My North America Roots: From Nashville to New Orleans

I was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1975- the first and only child to first generation immigrant parents. My father was a young Chilean pediatrician working at Meharry Medical College and my mother, a Vietnamese accountant and MBA working for the Internal Revenue Service. At the age of 3, we moved to New Orleans, Louisiana.

My father had got a position to teach Nutrition and International public health at Tulane School of Public Health. Coming to the US with very little to their names, my parents struggled to provide me with every opportunity. I was thrust into every extracurricular activity from ballet to tap dance, to choir, to piano to name a few. It was an incredible undertaking for my parents to find the time in their busy schedules to shuttle me from soccer practice to karate.  

After spending my adolescence in Nairobi, Kenya (AFRICA), I moved back to New Orleans to start at Tulane University where I majored in Pre-Medicine, Sociology and Spanish. It was here that I took my first formal photography course and where the love affair began.

In 1998, I started graduate studies at the Ponce School of Medicine. When I got accepted to medical school, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go along with it. At that time, I was well grounded in Santiago, Chile for a year break after University. I had a wonderful girlfriend, was working as a model, was offered a job as a photographer for a fashion magazine, and was training to be a volunteer fireman; things really seemed to be going well for me.  What finally resonated in my mind was the thought “You can be a doctor and a photographer, but you can’t be a photographer and a doctor”.  Little did I know that I would be faced with a similar decision almost 20 years later…

Needless to say, the transition was very difficult. I hated the first years of med school. I doubted my decision and spent time, instead of studying, selling my photos to my classmates and even hosting exhibitions at the local mall.  Even my professors asked me why I was studying medicine – as photography was clearly my passion.

It was no secret to anyone that if National Geographic had called me, I would have been on the next flight out.

At around this time, I was fortunate enough to be invited by my friend to attend a photo shoot for the fashion magazine “Mademoiselle”.  Seeing the entire process of a real professional photo shoot mesmerized me.  After the shoot, sharing beers with the photographer, I told him how lucky he was and how much I envied his life. He asked me what I was doing and I told him studying medicine. He then proceeded to give me some advice that changed the course of my life. He told me that I should stay in medicine, that all the glitz and the glamour in photography wears off over time and what was once a creative outlet for him had now become a job -a daily stressful exercise in HAVING to produce perfect pictures.  “For you, photography will always be your escape, your passion…if you make it into your career, you will lose that.”  It was sound advice and even though, for many years, I had to put away my cameras to focus on my studies, I am glad for the path that I then chose to take.

View My "North America" Collection