Carlos Roberto Martinez, the youngest child of five in a Mexican-American family, grew up in Boyle Heights, a traditionally multicultural sector of East Los Angeles where many recent immigrants to America live. Most of Carlos classmates in lower and middle school were children from Japanese, Mexican, Russian and Jewish families. His first grade teacher recognized that he was precocious beyond his years and suggested that he advance to the third grade. His mother was determined that her family benefit from the complete educational experience that she had missed. “She watched over us diligently. The only places we were permitted to go outside the house were school or the library.” Carlos’ older sister who also thrived under this policy is a dermatologist in Los Angeles and is his severest critic. “She keeps me on a straight and narrow path,” he said.

Carlos reached the tenth grade, the pace of his classes so bored him that he decided to drop out of high school. Sixteen years old and fired with intellectual curiosity and ambition, he chose more challenging courses in summer school and then added a few years to his age when he applied to a Los Angeles junior college. He supplemented his income with a full-time job as a classroom security guard on campus. Tall and husky at sixteen, no one questioned his age. “Now, these records are corrected,” he asserted.

At Cornell, Carlos wrote poetry and some fiction and enrolled in the Army ROTC. He spent one summer in training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and spent one year at the University of York in England as an exchange student. His presumed major was in early and contemporary English literature. Yet, he also became deeply interested in Russian literature. “Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Gogol became my literary heroes. I tried for a time to learn Russian. I was told that I was missing the nuances in the writing—the puns, humor and political statements—if I did not read these authors in the original language.”

Most of Carlos’ career has been in high technology sales and marketing and he has held management positions in this field for 14 years. Recently, he was named National Accounts Manager for Captaris, a Seattle-based company listed on the nasdaq, specializing in enterprise document capture, text recognition and classification systems. Frequent business travel—a necessity in his position—is a pleasure for him.

Around the time of 9/11, a fallow period for hardware and software companies, Carlos found his undergraduate degree in English useful. For that period of 2½ years, he taught high-school English in the South Bronx. From 1988 to 1992, before toiling in the vineyards of Silicon Valley, and just prior to business school at Berkeley, he worked for four years at the Ministry of Foreign Trade at the Italian Trade Commission promoting Italian exports. Initially, after college, from 1985 to 1988, he was involved in independent filmmaking and television media production in New York, Los Angeles and Manila.

Carlos had two incentives to learn Italian: his work at the Trade Commission and a two-year marriage to a young doctoral candidate in Economics from Italy whom he met when he was an exchange student. With fluency in two Romance languages, it was fairly easy for him to learn Portuguese and French. During the year he spent in the Philippines, he acquired some Filipino and Chinese. When he returned to Los Angeles, he took night courses in Chinese. He acquired some Japanese from childhood friends in Boyle Heights. Carlos’ three children share his proclivity for languages. His eldest, a 15‑year‑old son, Camilo, studied at a French school for five years and is now immersed in Italian and Spanish, and his daughters Flavia, 11 and Elisa, 9, are also studying languages. Elisa has also chosen to study Japanese. All three children participate in the All Souls Religious Education program.		Carlos Martinez (center) with his children: Flavia (11), Camilo (15) and Elisa (9).
They live with their mother in New Jersey and spend weekends, holidays and summer vacations with Carlos in Mamaroneck. Carlos and his former wife, a native of Philadelphia, were married for 12 years.

There is a strong spiritual side to Carlos’ character. Born in 1960, baptized and raised as a Roman Catholic, his initial exposure to Unitarianism was in 1977 at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. He became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church at Berkeley in 1994. When he moved east, he joined the Community Unitarian Church in White Plains, New York, and in 2002, became a member of All Souls. He takes part in several All Souls groups: Single Parents, the 30s/40s Fellowship, and Career Development. At a recent meeting of Stories with Soul, he read Lyubka the Cossack by Isaac Babel, one of his favorite Russian writers from his Cornell years.

Last year Carlos founded and launched the Emerson Circle. Participants read and discuss the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers of similar mind such as Henry Thoreau and William James. The group meets twice monthly in the Ware Room. In December a panel of Emerson scholars discussed the topic “Emerson For a Nation in Crisis.” This February, Philip F. Gura, author of American Transcendentalism: A History, read passages from his book and from Emerson’s writings. The following month, Susan Cheever’s presentation on her recent book on the Transcendentalists, American Bloomsbury was a great success. Special events such as the second annual trip to Concord, Massachusetts, April 25-27, 2008, occur throughout the year. On May 22, Emerson’s birthday will be observed with a talk by Nancy Craig Simmons on the influence on the young Emerson of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson.

Carlos is involved in the formation of another new All Souls group along with several other church members including Professor Richard Ford. The International Church Partnership plans to link American Unitarian Universalist churches with fellow Unitarian churches abroad to initiate a continuing dialogue among congregations here and overseas. Carlos is a man of ideas who makes things happen. Whatever he pursues, one may be sure it will be done with intelligence and vigor. He is a man on the move.