By guest contributor, Juan Pablo Di Pace as part of GLAAD’s Latine Heritage Month op-ed series, championing queer and allied voices in the community.
I grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with an artist mother and a father who worked in marketing. He traveled constantly, returning with all kinds of gifts from distant lands, but the best ones were always his stories: how people lived differently, how the streets looked in Germany, how food tasted in Brazil, how art spoke in Italy. Through him, I grew up with curiosity, a longing for what was out there, and a sense that the world was bigger than the block I grew up in.
When puberty hit, that curiosity became a hunger. I wanted to leave Argentina, to see the world with my own eyes beyond my family and my country. And one day in 1997, at age 17, a schoolmate showed me a piece of paper with a strange ad: “Would you like to finish high school abroad, in English? Apply here.” It was for something called the United World College, and if you were chosen, you were sent on a full scholarship to the other side of the world for two years. Of course I applied, and my hunger got me in.
I had no idea the UWC was created by Kurt Hahn, a visionary who, after opposing Hitler and fleeing Germany, imagined a school where teenagers from every country would live together, learning from their differences to foster international peace. I arrived in Duino, Italy, in September 1997, and was thrown into a whirlwind of experiences: races, languages, foods, music, opinions, and religions I had never encountered before. I remember stepping into the canteen and hearing twenty languages spoken at once. I felt shot out of a cannon, suddenly a person with no past. I had only my Argentinian flag, my name, my Spanish. But in that space, history didn’t matter, I could start from scratch. We all could…
Now, 25 years later, I realize it was the greatest gift you can give a teenager: the chance to reinvent themselves by experiencing the world in one single place. It taught me that identity isn’t something you inherit fully formed, but is something you build, moment by moment, in relation to others.
When it came time to choose a life path, I chose an artistic one: first a dancer, then an actor, a musician, and now a director. I’ve started from scratch many times after that high school, from London, to Madrid, to Los Angeles. My father’s stories became my own life. I discovered the price of differences, both in the safe container of an international school, and in the real world, with its finger pointing, its oppression, its insistence that you fit into boxes. In my industry, I had to play the “Latin flavor” of the month a few times, but in my own heart I couldn’t care less about my acting type. I was still the curious kid marveling at stories from distant lands and I had arrived at the center of where movies are made, Hollywood. Reinvention, I realized, is not just survival—it’s a form of creativity.
Recently I wrote and co-directed Before We Forget, a feature about an Argentine filmmaker struggling to finish a movie inspired by his first love as a teen with a charismatic Swedish boy at boarding school. The film deals with memory, heartache, parenthood, culture, being far from home, and resisting the cages society builds around us. It is also about the desire to start over, to build a new self and to celebrate the beauty of those precious memories, which are the true building blocks of who we become.
And that is where heritage comes in. Our memories, whether of family, country, religion, or culture, don’t have to trap us. They can guide us, they can inspire us, they can give us the raw material to create something new. Latine identity is exactly that: not a single story, but a tapestry of many, with contradictions and richness, joy and pain, tradition and invention. Because when we learn from our history, we have a choice: repeat it, improve it, or create something entirely new. And that choice will always begin with curiosity.
Like Hahn, I believe actions taken through whatever we are most passionate about, can make a world of difference. In my case, it’s movies and stories. For you, it might be something completely different, and I encourage you to go boldly in that direction. Make, fail, make again, but always, always from the heart and a desire not to be right, but to be open.
