gerardo.

I spent some of the most formative years of my life in Stockton, California. throughout my time in college, I seldom encountered students from the Central Valley, and I wasn’t surprised.

many Valley populations are riddled with poverty. this manifests in high rates of unemployment, gang violence, homicide, low access to health care, and low graduation rates. it manifests as food deserts and fast food chains, leaving people with a lack of access to healthy foods. these issues disproportionately hurt the Valley’s communities of color. they are San Jose residents pushed out of the Bay Area housing market. they are host families for recent war refugees. they are grandchildren of migrant farm workers.

to revitalize our communities, the youth of this generation will need to step up to the plate. after this interview, you’ll see why I firmly believe he is an integral part of that movement.

artisintheyes: we’re here posted underneath the shade of a tree next to UC Berkeley’s campanile. I’m here with Mr. Gerardo Veliz. how you doing?

gerardo: I’m doing well man, it’s lovely day in the bay, it’s a great day to be a hyphy intellectual.

artisintheyes: that’s what I’m talking about man. yeah man i feel very lucky to know folks who have that kind of foundation, but have made it into institutions such as this. cause’ as we know there are so many barriers to access that a lot of us have been challenged with, so to see you here doing your thing gets me real excited and I’m glad to be here. can you introduce yourself to the folks out there?

gerardo: yeah mos def. I’m from South Sacramento, born and raised. Mexican and Guatemalan. I didn’t find out i was Guatemalan til’ I was 15 years old when I met my biological father. So I just graduated. I was studying Civil and Environmental Engineering here at Cal. I was a product of the public school system in South Sacramento. I started out in Sacramento Unified School District in elementary school then I stayed in Elk Grove Unified School District the rest of the time. And for those who know about South Sac, I spent most of my time on Mac and Center, the epicenter of what is known as South Sac Iraq, the place I call home.

artisintheyes: how did you get into engineering? What got you into the sciences?

gerardo: The roots of my interest in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields started early early on. I don’t think I noticed it until I looked back when I was in college. My first language was Spanish when I started school.  There was that hurdle of learning English while other kids were just blurting out words and full sentences in English. I had to learn that in kindergarten and 1st grade, but as they were teaching us math, that shit made sense in English or Spanish. like 1 + 1 = 2 in English or Spanish or whatever fuckin’ language. I always felt a sense of empowerment, I felt that’s where I could communicate and grow without feeling behind everybody else, and I think that that carried on through my entire academic career. even today, there’s plenty of people who can write better essays than me, but we could go toe to toe on math and that was always very empowering for me. that’s how I stayed on the mathematical side in terms of academia. I took a pre-engineering course in middle school. They offered it for two years but I took it on my way out. It was cool, like you got to play around with AutoCAD, which I’d never seen before.

artisintheyes: damn, at that age.

gerardo: yeah which was really nice you know, I didn’t know that shit was out there so it was coo just fuckin’ around building cars and shit. and then I didn’t have another experience like that but I had a lot of positive experiences with my STEM teachers.I had a Chemistry teacher in middle school who was bat shit crazy but he was excited about Chemistry. Science and Math were always hella exciting to me. I liked writing and reading but I was always real excited for my STEM classes. I remember having a homie who did geometry in 8th grade and I met him as a sophomore in high school, that’s when we became really coo. and I was always like, “that mofucka hella smart, how the fuck did he do geometry in middle school?” I always felt a sense of competitiveness so I tried to murder that math shit and tried to do really in math for a long time. It turned into something that I wanted to build on continuously.

gerardo: I chose civil engineering because I knew I wanted to do math and science. I was a part of AVID, a college prep program since like middle school. The thing that was coo about AVID was like, they wouldn’t just say, “you can go to college” they’d be like, “so when you go to college”. Like they didn’t even give you an option they were like, “that’s why you’re in the program.” That program really helped me out cause’ they just instilled it in my head that, “you don’t really have any other option so the least you could do now is just get good grades and then from there we can tell you when to apply to stuff”. They were the ones who were like, “well now you need to choose a major.” with Engineering I thought that I could apply math and Science to do something. that’s the whole basis of it, applied sciences and applied math. Civil Engineering seemed closer to the people. Mechanical Engineering sounded really cool because you could build cool shit like robots and drones or whatever the fuck, but Civil Engineering seemed closer to the people. That’s why I chose it. After four years, I realized that Civil Engineering was not what I wanted to do.

