Victor Rodriguez

The date is August 2, 2023. Victor, Nay, Angie, and I have gone into a building in Japantown that houses a cozy sake bar, and we are standing by the bar’s entrance, waiting to get a table. The bar is packed, the hostesses are busy, and the four of us are anything but busy, lingering in the hallway and debating at which point we decide to skip this ordeal. 

“Come on, Denis,” Victor says jokingly. “This is what a real journalist would do.” 

“Well, I never said I was a real journalist.”

I used our wait time to cajole Victor into agreeing to be profiled for the magazine. The strategy backfired because his idea of spending a day together—which, admittedly, is what I asked him—consists of activities that he enjoys doing, which includes kitesurfing, paragliding, scuba diving, onewheeling, and other permutations in which the physical body becomes subjected to motion, coordination, and acceleration due to gravity. In other words, activities that terrify me. 

We come to a compromise after a few minutes of deliberating. I can join, but I will not, under any circumstances, have my feet lifted off the ground. Even with this agreement, there is still one problem: finding the time on Victor’s calendar will not be easy. He is going to Burning Man in a few weeks. He and Angie also like to venture out on the weekends, often to another state or another country. And I am certainly not making my life any easier by imposing restrictions on which activities we can do, because many of them are heavily dependent on the weather and can therefore be scrapped at the last minute. 

Kitesurfing, specifically, requires a good amount of wind, which is reliably omnipresent in the summer when the high-pressure, cold air from the Pacific Ocean moves toward the low-pressure, hot air in the inland Bay Area. In the winter, this differential doesn’t exist, so the wind only ever comes as a bundle offer with wet storms, which is certainly not the vibe I am going for. In addition to all that, even if we find an appropriate date in the summer, too much wind might make it impossible to jot down notes and take photos. It’s all too uncontrollable for my taste. 

“Don’t you want to show the world the truth?” he continues teasing. 

Nay and Angie laugh. I pout, petulantly.

“Victor, I am very happy living a life of lies.”

The four of us finally decide, after twenty minutes of debating, to spend the rest of the night at Last Rites instead of waiting for the elusive hostesses from the bar. I stop talking about the interview with Victor and tell myself that I just need to let some time pass and that Victor, in the meantime, will maybe give up on trying to make me do sports with him. Maybe.

* * *

Three months later, the date is now November 7, 2023, and I am texting Victor and Angie to figure out where and when we meet for dinner. Angie is held up at work, so Victor makes a proposal.  

“Denis, how about you and I have a date in the city?”

The perfect scenario: no motion, no coordination, no acceleration due to gravity. I grab the notebook from my apartment and go wait for Victor outside my building. Just a few minutes later, he pulls up in his car and rolls down the windows. 

“Ready?”

“Where are we going?” I ask. 

“To an ice cream place in The Mission place that reminds me of home,” Victor answers. “And, I mean, that really reminds me of home. It’s exactly the type of place you would find in Mexico. The ice cream is a little different compared to what you typically have in the US.”

Victor grew up in Mexico, in the state of Baja California, and specifically at the state’s northeastern border with the United States, where one finds the state’s capital city, appropriately named Mexicali. He lived in Mexicali until the end of high school and then moved to Boston to attend MIT. 

Though we overlapped for three years in college and lived only two blocks from each other, we didn’t officially meet until I went to visit Angie in San Francisco in 2016, which was just a little bit before they started dating. Twelve months later, on July 4, 2017, the day I officially moved to San Francisco, I found myself in the backseat of Victor’s SUV, going to his and Angie’s place where we later had dumplings and then spent the evening together, next to the ocean, looking at the fireworks veiled by the city’s fog. It was a windy night and I distinctly remember thinking how strange the circle of life was. 

The place we’re going to is called Nieves Cinco de Mayo, located in the heart of The Mission, right next to the intersection of 16th Street and Mission Street. Victor asks me how willing I am to go outside of my taste’s comfort zone, and I feel good about myself when he asks that question because, in contrast to how I feel about unfamiliar physical activity, I love trying out new food. He orders us Tostilocos and a chamoyada with tamarind sorbet base.  

