About Casa de Chavez

Last Reviewed: July 2026

My parents left Mexico and gave up more than I will probably ever fully understand, so that their kids could have a life they could only imagine. That’s the whole story, really — the leaving, the risk, the years of work — all of it pointed at one goal: give the kids a better shot.

I got that better shot. I went to university, became an engineer, and landed a job out of college. I did exactly what the plan called for.

What nobody could tell me was what came after, because nobody in mi familia had ever gotten far enough to find out. The mission was to arrive somewhere better. I arrived, and then I stood there wondering what I was supposed to do with it.

Here’s what I decided it was: learn the things that were never offered to them, and hand those things back.

I grew up the way a lot of us did. Nobody in my house thought much about what we ate, or what was in the things we used, because it was never a question anyone had asked. That isn’t neglect. My family cared enormously and worked harder than I understand to put food on the table at all. But nobody had told them, and nobody had told the people who taught them either. Which is the part worth sitting with: most of what any of us believe about health, money, and what counts as normal, we didn’t choose. We inherited it, from people doing their best with what they had at the time.

It wasn’t until after I started working that I made my health a priority at all — the first time in my life I’d treated it as something you manage rather than something that happens to you. The only tool I had was be more active, which I understood to mean lose weight, because I thought weight and health were the same measurement. So I ran. I trained for months, ran a full marathon, and afterward looked exactly the same and still didn’t feel good.

Then my health started declining in ways my doctors couldn’t fully explain, and eventually I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

So I did the only thing I actually knew how to do. Engineering had taught me how to research — how to find sources, read past the summary, check who actually measured what — and I put that to work on my own health. Books, papers, articles, podcasts. I changed what I ate and what was in my house, and things measurably improved.

What changed is that I stopped being a passive recipient. I started asking questions. I still work with my doctor — I’m monitored regularly, and that has never stopped being true; I healed because of both the medical care and the changes I made, not one or the other. But I also learned I could ask what else we might try, that a second opinion was mine to seek, and that if a doctor doesn’t treat you well, you’re allowed to go find one who does.

Which is the whole of it, really. Not that I found some secret answer. That I found out I was allowed to ask.

That’s the part I most want to teach. Our health, our money, the shape of our lives — those aren’t things that simply happen to us, decided by whether we got lucky. There is almost always something we can do about them. The hard part is that nobody hands you the list.

None of this is a correction of how I was raised. That chain — each generation passing down what it had — doesn’t break because someone did something wrong. It bends when someone in it learns something new and decides to pass it forward instead of keeping it.

Their sacrifice was step one. This is step two. Same project.

So if you’re reading this, my hope is small and specific: that something here is useful enough to pass along. Maybe to a parent. Maybe to a cousin who’s just starting to ask the same questions I did. You don’t have to overhaul anything overnight — nobody in my family has, and neither did I.

But if one piece of information moves from me, to you, to someone in your life who needed it, that’s the whole point. That’s the job.