(hahaha)

gerardo: I realized I don’t want to build bridges so I kind of geared more towards Environmental Engineering, which dope about the program here at Cal, it’s a dual program in Civil and Environmental Engineering. but yeah that’s how I got into Civil and Environmental Engineering, just a lot of that culminating in the back of my head. I had a lot of mentors like this one lady named Mama Swan in Sac who always pushed me my last two years to think about who I wanna be, cause’ the college thing to her was like, “well fuck you decided that you wanna do this college thing and you already decided that you wanna go. now you gotta think about who you wanna be as you go through academia, so what do you wanna do?”

artisintheyes: that’s a trip because it seems like you had this internal motivation to push yourself that goes as far back as far as your homie in geometry – that competitive spirit. for me I had a very different experience because the only subjects I felt good at were english and biology. for me math was especially disempowering. I felt like I was always just getting by and I felt stupid dang near the whole time. I had a bad foundation in high school and that kind of snowballed and I got shitted on in college. but it’s cool to hear that you had this internal drive that came from somewhere that evolved into where you’re at now, which is really cool.

gerardo: In high school I took up to calculus AB which is like the equivalent of first semester calculus here. I met this crazy ass El Salvadorean motherfucker, who’s been one of the most inspiring cats I’ve met throughout my time Cal. He was like, “I don’t give a fuck what high school you came from, or how far you got into math, because it’s not Berkeley math. You better take that first math class and worst case scenario, it’s an easy A if your high school prepared you. I got cool grades in the class, but the thing was that it went to a much deeper extent than what I learned in high school. There was this whole theoretical level that I’d never even thought about in high school. Calculus just became this whole ass creature.

artisintheyes: was that Calculus 1A?

gerardo: yeah 1A. like they start talking about proofs and shit, like I didn’t really do proofs in Calc AB, it was mostly learning how derivatives and integrals work. the cool thing was that at least I liked math. I didn’t have to know what Berkeley math was like, I just knew that I liked math and that was enough to turn the gears on when the El Salvadorean dude asked us to turn em’ on. he said you better turn it on now or else you gonna get that ass whooped.

(ahaha)

artisintheyes: did he say it like that?

gerardo: he was like, “I’m here to let you know 1) that the slap is coming, and to 2) teach you how to duck or fight back because the slap is coming regardless.”
when physics came he told us, “I don’t care if you got to the 3rd physics, AP class or whatever, you’re not ready and you’re gonna get slapped, but we’re gonna teach you how to fight. the one thing they didn’t teach you in high school, especially if you were in public education was how to learn how to learn.” that was his thing. “you can know every equation in the book, I don’t give a fuck. they didn’t even teach you how to read a book.” I was like what the fuck I know how to read dude! he was like, “naw you don’t know how to read bro, you don’t know how to learn. your concept of learning is confined to the classroom lectures, doing homework, and practice exams if they even did that shit. you don’t know how to learn.”
so he was the one who just showed us what the learning curve looks like. and you shit your pants with the way he teaches, he talks so intensely. he yells, he’s loud, he cusses. he’s like “PUTA”. he be yellin’ and shit. the only other person that’s ever gone that hard on me is my mom, so I know he cared. he really wanted us to learn.

artisintheyes: so we touched on your path to higher education and pursuing a career in STEM, what else shaped your development into the individual that is gerardo veliz?