Tostilocos are a classic in Mexican street food. The most common way of serving the dish is to cut open a bag of Tostitos chips, and first add a combo of sauces and juices, typically chamoy (paste-like sauce usually made of pickled fruit, chili, lime, and salt), Clamato (tomato juice, clam broth, sugar, and spices), lime juice, and hot sauce. Then come the jicama, cucumbers, maybe a bit of meat like pig skin, and Japanese peanuts.

There is no such thing as peanuts grown in or imported from Japan, and according to Victor, when he first showed the dish to Angie—who is half Japanese—she found it comical that the deep-fried, wheat-coated peanuts were called that way. There is a story behind this name, however. A guy by the name of Yoshigei Nakatani, a Japanese immigrant in Mexico, came up with the idea sometime in the 1940s when he started selling snacks as a way to provide for his family. Very quickly, the locals were lining up to buy the peanuts, and they became known as cacahuates del japonés (the Japanese guy’s peanuts). 

Chamoyada, the second thing we ordered, is a drink typically made with chamoy, sorbet or ice cream (Victor likes a tamarind sorbet), fruit chunks (most often mango), tamarind candy, Japanese peanuts, and Tajín (a popular Mexican condiment). For Victor, this is the ice cream that he used to eat growing up in Mexico. And it’s often the snack that his non-Mexican friends find unusual at best and unpleasant at worst. 

Growing up in Mexicali meant that California was just a border away—a very, very close border away. Which meant that Victor went to school in California, in a nearby city that sounds like Mexicali's alternate-universe twin: Calexico. 

“You went across the border to go to school as a kid?” I ask, in awe.

“Oh, yeah,” he adds. “I would wake up at 6 a.m., go to the border, wait for an hour and then go to school in Calexico. It was like this every day for years: kindergarten, elementary school, and high school.”  

“Wait, so, does that mean—”

“Yep,” he laughs. “I never actually went to school in Mexico.”

Victor’s childhood in Mexicali was fun. It was the usual childhood of a kid from a middle-class family in Mexico. He spent most of his time studying and hanging out with friends. Mexicali remained his microcosm throughout his teenage years as well, but that quickly changed once he got into MIT and moved to Boston.

How did that shift feel, I ask.

“Honestly, the biggest shock was just how cold Boston was,” he says. “Mexicali is a very hot and dry place. Sometimes in the summers, it can reach 50 Celsius. My friends and I, one time when we were kids, cracked an egg on the hood of a car and the egg started frying.” 

It was a fundamental shift, though. MIT was the perfect place to harness his talent for building, tinkering, and experimenting. It was also the place that, in a way, separated him from his life and his friends in Mexicali, because he was suddenly exposed to opportunities and activities that were once out of reach. It’s a disquieting thought that continues to linger in his mind, because having access to the best-in-class that the world has to offer can feel unsettlingly coincidental if you didn’t have that access before.

Victor graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering, moved to San Francisco, became a hardware engineer at Apple, and found himself at the nexus of everything that he liked and everything that he would grow to like. Tech, travel, friends, scuba diving, kitesurfing, paragliding. Modern-day San Francisco was the perfect place for him, and, come to think of it, I could not imagine him living anywhere else. 

Nieves Cinco de Mayo is closing up, so Victor and I take the Tostilocos and the chamoyada and start walking toward his car. We decide to go to another spot in The Mission, and on our way, we end up talking about kitesurfing. 

If you have never heard of this term, this is what you need to know: kitesurfing is a water sport that is effectively a mix of windsurfing, snowboarding, wakeboarding, and even paragliding. The kite surfer rides a board on the water while holding a power kite that is propelled by the wind. The result is an aerial-aquatic acrobatic spectacle that looks like something straight out of a video game. When the sport first became a thing, it was rife with physical injuries but has since become safer.

Victor started kitesurfing in 2018 when he learned the basics in Boracay, Philippines, and from there quickly fell in love with the sport. He now competes (his record jump was 22.7 meters), spends most of his weekends on the water, and even organizes annual kitesurfing trips to La Ventana for his experienced kitesurfing friends as well as for novices who want to learn. It’s a lifestyle that is beyond my comprehension. When the last atmospheric river hit San Francisco, during which most of us, humbled by Mother Nature, coiled up in our apartments, Victor grabbed his wetsuit and went kitesurfing instead. 

