Carlos Arce identifies with the lyrics of his favorite song “No Soy de Aquí, Ni Soy de Allá”, “I’m not from here and I’m not from there.” Born in Mexico, he moved to the US at an early age, and returned to his homeland only recently, in his 80s. He chose to settle in historic San Miguel de Allende, where he first came as a young man in the 1960s.
After achieving great success in the US, he chose to re-invent himself and invest his time and money in Mexico: acquiring a hotel and coffee shop, and playing an active role in the community, serving on the board of the local bilingual library.
Carlos was an accomplished professor and entrepreneur. He is also the proud grandfather of five: a musician, an audio engineer, a medical student, an AI engineer and a fashion designer (scattered across the U.S., Canada and France).
“My family reunions today represent many identities; Mexican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Native American, African American, and all sorts of European and northern African origins,” Carlos says.
Carlos knew his parents and grandparents hailed from the western mountains of Chihuahua – the Sierra Tarahumara – and he only recently made some exciting discoveries about his family’s origins, going back seven generations.
Carlos’s grandparents split their time between New Mexico and Chihuahua in the early 20th century, when the border was more porous. His family embraced cross-cultural life between the two countries. His father Francisco lived in the U.S. during the Great Depression before returning to Mexico, marrying, and then rejoining his brother José in California in 1954, when Carlos was 13, and his younger brother was six years old.
While his father and uncle worked hard in rice fields, Carlos attended a small Catholic school, where the nuns had little experience with immigrant children. But Carlos excelled – foreshadowing a bright academic career ahead – and was placed in a new grade each week, all the way up to 7th. He remembers with a smile that the chairs got bigger by the week.
With the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, by the Soviet Union, the space race began; the U.S. turned its focus on students, like Carlos, with strong math and science skills. Fortunately for Carlos, he had the luck of being mentored by Charles Lindquist, a Swedish-American math and physics teacher, who made Carlos his teaching assistant. Lindquist put Carlos forward for Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Caltech and he earned scholarships to all of them.
He chose Berkeley because it was the closest to home.
Carlos remembers when he started, he developed a class schedule that would keep him in the class from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. every single day, five days a week, having no clue that he was only supposed to take up to 15 hours of classes per week. The faculty advisor didn’t even lift his head when he looked at Carlos’s schedule and threw it back at him, but a fellow student he befriended told him a secret that would transform his college career: if a signature was scribbled on his class card, no one would notice. Carlos could design his own class card and therefore, create his own schedule!
During these college years Carlos became an avid cyclist, road-tripping from Berkeley to Vancouver, Canada. In 1963, he bought a motorcycle and went on his first long ride down to South America through Mexico, stopping in San Miguel de Allende for a month.
Carlos’s motorcycle journey in South America lasted for two months He loaded his bike on the boat at the Panama Canal heading to Turbo, Colombia, a port city that lies near the southeastern tip of the Darién gap, 340 km north of Medellín.
It was on this grand and risky adventure that he truly grew to appreciate diversity – rich, poor, dark, white. He had a natural passion for observing, asking questions and most of all, for feeling at home wherever he went.
He decided to study anthropology in his seven years at Berkeley and to do ethnographic research in the place he was most curious about: his homeland, Mexico.
While studying for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Carlos met two notable professors who were pioneering a field called mathematical anthropology. By examining massive quantities of public health data and parsing it into separate components around culture, folktales, food and more, they were essentially building affinity models to track how culture evolves. Carlos’s studies would lay the groundwork for his future entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors.
He started his career after completing a PhD in 1974, working at a survey research center, and in 1984 he started up his own survey research company. He met his wife Johanna, who became his invaluable partner in both life and work. His work centered primarily on focus groups. He had learned about asking “the difficult questions” and probing difficult topics, especially around health, delivering the insights his clients sought.
After 25 years, Carlos and Johanna successfully sold their first company and began a second company for a novel type of survey research, paralleling the birth of GPS technology. They sold the second company to a company in Bethesda, Maryland that was conducting extensive research for the Federal Government.
Their third venture in research aimed to improve advertising campaigns with solid psychographic research. The ambitious goal was to influence consumer buying behavior based on social and attitudinal data. But it was before its time, and needed big investors to float, despite their customers including AT&T, Coca-Cola and Toyota.
By this time, Carlos was in his 70s, and the call to pursue new horizons beckoned. He’d lived a full life in academia, and the adventure of successful entrepreneurship. His heart still belonged to Mexico, to San Miguel de Allende, the city he’d fallen in love with on his epic motorcycle journey as a student. It was time for him to bring all that he’d gained back to his original homeland and the city of his dreams.
Source: Mexico News Daily