gerardo: yessssss two things. I think the root of all, and again this is all in retrospect and didn’t occur to me until I got a little older, but I think that my stepdad really plant the seed that grew into the hyphy component of the whole hyphy intellectual thing. I didn’t grow up with my biological father. this dude came in when I was like five years old and was starting school. I didn’t grow up listening to corridos. my friends would play that and I’d be like, “this is coo” but this was never being played in my household. but what was played was a lot of soul. I’d listen to Al Green, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Heat Wave – I was listening to some fire ass old music! I think that naturally led to me getting into hip hop. In 2nd grade my teacher would play 102.5, a Sacramento hip hop station while we were doing homework. It just sucked me in, it was over from there. I remember listening to like 50 Cent and Culturally that was it for me, you know?. that was a huge part of what I identified with culturally. I didn’t know I was half Guatemalan til’ I was 15 so my entire life I just hung out with the Mexican side of the family. In 5th grade I was kicking it with this Norteño, which was crazy. I was like, “damn, you in 5th grade and bangin’ and shit? how are you already funkin’?” He put me onto Mac Dre. that’s when I was like, “whooaaa holy shittt.” At that point that’s when I knew I’d be in the Bay Area at some point for sure. That’s when I got into Bay Area culture in terms of music. that with my fascination for hip hop really pushed me. that’s where I think my energy stems from, because the hyphy movement is about a lot of energy, it’s about just going dumb. people that understand going dumb just understand that whole hyphy movement. I also realy liked dancing. This is really ironic. Interestingly enough, my mom left my dad because while she was pregnant, he would go out to the club and dance. she was like, “well why the fuck am I gonna share a household with this motherfucker when I’m doing all the hard work and he’s going out to play. I can do this shit myself.” It turned out that I was naturally a dancer too and I got that from him. In middle school I started hanging out with hella Hmong folks. they were hella into bboying and popping, so I got into popping. I didn’t think I was ready for bboying. that shit looked hard. some motherfuckers were doing backflips and airflares and crazy ass shit. I stuck with the dance community from middle school to high school, then in high school I decided that I’d try this bboying shit. that’s where those seeds were planted and to this day, probably til’ my hips give out I’ll still be bboying.

artisintheyes: do you still pop at all?

gerardo: in middle school there were poppers but in high school they either stopped dancing or did something else. there were only bboys around to practice with and I was like, “I could pop by myself” but it was nice to practice with other people. that’s where the dance part came in. I think it was really my step dad playing all that Heatwave and shit they threw the funk into the bowl. I really wanna try waacking.

artisintheyes: you talked about your influences academically, musically, as a dancer, tying it back to your family and that foundation. you also mentioned that part of that foundation is being this hyphy intellectual.
why do you think that that’s valuable? what’s important about that and how can someone pull from some of those elements and incorporate that into their life?

gerardo: the reason I always put that tag on my photos or whatever is because I feel like there’s this archetype of what it is to be an, “academic”. well dressed, some old white guy. professors are oftentimes some old white guy. like if thats the case, then how’s some brown or black kid from the hood gonna picture themselves as an intellectual if they dont see themselves there? what I really mean is that I don’t have to get no fuckin’ sperries to wanna learn or to explore ideas.

artisintheyes: ahaha. top sideahhhz.

gerardo: you know I liked math when I was really young. maybe some other people do and maybe the people around you don’t. but like fuck if you do, I don’t care what you’re dressed in. I dont’ care if you’re still wearing Girbrauds…

artisintheyes: ahaha. what about Uggs.

gerardo: whatever it is bro!

artisintheyes: what about Crocs?

gerardo: Crocs, the whole shit bro, it really don’t matter! It’s fucked up how many people are discouraged from pursuing little interests that make them happy. maybe they hide em’ cause’ everybody else thinks you being a nerd is really weird and really wack and shit but you don’t have to look like anyone to want to learn something. shit…there’s a plethora of knowledge in the hood and it’s not valued as an academic thing because you don’t see it here. I purposely don’t have the “academia” look so that people can see that you don’t have to square up to be an academic. Academia isn’t the most perfect place. It’s not an oasis amidst a desert or anything, but like the cool thing is that I’ve been able to have so many dope experiences because of it. I’ve been able to travel since I’ve been here. traveling is valuable for anybody, like meeting different people, and getting out of your own city. If I don’t adopt the culture of academia, but bring to academia my culture and force people to just deal with the hood in me, maybe that’ll let other people know that they can bring the hood with them too. maybe then they can go fly around to conferences or do whatever the fuck they wanna do and meet new people. maybe not necessarily becoming an academic but just coming to a place where you can see a lot of shit is valuable. I retain my look intentionally because there are a lot of brilliant people in the hood that may be discouraged for whatever reason, and I’m thinking this is a way to encourage a lot those folks. also I just don’t like how people dress here. ahahahahahaha.

artisintheyes: hahahahaha. I kinda do wanna try some Birkenstocks, they look comfortable.

gerardo: I heard they’re comfortable. freshman year of high school Mama Swan was rockin’ Birkenstocks. back then I was so young. me and my Asian homie just roasted her.. just like, “what the hell are you rockin’?” now it’s hella funny cause’ we see hella people with Birkenstocks. I guess people were diggin’ it. she was really into comfortable shoes, so that must be it.

artisintheyes: sneakers can sometimes be kind of a chore though. versus Birkenstocks where you can just slip the things on and, “boop!” you ready to go.

