Building in the open: AIA's President-elect on the meaning of Hispanic Heritage Month

I grew up inside a photograph before I understood what it was telling me.

My grandparents. My mother, Afro-Latina. Her mother, from the Canary Islands. My father’s people, Basque. My brother, my father, me. Look closely and you can see it. Taíno. West African. Canarian. Basque. Spanish. All of it, mixed into one bloodline, generations before any of us had a say in it.

Puerto Rico taught me this first. We are barely a hundred miles long. From space, we are the brightest part of the Caribbean. Small island, enormous light. That has always felt like the truest thing anyone could say about us. We are not one thing. We never were. We are the perfect mix, and the mix is the point.

This year I became the first Latina elected president of the American Institute of Architects. I am also the first openly LGBTQIA+ architect to hold the role. Two firsts, arriving together, in the same body, at the same time.

I don’t tell you this to mark a milestone. I tell you this because it is proof of something I have believed for a long time: The future of this profession does not look like one identity finally getting its turn. It looks like all of them, layered, arriving at once, because that was always the more accurate picture of who we are.

I think about the moment I chose Washington, D.C. I was driving through the city after a job interview, and I saw two men walking down the street holding hands. No one stared. No one flinched. I had never seen that before, not like that, not in public, not treated as ordinary. I decided to live in that city that same afternoon. Not because of the job. Because of the sidewalk. Because a place had been designed wide enough, open enough, for that moment to happen in daylight.

That is what I want architecture to be for everyone now. Not a profession some people are finally allowed into. A profession built, from the ground up, with enough room for the whole photograph.

I think about a tiny hospital suite I designed years ago for high-risk newborns, where the real question was never square footage. It was who counted as family in the room. I think about a healthcare program I am building at Howard University right now, training the next generation of architects who will look like the communities they are designing for. I think about a book, Out in Architecture, now on its second volume, and my own stated goal of reaching forty volumes. Not because forty is a nice round number. Because every volume is one more person who no longer must go looking for themselves in someone else’s story.

None of this is about firsts anymore. Firsts are just proof that the door was closed for a while. What I care about is what happens once enough of us are standing on the other side of it.

I want a profession that stops treating identity as a category to accommodate and starts treating it as a resource to build from. Every difference in that photograph, my grandmother’s hair, my mother’s skin, my own life with my wife, is not a complication to manage. It is intelligence. It is data about how differently people move through the spaces we design, and every architect who carries that data into a project makes the project richer for it.

This is what Hispanic Heritage Month means to me this year, standing where I am standing. Not a month to explain ourselves. A month to say, plainly, the future already looks like this. Small island. Enormous light. None of that is new. What’s new is that we finally get to build with all of it in the open.

I am the perfect mix. So is this profession, whether it has caught up to that yet or not.

I intend to spend my presidency making sure it does.

Yiselle Santos Rivera is AIA's 2026 President-elect.