From this border.

I'm from this border. My family has businesses in Nuevo Laredo, and my work crosses it every day. Laredo alone handles 38.8% of all truck crossings on the U.S.–Mexico border (2025, BTS), and I've built my career on both sides of it.

I started in municipal government, as Nuevo Laredo's Secretary of Economic Development and Employment, then led its institute for competitiveness and foreign trade. A PhD at Deusto Business School and years of research at Orkestra, the Basque Institute of Competitiveness, taught me how cross-border regions work in Europe. Mexico's Secretariat of Economy brought me back as an advisor on innovation and industrial strategy. In 2016 I founded the Center for Socioeconomic and Technological Innovation in Nuevo Laredo, guiding companies from SMEs to the Fortune 500 as they built new business models.

Since 2021 I've directed the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development at Texas A&M International University, home of the TAMIU Logistechs Living Lab, the first logistics-digitalization lab focused on cross-border flows.

Along the way I coined a term for what I kept seeing: Logistechs, the impact that AI and other exponential technologies have on logistics and cross-border trade. The companies that survive won't be the strongest or the smartest. They'll be the ones that adapt best to change. I've written two books on what that means for North America, the second forthcoming from Springer, and I publish the argument in progress as op-eds, research, and live data tools.