“That is insane, Victor,” I gasp. “I spent my time during that atmospheric river under my blanket, staring through the windows, and not leaving my apartment.”

He laughs and tells me that Angie is just as unafraid to face Mother Nature. 

“People asked Angie if she was scared that I went kiting during that storm and if she was worried something would happen to me, and she just shrugged and said: ‘No, why? I told him to be careful when driving in the rain.’”   

Victor parks right next to Rosamunde Sausage Grill on Mission Street, which is oddly packed for a Tuesday night. We decide to stay in the car, turn on the heating, and finish the Tostilocos. I notice a girl standing outside the restaurant’s door, drinking beer and shivering in the cold, visibly bored by her friends’ conversation, and I think about the fact that she probably paid more than ten bucks for that beer and that she would probably be much happier eating Tostilocos by herself in a car.  

“Were you always like this?” I ask Victor. “Adventurous?”

“Actually, I was shy and reserved when I was young. And, I was easily scared. Like, I was frightened by rollercoasters.”

“Really?”

“I am terrified of heights actually,” he says. “When I am near a cliff, for example, and when I look down into the water, it’s really, really scary to me. But, when I kite, for example, I feel like I am in control. I know what to do and how to navigate myself in the air. It’s important to me that I understand the ins and outs of whichever activity I am doing. Doing tandem paragliding is actually much scarier to me than doing it on my own.”

“Why?” I look at him, baffled. “Wouldn’t an instructor make it feel safer? You’re doing it with someone who is certified actually.” 

“For me, no,” he says. “What’s scary to me in these activities is the lack of knowledge. I want to learn everything there is to know in these sports. Having the knowledge makes me confident. I feel like I am in control because I know what to do in scary situations.”

“Well, that’s one way to deal with fear,” I laugh. “I just go for the good ol’ avoidance.”  

“It’s always been like that for me. I go from passion to passion. It started with traveling, then scuba diving, then kitesurfing, and now paragliding. I get obsessed with whichever activity I am doing, I want to learn as much as I can about it, I do it a lot, and I become good at it as a result.” 

We get out of the car eventually because Victor wants to teach me how to ride a Onewheel Pint X, an electric single-wheeled riding board that I am supposed to control by leaning my body in the right direction. I vehemently resist participating in this ad hoc, on-the-street training session, but I give in after ten minutes of saying no. 

Victor helps me stand on the onewheel and tells me to put my arms on his shoulders so that I don’t fall. We practice for a bit, my hands resting on his shoulders, circling on the onewheel around the 24th BART Station entrance. Eventually, he lets me go, and I realize that I am, miraculously, riding the onewheel on my own. 

“Dude, you did it!” Victor cheers. 

I cheer as well. 

“Paragliding next?” he laughs.  

“Alright,” I snap sassily, “let’s not get ambitious.”

* * *

Fast forward three months from that night, the date is now February 19, 2024. I am at Victor and Angie’s place because Victor got a hold of Apple’s new Vision Headset Pro and he wants me to try it out. It’s hard to say no to him, not because he is pushy but because his passion for technology in these situations is contagious.

Victor has been working at Apple as a Hardware Reliability Engineer for nearly a decade, across different domains: audio, home, power adapters, and accessories. If you have ever purchased AirPods, HomePod Mini, iOS adapters, or Mac adapters, you have used a product that Victor had worked on. Spending time with him is witnessing the Internet-of-Things movement happen in real time. From his smart watch to his smartphone to his laptop to his smart speakers to his smart accessories, his everyday environment, to me, often looks like a microcosmic infrastructure of rapid, efficient information flow. And, it rubs off on you. Victor is the reason I bought myself an Apple Watch and AirTags.

“It’s pretty cool to see people across the world using products that you’ve worked on,” he tells me while he sets up the headset. “And, I think Apple is unique in that way because it’s ubiquitous and it’s hardware. It’s tangible.”

“Ten years, that’s a decent chunk of your life. You still find it exciting?”

