About

I was twelve when my mother died.

That sentence is where everything I do begins. Not because grief is a credential, but

because losing her early taught me what I now spend my life trying to live out. Time is short.

The people around you are the work. And the only version of a life worth building is one honest

enough to admit what it cost.

I am Humberto Rodriguez. I was born to migrant parents and raised in Central Washington's Yakima Valley,

in a single-parent household after my mother passed and during the years my father was deported

and re-deported. I grew up in the kind of place this country talks about a lot and listens to almost never.

Farmworker families. Old houses. Cold winters. Long rows of grapes and apples that fed everybody but

us. I learned early that the people who do the hardest work are usually the ones nobody writes about.

So I write about them. And I build for them.

What I do now

I am the founder of XENDRY and SynovoOps, two software companies built for small businesses and the trades. The kind of people who keep towns running. That work is where most of my professional energy lives now, and it is what I am trying to grow into something big enough to hold up the rest of my life.

I am also the CEO of a behavioral health agency serving Central Washington with mental health, substance use, and medication management services. It is hard, unglamorous work. I am grateful to do it. My team makes me better at it than I would ever be alone.

On the creative side, I write essays on Substack. I host a podcast called Behind the Scenes with Humberto Rodriguez. I am developing Valle Limpio, a bilingual environmental justice platform for farmworkers. And I am in production on two documentaries. A four-part micro-series called What We Mean When We Say Human, and a feature on Radio KDNA, the bilingual farmworker radio station that gave my community its first voice on the airwaves.

Why all of it

People ask me how the pieces fit together. They fit because they have the same root. The software, the writing, the films, the agency. It is all the same project. Take the place I am from seriously. Tell the truth about it. Build what it needs. Refuse to pretend any of this is separate from any other part of it.

What I have learned

I used to think leadership was something you performed. A posture you took, a voice you used, a set of principles you displayed on a wall. I do not think that anymore.

What I think now is that leadership is what happens in the small unwitnessed moments. The email you answer when nobody would have noticed if you had ignored it. The conversation you have with your kid when you would rather scroll your phone. The bill you pay for someone who cannot pay it themselves and never tell anyone you did. The truth you tell about your own community even when your own community would rather you did not.

I have failed at a lot of this. I have lost my temper. I have missed podcast recordings. I have said things I regret and I have stayed silent when I should have spoken. I am not a case study in resilience. I am a person still figuring most of this out, in public, with all the mistakes that come with that.

The personal part

I am a husband. I am a father to six kids. I steward a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farmhouse with my wife. My faith matters to me and I write about it honestly, which means I write about it in a way that makes some people uncomfortable. I am Mexican American, and that is not a flavor I add to my work. It is the ground I stand on.

What you can expect from me here

Software that respects the people using it. Films that take their subjects seriously. Writing that does not flinch. And no version of leadership that requires me to pretend I have it all together.

I would rather be useful than impressive.