flight of my life. What was I to do? Read something? Ew. Then, I remembered that on my way to the airport, I downloaded Bad Bunny’s new album: Debí Tirar Más Fotos… I can explain!
Like I mentioned earlier, I moved to the United States when I was sixteen years old. I crash-landed in Tampa in 2003 when reggaeton was taking over the world. Somehow the Fast and Furious aesthetic never clicked with me. Actually, that’s an understatement. I rejected it like the plague! Reggaeton felt like the worst parts of Hip Hop, packaged with the worst parts of Latin America. Repetitive beats, uninteresting melodies, and misogynistic messages became the soundtrack of every high school party, which I honorably bowed out to watch my friend Klaus smoke weed while listening to Fugazi.
Fast forward 20 years and reggaeton has become a cultural touchstone for Puerto Ricans and their first cousins: Cubans. It’s inescapably in every family gathering, television show, or movie depicting our people and it’s likely one of the first images that comes into your head when you think of those countries.
Bad Bunny is today’s most prominent reggaeton figure. He’s Latin America’s top pop star who broke through the American mainstream by dating one of the Kardasians (I don’t remember which one. The hot one, I think!), appearing in Bullet Train with Bratt Pit, and even hosting SNL. There’s something defiant about him: he refuses to speak English in front of English-speaking audiences despite the pressure and yet somehow gets away with it.
I heard a couple of clips of his new album on TikTok and was surprised to hear that it was (1) not reggaeton and (2) emotionally resonant. So I decided to give it a listen when trapped in a tube in the sky for 14 hours with no available entertainment.
The album turned out to be an extraordinary blend of traditional Puerto Rican and Cuban music seamlessly fused with modern sounds and arrangements. It’s a bridge between generations and cultures, crafted with meticulous intention and remarkable musical and cultural nuance. Both critically acclaimed and culturally significant, it has sparked countless think pieces while climbing to become the #1 album in the world.
I never pictured myself in China, let alone with Bad Bunny as my soundtrack, but there I was. His album played on repeat in my headphones, offering a familiar sense of home as I walked the streets of Shenzhen.
Navigating China felt like trying to draw with my non-dominant hand while everyone else around me was effortlessly ambidextrous. But even in the middle of all that unfamiliarity, I found pieces of home—like, unexpectedly, Bad Bunny’s music.
It’s funny… this concept of home. It isn’t really a place but a feeling—a collection of behaviors, sensations, and the safety of predictability amid the chaos we throw ourselves into every day. It can be triggered by something as simple as a smell, a song, or even a sandwich.
Claudio Guglieri once said—I’ll paraphrase—that home now lives in the digital interfaces we interact with every day. Remove those familiar interfaces (the keyboard, the browser, the camera) and we’re suddenly unmoored, drifting through foreign lands. For someone like me, who has spent most of their life between worlds, that insight hit hard.
Maybe that’s why I fell in love with design: it gives me a sense of home, a constant in the midst of change. Software can be as grounding as language itself. The characters that we recognize into words. The words we use to communicate feelings. The meaning we imbue onto our feelings. They feel like home, especially when they’re gone and replaced with another.
Home, I’ve come to realize, is the taste of breakfast that starts my day with certainty. It’s the rhythm of a song that takes me back to a time and place I thought I’d left behind. It’s the interfaces we build to create spaces where we feel understood.
That’s the paradox of Change: it disrupts, unsettles, and demands adaptation, yet it’s also what brings us back to the constants we rely on. Change has a way of stripping everything down to its essence, forcing us to see what truly matters. Perhaps that’s why I’ve grown to love it—not for its novelty, but for the clarity it leaves in its wake.