Today we’d like to introduce you to Alan Saenz.
Hi Alan, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was born at the foot of the mountains.
Where the Rockies meet the city and the sky goes on forever if you let it. I was born to two people who crossed a border with nothing — no English, no connections, no safety net — just the belief that something better was waiting on the other side. My parents came from Mexico and they built a life with their hands. Brick by brick. Word by word in a language that wasn’t theirs yet.
That’s where I come from. That belief. That stubbornness. That refusal to accept the story you were handed.
I just didn’t know, at six years old, how hard I’d have to fight to hold onto it.
My father was murdered when I was six years old.
I don’t say that to break you.
It’s the soil where everything else grows.
He was taken from my brothers I, broken home
It was no accident, not by fate, but by the same dark current that runs through certain families, like a bloodline, like a curse passed down through generations of men who chose the wrong power.
The people who killed my father weren’t strangers.
When he died, something structural collapsed. Not just in our home, in the whole architecture of who I was supposed to become. The community we’d built around his presence, the stability my mother had fought to give us, it all came apart in the weeks and years that followed. Like a city after an earthquake. The buildings are still standing but nothing is safe anymore.
And then, in that rubble, something even darker found me.
A family member. A perverted uncle. A man who should have been protection.
He wasn’t.
I use to carry that. I’ve carried it a long time.
surviving didn’t make me strong. Not at first.
First it just makes you quiet.
It makes you small.
It teaches you to take up less space in a world that already took everything from you.
We moved. Then we moved again.
My mother found someone new, she was trying, I understand that now but he wasn’t good to us. There was turmoil. There was instability. There was the particular kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people and still feeling completely alone.
I remember this tree in one of our front yard. Big, old thing. I used to walk circles around it when I didn’t know what else to do with what I was feeling.
Around and around, like if I kept moving I wouldn’t have to stop and feel the full weight of it. Like motion was its own kind of prayer.
I was a kid trying to outpace grief.
The story never ends when
The family that killed my father never went away.
They’re still here. Embedded in the same community. Running the same poison through the same streets. And because I carry the name I carry, because blood is blood in their world, they’ve always considered me an asset. A debt owed. A door they could walk through whenever they decided it was time.
I built my life specifically so they couldn’t.
I built a business. A brand. A body of work that had nothing to do with them, that lived in a world they couldn’t touch, or so I told myself. AlanxSaenz. A creative studio dedicated to bringing hope to the hopeless, because I remember what hopeless actually feels like. I remember the weight of the world, sitting heavy on my heart and mind in the morning before I was old enough to name what depression was.
Every photograph I’ve ever taken. Every business I’ve started. Every idea I’ve put into the world it was all a kind of territory. A life built so completely on my own terms that there was no room left for theirs.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I spent years learning how to heal. How to put down the pain that had been the only familiar thing I’d ever known. It takes time to release something that’s been living in your body since you were six years old. It took me a long time, and it cost me things I’ll never fully account for. But somewhere in the creating, in the writing, the photography, the building, something was released every single time. Like the work itself was doing the healing I couldn’t do consciously.
We’ve been impressed with Premenent, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I started Permanent because I needed to give something back.
Not just as someone who loves this city, but as a professional. A craftsman. Someone who understands that creativity, real creativity, the kind that changes how a person sees themselves, is one of the most powerful things you can offer a community.
I always knew I wanted to be independent. That wasn’t a business decision. It was something deeper than that, something I decided when I was young and had very little and needed to believe that the life I was building could belong to me. Starting Permanent was the long version of that decision. It didn’t happen all at once. It was gradual, first the practice itself, just the work, just showing up and getting better. Then slowly the architecture formed around it. The business. The team. The vision of what this thing could actually become
When I work alone, I can reach the people I can reach. My community. My network. The people who already know my name. That’s meaningful, but it has a ceiling. The moment I started working with other artists, other creatives — helping them develop their brand, amplify their voice, put their work into the world the right way — the ceiling disappeared.
That’s what Permanent is built on. The belief that your story, your work, your vision, it’s bigger than you. It deserves infrastructure.
The thing I’m most proud of is simple: I’ve made a difference in people’s lives through creativity. If you’re a business that needs brand development, film, photography, or any creative asset that’s going to help you scale — that’s what Permanent does. We build the creative foundation that lets your business grow without losing what made it worth building in the first place.
That’s been the foundation for everything my team and I have done. And we’re just getting started.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Gratitude.
Not the kind you perform. The kind that quietly changes how you see what’s in front of you.
I’ve been through phases in my life where I couldn’t see the next step. Working in the dark with more questions than answers, more doubt than direction, and the only thing that kept me oriented was the ability to look at whatever I had in that moment and recognize it as something. Not nothing.
Something.
The opportunity itself, however small, is the blessing. That realization doesn’t make the hard parts easier. But it changes what you do with when you’re faced with challenges.
When you’re genuinely grateful for where you are, even when where you are is difficult, even when the situation is not what you planned, you look forward instead of back. My father lived that way. He came to a country that wasn’t his, with a language that wasn’t his, and he faced forward every single day. I watched that before I was old enough to understand it. It took me years to realize I’d been carrying it the whole time.
That forward-facing quality, that instinct to find the best in any situation that’s the foundation. But it doesn’t stand alone.
Gratitude without discipline is just a feeling. And feelings don’t finish things.
Persistence is what you do on the days when the gratitude is hard to locate. When the work isn’t moving the way you need it to and the doubt is louder than the vision. What separates the people who get through it is the willingness to keep showing up anyway. Not because it feels good. Because you decided.
That combination is what’s carried me through. Every single time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://premenent.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arcxlusive/
