Andrew Trujillo is Española Public Schools' technology director, which means he worries about fiber optics, cybersecurity, servers, 1,049 security cameras, and an emergency management system that ties notifications directly into 911 response, alongside approximately a thousand other things most students will never notice. That's pretty much the point. If Andrew does his job well, a student opens a Chromebook and it works. A teacher touches a Promethean board and the lesson appears. The technology disappears.

What doesn't disappear is Andrew's connection to the place where he's doing it. "I'm an Española product," he told me. Class of 2002. Back then, Andrew wasn't imagining himself someday running the technological backbone of his old school district. He was a serious AutoCAD user with a family in heavy equipment and utility work, drafting for architectural firms and inevitably becoming the guy who ended up connecting plotters and solving computer problems. "I would have never figured I'd be the guy programming and doing all of the ones and zeros," he said.

He came back to Española in 2007 through Efinity Networks, a contracted IT service funded at the time by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. When that funding disappeared in 2013 and the district decided to bring everything in-house, its technology department shrank from roughly 14 staff to three. Andrew became director, and has spent the years since chasing a particularly Española-sized challenge: reliable connectivity across a district stretching from Abiquiú to Chimayó, through a patchwork of communities and Pueblo lands, including Ohkay Owingeh and Santa Clara, that Andrew describes as something close to a checkerboard. Some sites reach the internet through fiber; others required building out point-to-point wireless connections by hand. "That's been one of my biggest drivers with this district," he said, "making sure that everybody's got the high-speed internet."

COVID tested all of it. "This district was not ready for that," he admits plainly. Necessity accelerated the work anyway; today the district could pivot back to remote learning if it ever had to. Andrew has since layered on artificial-intelligence tools that can narrow a camera search across every school site, an HPE server cluster that keeps the district's systems virtualized and redundant across four points of backup, and ongoing cybersecurity work including regular penetration testing. "If you don't have that, that's your backbone," he said. "You can't drive anything else."

Underneath all those systems is something far less technical. Andrew knows the people using them, including the grandparents raising grandchildren who sometimes find technology intimidating, and being bilingual lets him explain, in their own language, that none of it is anything to fear. "It's here to help you," he tells them. "This is what we're here to do for you guys."

That's where being an "Española product" really matters. Andrew married his high school sweetheart, Kristen, a fellow Española Valley graduate, in 2011, and they're raising two daughters, Lauren and Aria, homeschooled but deeply connected locally through Moving Arts, a nearly two-decade-old program based in Ohkay Owingeh that teaches gymnastics, folklórico, and dance. Ask Andrew what makes Española special and he doesn't mention bandwidth. "It's the culture," he said, pointing to the grandparents, the traditions, the faith that shows up as a church seemingly on every corner, from the Santuario de Chimayó to smaller chapels most outsiders never hear of. Andrew is Catholic himself, and a Hermano, a member of a local religious brotherhood, which is how he happens to carry a set of keys to a church most Americans have actually seen without knowing it: San José in Hernandez, the building behind Ansel Adams' famous 1941 photograph "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico." He offered to let me in.

And then, just when I thought I had Andrew figured out, the tech guy offered one more plot twist. He's an actor, discovered years ago doing background work with horses, which led to a role in the Netflix series Ransom Canyon, trailer work for a potential Young Guns 3 built around Billy the Kid and Pancho Villa, and, currently, consideration for the role of Joseph of Egypt in a new project from Dallas Jenkins, the creator of The Chosen, which happens to explain the beard.

The kid who loved drafting became the guy connecting plotters, who became a technology director keeping an entire district online, who occasionally wanders onto a film set between server upgrades. Lives rarely follow straight lines. Neither do networks. Andrew has spent his career finding ways around mountains, distance, and difficult terrain to connect one place to another. Maybe there's something fitting in that. After all those unexpected turns, he ended up connected to exactly the place where he started, and now he spends his days making sure the next kid can connect to wherever their own path leads.