gerardo: “boop!” and you on the way.

artisintheyes: can you talk a little about what’s going on with you now?

gerardo: Yeah sure. Ima be in LA for a month doing this program called the DaVinci Camp Summer Institute. I basically will be teaching kids from 6th to 12th grade a lot of math. It’ll be math workshops so basically we’ll have these kids learning how to take the square root of fucking 127 or some crazy ass prime number, and learn how to do it without a calculator. learning all the divisibility rules and really neat tricks, teaching them geometry, how to memorize the unit circle, soh cah toa stuff but without the soh cah toa. this teacher in the program has some really cool tricks. we’ll be teaching them number theory, exposing them to art, we’ll be taking them to the opera, the ballet, and museums as well. And this all held at Cal Tech. there are other sessions at Stanford and Berkeley but the one I’m in is at Cal Tech. we’ll be showing them demos at labs in Cal Tech so they’ll be seeing a lot of cool science shit. It’s for exposure and it’s also to build skills. we want them to go back to their math classes and just fuckin’ wreck shit, like scare their teachers or something. just so that they feel confident in their abilities. there’s this idea of math anxiety where people don’t feel like they’re good at math, but I think anybody can do math, it’s just that people get discouraged. It’s posed as this really hard thing, but if you understand that 1 + 1 = 2… a lot of math is built on that sort of reasoning, you know? It just takes a while and it takes some grit. that’s what this program is. getting students to get up on the board, interacting with each other, and using words to talk through math problems because a lot of times we just try to do it in our head. It’s super neat to learn math through interaction and gauge how much students know through their interactions. mostly it’s fun. we just go around teaching kids math and science so hopefully they’ll get excited about it after this program if they’re not already.

artisintheyes: it sounds like they definitely will be for sure.

gerardo: after that I’ll be going to New Mexico. I’ll be a postbac. it’s like a really long internship. I’ll be a research assistant in the extreme fluids team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be researching but it’ll definitely be in Fluid Mechanics which is the field that I wanna go into. It should be fun. I’ll be livin’ on my own for the first time which I’m pretty excited about, so we’ll see how that year goes. I know it’s not the exact subdivision of Fluid Mechanics that I wanna go into but the analytical tools, the analyses they use pretty much work across that entire field, so I’ll be equipping myself in that way. after that, the plan is to grad school and get that little Ph.D. get that Dr. Veliz in the bag.

artisintheyes: oh, just a little Ph.D. you got something on your shoulder bro.

gerardo: let me dust it off real quick. the goal overall is to become a professor. I just really like this academic space. basically I just don’t wanna work, so I think that’s a big part of the motivation. this environment is definitely not perfect. there’s a lot to work on and as an undergraduate student it’s so hard to do that. as a graduate student you’re seen as an apprentice so you have more say but still. as a professor or like a dean you can have more of a say. basically I’m just tryna be a tenured faculty member so I can go fuckin’ around cussing tellin’ people, “you muthafuckas are fuckin’ up” and call people out on their bullshit. I do wanna teach. I was inspired by the El Salvadorean dude that helped us out a lot, and he plays a mentor role to a lot of the brown and black students in STEM here. I think I wanna be that but as a professor hopefully here at Cal, maybe teaching Fluid Mechanics or math or somethin’. I wanna be one of the more active professors that engages undergraduates a lot more. There’s definitely a huge gap between professors and undergraduates in terms of engaging beyond the classroom, and beyond office hours.

artisintheyes: for real because I was about to say, what is that relationship really outside of office hours?

gerardo: the focus is mostly like, “you’re struggling in my class, how can I help you out?” and it’s dope because you can go to office hours and get a deeper understanding, but sometimes students just wanna know that there’s a professor that gives a shit about what their student organization is interested in. having been in a student org, it often felt like none of the professors gave a shit, and the ones that did weren’t in the field you were interested so they had no clout in your neck of the woods.

artisintheyes: so you’d want to be like a faculty advisor or co-sponsor for an org?

