There are certain people whose life’s work is to cultivate community and preserve cultural heritage. In the Bay Area, Fernando Martí is one of these people.
At first, architecture came as a compromise between his artistic dreams and his mother’s wish that he become an engineer. But it wasn’t long before he realized that architecture was more than just designing photogenic buildings. It wasn't until he was introduced to books like “Loving in the War Years” by Cherrie Moraga and the comic series “Love and Rockets” by the Hernandez brothers that Martí found like-minded voices and Latin stories that portrayed characters with complex personal identities. These stories spoke of the hardships that come with having a mixed identity as well as of the attendant resilience and pride. He said it was one of the first times he felt represented in literature.
“This way of thinking about architecture and urban planning is built upon the idea of intersectionality,” says Martí, “upon integrating who we are and our history into what we make. For me, this is about philosophy, but it’s also about politics. It’s about protecting the agency of people.” Martí knew that to influence the way neighborhoods develop, new policies needed to be advanced. So he went back to UC Berkeley where he earned a joint master’s degree in architecture and city and regional planning. Since then, he has been working on advancing policies and organizations that protect long-term residents, low-income families and cultural neighborhood institutions in San Francisco.
Martí recalls San Francisco 30 years ago, when Valencia Street was affordable and full of Latino cultural spaces and Hayes Valley was a Black neighborhood. He explains that to reclaim the land and create a new vision for the future of our communities, we need protective legislation, collaborative organizations and united neighborhoods.