“Even after all these years, there is still a lot of novelty in the job,” he answers. “Because the products are so different, you deal with different problems.”

“What’s an example?” I ask.

“For instance, over the last three years, I worked in audio, specifically on the AirPods. If you think of AirPods, there is obviously all the engineering complexity that you have to think about, like how you optimize the size of the battery. Then there is also the design part of it, like how you make something that has a distinct Apple feel. But what might get overlooked in this case is how the operations behind AirPod production influence engineering. With AirPods, the volume of produced units is massive. So, if a mistake is made, it gets amplified quickly just by the sheer number of units that get produced. As a result, you are dealing with a very high-pressure situation. That changes how you have to think as an engineer.”

There is undoubtedly an innate nerdiness to Victor, which is what makes his passion so contagious. But there is a more profound layer beneath the nerdiness: his conscious and deliberate desire to be inclusive. I noticed it early on in our friendship, particularly in those moments at big parties or in big groups, when Victor went the extra mile to make sure no one felt left out or invisible in social interactions. It also came through in subtler ways that I didn’t recognize at first, like his tendency to immediately switch from Spanish to English if an English-speaking person came up to him when he was chatting with his Spanish-speaking friends. To that extent, playing with the Apple Vision Pro at their place is not just Victor sharing his passion. It’s him making sure that I get to be part of this groundbreaking experience as well. 

Victor helps me put on the headset and tells me that the hardware and software need to recalibrate to my eyes. Colored dots suddenly appear in the middle of Victor and Angie’s living room. With my right hand, I begin air-clicking them. The headset recalibrates, and just like that, windows and tabs and images disperse across their living room, and I become a piece of augmented reality. 

“You wanna watch Alicia Keys?” Victor asks. 

“Uh, sure,” I say, not knowing what to expect. 

Their living room disappears and I find myself in a rehearsal room, standing next to Alicia Keys and her live band. It feels surreal, as if I am actually there.  

“Woah.”

I have to take a seat—in physical reality—because the experience is all-consuming. The band starts playing a reggae take of Alicia’s hit-single “No One,” which catches me off-guard because I haven’t heard the song since high school, and I start wondering what my fifteen-year-old self would think if he saw himself, fifteen years into the future, listening to the song in virtual reality. For the next thirty minutes, I sit quietly, my jaw dropped, and I gasp wows every few minutes, eventually forgetting that Victor and Angie are in the room, entertained by my theatrics. 

* * *

My day of reckoning descends on May 12, 2024, three months after the AR and VR hangout at Victor and Angie’s place. The spring weather has arrived, which means the Bay Area wind is more predictable, which means the conditions are great for kitesurfing, which means I am once again in a car with Victor, this time driving to Sherman Island County Park, where the air is hot and the fields are green and in unison the white windmills spin. The nine-month waiting period, however, has served me well. Victor had accepted that I will not kite surf, but merely act as an observer on the ground, to see what the sport looks like in person. While I spent these nine months not making any progress on conquering my fears, Victor crossed another milestone off his list: he officially landed his paragliding certification two weeks ago.

“So, there are two spots where you’ll be able to take photos of me kitesurfing,” he tells me in the car. “One is right by the beach, and the other is close to these small islands, where the water is flat, so it’s easy to learn new tricks there. But I’ll stick to the beach because you’re here today, and most of us prefer to kite there anyway.”

“Any reason?”

“Well,” he laughs, “one, it’s a great spot to show off your tricks. Two, in case something happens, it’s much better to be close to the beach.”

Victor checks the Find My app on his phone, where he tracks the locations of his kiter friends. It seems that a few are already there and that the rest are on their way. On a given weekend in the spring and in the summer, there is actually very little coordination needed among this big group. People will simply drive to Sherman Island with their gear, join the group, kitesurf during the day, and grab dinner together in the evening.

Within the Bay Area kiter community, Victor has become well-known for his kitesurfing skills. That is apparent to me the moment we get to the park, when a tall guy jokingly throws a ball of crumpled paper at Victor’s car. He cheerfully yells Victor’s name, and suddenly, other people start coming up to the car to say hi to Victor as well. It’s an amusing scene to be part of, mostly because it’s visibly obvious to everyone that I—Victor’s quiet friend in head-to-toe-black with a notebook and a pen in his hand, who looks like he had emerged from the depths of a pretentious cavernous club—am clearly not there to kite.