gerardo: for sure. And actually listen to the students. I mean I could come up with a list of shit I think should change, but if the institution is supposed to serve the students, then I should be getting my sense of direction from the students. also yeah I just don’t wanna work so I’d rather be a professor. like I don’t wanna be going to meetings a lot. one my Fluids Mechanics professors was like, “I can just go my office, sit down, and read. I could read articles and hit up my buddy like, “I didn’t really understand what you meant here, can you explain this to me?”that sounds really cool, like you just learnin’. you don’t have to go to too many meetings like I’d assume you would in the industry. I really wanna set up no cost community centers. what was really dope about where I got to practice at back home was that it was an after school program so it was no cost to the students directly, taxes or something paid for that shit. we just got to practice. some kids would go home to some bullshit so they’d be like, “if you wanna finish your homework, just come here right after school, we’ll do homework for like an hour and a half, and then we can practice the rest of the time.” I would like to do community centers where people can do something like that, near the school so they’re already there. I’d wanna do some kind of workshops where you teach students how to learn in the same place where you teach students how to create. that’d be tight. I don’t know how I’ll cover the cost but I’ll figure that shit out later.

artisintheyes: I’ve thought about that before too.

gerardo: as a professor I’ll learn how to write grants pretty well. That’s a big part of it. I think that’s one skill that people who wanna do that kind of stuff really cherish because that’s how you can funnel in funds for that kind of stuff. In the hood people don’t just have money to be putting students into programs. that’s why you might see those kind of programs in places that are more affluent. but we trying to bring those programs to the hood.

artisintheyes: yeah because there’s financial capital but there’s also the social capital and knowledge that it takes to learn how to access those resources. even right now when I think of grant writing I’m intimidated because I don’t know how to go about it.

gerardo: yeah, that’s the plan right now though. I just wanna teach. I got really inspired by my mentors that didn’t have kids. I had three mentors that didn’t have kids, but they HAD kids. like hundreds of kids, cause’ they mentored so many people. I feel like I really resonate with that because my pops wasn’t around, so I don’t think I wanna have kids but I definitely want to mentor, help folks out, and learn. I think the reason my mentors keep doin’ it is because they keep learnin’. It never seems to be a dull day for them.

artisintheyes: it’s energizing and definitely a two-way thing in terms of that knowledge flow.

gerardo: you’re not just some all knowing person, you’re definitely learnin’ from the folks you helping. and they’re helping your ass out. you’re not just some all knowing person, you’re definitely learnin’ from the folks you helping. and they’re helping your ass out.

artisintheyes: that’s a lot to be excited about.

gerardo: I’m usually excited about it most of the time.

artisintheyes: that’s pretty much what I wanted to ask you about, but if you have anything else you wanna add this is your open forum.

gerardo: in terms of the theme of your interview series, my life is a definitely a process. one thing I had to learn the hard way was coming at these sort of goals with humility. not in terms of don’t be boastful but like, “well fuck I don’t know to do this or do that, or how to be a professor.” being able to say, “well shit, I don’t know but somebody out there does and I need to ask.” to make those connection you just gotta ask. If you don’t know who to talk to then you need to go and ask, “well fuck, who do you talk to?” that’s a skill that’s been so helpful for me. I don’t think I’d be here if I didn’t ask some people simple questions even. they don’t have to know the answer, they might know somebody, and I think that’s something that gets overlooked. there’s that sense pride like, “I’ll figure it out myself.” If we all thought that way, the world would be mad anti-social.”

artisintheyes: in my case what was holding me back was fear. I was always feeling stupid, and always feeling lost. I believe wouldn’t have gone to Cal if I didn’t approach a girl with a clipboard in Stockton’s food court who happened to be doing outreach for a program called REACH! that brought underserved Asian Pacific Islander students to the college campus to give them that exposure and mentorship.

gerardo: this is one thing that I really love about Mama Swan. she was like, “to make things simple for yourself, you can boil all emotions down to love and fear. anytime you’re making a decision you have to ask yourself, which one of those two are you coming from?” you can sit down and try to categorize your emotions or you can just ask yourself how you wanna approach this, from love or fear? If we talk about your passions and what your goals are, it’s really hard to think that you’ll get there from taking a path a fear. you can simplify a lot of the things you contemplate by just asking yourself, “well what the fuck am I so afraid of?” we definitely need a lot more love in this world. I mean you see what fear manifests into, we’re pretty much seeing some kind of article about that everyday. but yeah we definitely need a lot more love.

artisintheyes: amen. I can clearly see that you’re manifesting that love in the life you live.

gerardo: I had a lot shown my way.

artisintheyes: me too. we’re just trying to be mirrors of the love we’ve received and pay it forward in that sense. thank you so much for being here. I got gratitude to the nth power.

gerardo: thank you for having me.