Andrés Báez¶
Andrés Báez, known as Andy to those closest to him, was a Dominican-American architect and contractor who became the husband of singer Nadia Beckford. A builder of stable structures by trade and by temperament, he was, in nearly every way, the opposite of Nadia’s earlier relationship with Ezra Cruz: steady, secure, and entirely outside the music industry. He met Nadia by chance, with no knowledge of or interest in her fame, and the ordinary footing on which they met became the foundation of the most stable partnership of her life.
Early Life¶
Andrés was born around 2003 in Paterson, New Jersey, into the same Dominican diaspora community that shaped Nadia’s father, Joaquín “Joaco” Peralta. He grew up bilingual in English and Spanish, rooted in the merengue, bachata, food, and family rhythms of Dominican Paterson.
He was the eldest of his siblings, and that fact organized his whole childhood. His parents worked constantly—the immigrant grind of multiple jobs and long hours—and they loved their children fiercely, but the arithmetic of their lives meant they were often absent by necessity. Andrés filled the gap. He became a third parent young, the one who got his younger siblings fed and to school, who fixed what broke and calmed what frayed, who learned before he was grown to be the steady center a stretched-thin household needed. His famous calm was not something he was born with so much as a role he grew into out of necessity and never put down. It made him dependable in a way that ran to the bone, and it cost him something he would not name for decades: a childhood in which he was always the one holding others up and rarely, if ever, the one being held.
He came to building honestly, working his way from job sites into design and eventually into a career as an architect and contractor—a maker of homes and buildings, things meant to stand for generations. The work suited him: tangible, grounded, unglamorous, and durable, the same qualities he carried in himself. There was something else in it, too, beneath the practicality. A man who had spent his life holding up other people’s worlds wanted, quietly, to build things that were his own.
Physical Presence¶
Andrés was a big, warm man with a gentle-giant calm—tall and solid, broad-handed and roughened from years of site work, with a low, easy voice that filled a room without strain. He was easy-handsome in a way he never traded on, salt entering his hair early and laugh lines settling around his eyes, comfortable enough in his own body that he never performed any version of himself. He took up space without trying to dominate it. To be near him was to be near something you could lean on, literally and otherwise; his physical steadiness was of a piece with his temperament, the body of a man who built solid things and was one.
Relationship with Nadia Beckford¶
Main article: Nadia Beckford and Andrés Báez
Andrés and Nadia Beckford met completely by chance, outside the music world entirely. He did not know who she was, and would not have cared in the way the industry cared; for Nadia, who had spent her adult life being assessed, braced, and reduced to “the Jamaican one” or “Ezra Cruz’s baby mama” or the voice on the stage, meeting a man who simply saw a person was disarming in a way nothing else had been. There was no performance for him to see through because he was not watching a performance.
What he gave her was the thing her first great love could not. Secure in himself, he was never rattled by her fame, her fire, or her boundaries, and so he never competed with her or shrank from her. With Andrés, the lifelong watchfulness switched off. He showed up reliably, undramatically, and without fail, until the guarded woman who had learned that loving people was dangerous finally believed that someone would stay. He made her laugh, and he let her rest, which after a lifetime of vigilance was the deepest gift she had been given. There was an additional ease in him being Dominican: he shared and saw the paternal, often-overlooked half of her heritage, the merengue-and-Spanish side the world tended to miss in a woman it read as Jamaican. Home recognizing home, specifically the home that usually went unseen.
They married later in life, on Nadia’s own terms—the wedding she had never had with Ezra, entered when she knew exactly what she was choosing. The irony was not lost on either of them: the stability Nadia had once left Ezra to protect, she now chose freely, for herself.
Relationship with Raffie¶
Andrés entered the life of Nadia’s son Raffie Cruz when Raffie was older, and he won the boy the same way he had won Nadia: through patient consistency rather than force. Raffie, protective of his mother and already secure in his bond with his father Ezra and stepmother Nina Cruz, was wary at first. Andrés never tried to replace Ezra or to be anything other than what he was—a steady, reliable adult who showed up. Over time he earned a real bond, becoming the man who taught Raffie to build things and, plainly, the man who made his mother happy. He took his place as another loving figure in an already wide blended family, no competition with anyone, just more solid ground beneath Raffie’s feet.
Personality¶
Andrés was defined by steadiness. Secure, even-tempered, and unhurried, he was the rare person whose calm did not read as passivity but as strength—a groundedness that settled the people around him. He had no need to perform, compete, or prove himself, and that absence of ego was precisely what allowed a woman as guarded and as luminous as Nadia to set down her armor in his presence. He was warm and quietly funny, content in his own life and his own work, planted rather than striving. Where Nadia’s first love had been chaos that demanded constant vigilance, Andrés was a structure that simply held.
Beneath the steadiness, though, ran something that was his alone and that he rarely let anyone see. A lifetime of being The Dependable One—eldest son, third parent, the rock of every room—meant that almost no one had ever held him. He carried a quiet, unspoken need to be cared for rather than only relied upon, and underneath it a deeper fear: that he was valued for what he provided, fixed, and built rather than for himself, and that if he ever could not be the rock he might not be wanted. His drive to build was bound up in this. After a life spent holding up other people’s worlds, the hunger to make something that was genuinely his—his work, a home, a family chosen freely—was the engine under the calm.
This is part of what made his marriage to Nadia run deeper than its surface ease suggested. The rescue went both directions. He gave the guarded woman who had never trusted that anyone would stay the experience of someone staying; and she, once she let him in, gave the eldest son who had never been held the experience of being taken care of back. She saw that he needed things too—a thing few people ever bothered to notice about a man so reliable—and in building a home and a life with her and Raffie, Andrés finally had the something-that-was-his he had wanted since he was a boy raising other people’s mornings.
Daily Life and Community¶
Andrés kept the rhythm of a man who made things. He rose before dawn, took his coffee, and spent his days on site or at the drafting table, working alongside a crew whose names he knew—along with the names of their kids and what was going on at home. He ended his days tired and satisfied in the particular way of people whose work leaves something standing behind them.
He remained the center of his own large family, the sibling everyone still called when something broke or went wrong. The difference, in adulthood, was that he carried the role by love rather than obligation: the Sunday dinners, the gatherings, the steady dependability were now things he chose, not weights he had been handed. His pleasures were quiet and repeatable—dominoes with the older men, baseball on in the background, fixing things around the house, sancocho going on the stove on a slow Sunday. He did not need much to be content.
He took particular pride in work that served people. Over his career he gravitated toward affordable housing and the restoration of old Paterson buildings, the kind of building that roots a neighborhood rather than displacing it. His values lived in what he chose to make: structures meant to stand, for people meant to stay.
Related Entries¶
- Nadia Beckford
- Nadia Beckford and Andrés Báez
- Raffie Cruz
- Joaquín “Joaco” Peralta