Victor finds a parking spot, puts his wetsuit on, and grabs his kiting gear from the trunk. He introduces me to a few of his kiter friends who are setting up their kites on a big grass field, which is separated from the beach by low-rise bushes and shrubs. Watching the Sherman Island kiters prepare for their time on the water feels like observing a highly stylized ritual. They first bring their kites to this grass field, where they start inflating the kites with air. It’s a step that is not apparent to a distant bystander, to whom these kites might appear as paper-thin curves in the air, but it’s one that ensures there is enough air in the leading edge and struts to give the kite a solid canopy.

Photo credit: The cover photo of Victor is courtesy of Konstantin Martynov, and has been edited to fit magazine’s brand.

During this time, the kiters chat with each other. Questions and consultations ricochet across the field—how is the wind? who is taking a 9? who is taking a 12? is a 12 too much? The integers, in kitesurfer vernacular, refer to the square meter surface area of the kite. It is an important physical dimension because the magnitude of the two critical aerodynamic forces on the kite—the lift and the drag—is directly proportional to the kite’s surface area and directly proportional to velocity squared of the wind.

Put simply, if the wind becomes fast (its velocity becomes high), the aerodynamic forces on the kite become super strong, which means the kiter is in for a ride. Or, vice versa; if the wind becomes slow (its velocity becomes low), the aerodynamic forces on the kite become super weak, and the kiter has nothing to work with. One way to balance out these effects is to alter other variables in the aerodynamic force equations. Surface area of the kite, the directly proportional variable, is one of them. That’s why kiters always bring at least two differently-sized kites, to be able to adapt to the wind’s speed.

When the kites are inflated, the Sherman Island kiters flip their kites upside down and start walking the lines. This step looks exactly what it sounds like. Walking backward from the kite, each kiter lays the kite’s threads, in parallel lines, on the grass. This is to ensure that no threads are entangled and that there are no issues. As they do this, the kiters also walk parallel to each other, to ensure the threads from one kite do not get entangled with those of other kites. This is the step that gives me, an unknowledgeable bystander, the most anxiety, because it feels like a 2D version of Mission Impossible as I try to Tom Cruise my way across the field and not step on anyone’s threads.

The inflated kites are then propelled into the air, away from the kiters, and the show finally begins. The kiters start walking (most do so by going backward again) through the bushes and the shrub toward the beach. There are rules in this step as well. The kiters cannot tailgate each other, and the kiters who are returning from the water cannot use the same path as the kiters who are heading toward the water. Non-kiters, like myself, are free to use any path as long as they yield to the kiters.

Victor directs me to a spot on the beach where it will be easy to take photos. The sand is muddy and squishy, so I take off my sandals and walk into the water. I watch Victor perform tricks for me on the water and in the air, and while kitesurfing is indeed an impressive form of physical prowess and courage, it dawns on me, there and then, that it is also a remarkable form of showmanship.

I knew the sport had elements of acrobatics, but I had never thought of Victor as a showman. That, I now realize, was a gross assumption on my part. Watching him do board offs, front rolls, dead mans, and all the breathtaking figures of the big-air kitesurfing style made me appreciate his passion even more. His confidence, athleticism, and gutsiness were still there in his kiting moves, but I saw for the first time the regalness, the grace, and the humorous cheekiness in the way he played with the wind.

In the evening, I go sit on a big branch by the beach, wearing Victor’s towel poncho to stay warm, and I watch him and his friends kitesurf against the golden glow of the late sunset. When the sun’s crown disappears behind the horizon, Victor and his friends become tiny silhouettes in the distance, flying and spinning in the air like butterflies. I notice that each silhouette has a distinct style of holding court—a way of gliding on the water, a manner of appearance in the air. And there is one whose style is just as recognizable in the distance as it is up close, with its flamboyant glides, fearless flips, and phoenix-like lifts.

Even as a silhouette, Victor knows how to reign.