Pitching America Ferrera at the Grace Hopper Conference in Philly
One of the most famous Latinas is keynoting the world’s largest tech conference for women and nonbinary people next week Oct. 8-11. Should I go and pitch our Latinas in Tech show?
The Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest tech conference for women and nonbinary people presented by AnitaB.org, is happening in Philly next week Oct. 8-11. I’ve been thinking of going in person cuz our girl America Ferrera is keynote speaking. Would it be worth the time and money? Maybe.
But first, lemme welcome all you engaged subscribers back to The FACTory! I’m Dr. Nutmeg, your trusty hostess for Monday night entertainment (and sometimes Thursdays) since November 2023. After almost a year, I expected your attention span would have dissipated, but Substack says my open rates are still in the 70% range. So… here I am. And there you are!
We are The FACTory.
The FACTory is code for “Brain.” Together we are a collective brain that is connected through our shared experiences of being a “Latina in Tech” and/or a desire to see “Latinas in Tech” reflected on TV and movie screens. I made a cool 3-D brain using RunwayML to represent this idea:
If you’re also a paid subscriber, you got to see last week’s Establishing Shots, where this collective brain is represented as a Blue Ball structure located across from the Downtown Orlando Public Library.
In other words, Dr. Nutmeg’s FACTory is located inside a big Blue Ball, haha. How ironic, verdad? I suppose this has always been the location of Dr. Nutmeg’s techie endeavors, even in 2014 after I finished editing Season 1. There is a picture of me somewhere, maybe Facebook? Hugging this Ball. It was sometime after Brazil. Found it!
The city of snOrlando has no idea that this is my fictional location for Dr. Nutmeg’s FACTory, but that’s part of the “lore” I’m attempting to create over the next few years. It’s supposed to be a secret location! Perhaps someday I will need a release to keep using it in my establishing shots, but for now, I think we’re good since this Blue Ball is a public structure.
Would America Ferrera agree?
I thought of going in person to the Grace Hopper Celebration cuz our girl America Ferrera is keynote speaking. I’ve had a fantasy about running into her at a networking event and pitching this “Latinas in Tech” TV series to her…but I had the same fantasy last year, when the conference was in Orlando, and the keynote speaker was Janelle Monae, one of the techiest women of color on the pop star circuit right now.
Wondaland Arts Society, where Janelle got her start, is close by in Atlanta. If you’ve seen her first music video/film Dirty Computer, you’ll understand why I’ve been obsessed with her since she hit the scene. It was a no-brainer for me to pitch her while she was in my backyard, here in snOrlando.
Entonces, paying $1038 for a ticket to Grace Hopper in 2023 felt “worth it.”
Unfortunately, stormy weather in NYC prevented Janelle Monae from making it to the conference in person, so I never got to play out my fantasy of pitching her my idea. A year later, my hesitation to invest even more than $1,000 for registration, flight to Philly, and hotel to potentially rub shoulders with a hard-to-access, but like-minded celebrity, is therefore understandable. America Ferrera could easily cancel her speaking engagement, and then I’ll be stuck in a hotel room in Philly wondering WHY I keep trying to “make fetch happen.” And yet…
I bet you $1M that America Ferrera, Global Goodwill Ambassador for the UN’s International Organization for Migration, is keynoting the Grace Hopper Celebration in Philly because she understands the power of women of color to make change in the tech industry.
Does this poderosa Latina potentially have the SAME idea? Right now, she is busy directing an adaptation of Erika Sánchez's New York Times bestselling novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, for Netflix.
Let’s look at the weather, astrology, and numerology…
If you check out this Substack’s archives, the journey into Season 3 of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® started almost a year ago, coincidentally when earth’s hottest summer went on record. And now the temperatures recorded for 2024 are even higher.
Why does this matter? Cuz our use of AI is literally causing worse climate change, according to this July 12, 2024 NPR article: “AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change:”
“One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes.” — Jesse Dodge, senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI.
Google said its greenhouse gas emissions rose last year by 48% since 2019. It attributed that surge to its data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging,” the report reads.
Planet Earth got hotter as I played with all the AI apps to create Season 3. This makes me want to stop because I have always been a bleeding-heart hippy tree hugger.
At the same time, my networks have been reconnecting and expanding as a result of writing, producing, re-writing, and promoting Season 3. I knew this would happen. Numerology told me my life would be taking a HUGE SHARP TURN in 2023, which was a “1 Year” for me. And 2024 is a “Two Year:”
The 2 Year is an inspiring twelve month journey in which you will find exciting connections between your past, your present, and your future. Eventually, you will be able to use this information to set an ambitious goal in motion. But make no mistake, what happens this year is going to take perseverance and, above all, great patience. — Creative Numerology
What does this tell me? As Sheldon from the “Big Bang Theory” tells Penny after she tells him she’s a Saggitatius:
“…it tells me you suffer from the mass delusion that the movement of the planets has something to do with your personality.”
Laugh Track.
But hey — astrology and numerology aside, I learned from my late mentor Hazel Henderson that if you study the cycles in history — whether humanity’s or your own personal trajectory — you’ll see the trends. I could see that my life and the cycles in the economy were correlated, especially when a few of my LinkedIn connections sent me messages in 2021 and 2022 like, “Femmebots will be trending…” I was like, “Huh?”
I didn’t know what they meant, exactly, but now I do, now that I am at this juncture one year after getting notified by my main client that my contract was not going to be renewed. Wooooah. For 12 years I had been managing this client’s website. The data visualizations I had created during the pandemic had gone viral, so I could feel proud, and hey, I still had two other contracts, no worries — an entrepreneur ALWAYS has multiple sources of income — pero a few months later, I wasn’t able to convince my second client to renew my contract, and my third client wouldn’t allow me to upsell them.
Everywhere I looked on LinkedIn, marketing departments were getting the ax.
That’s when my mentor Maria Ibañez suggested I put a panel of Latinas in Tech together for SXSW EDU. “It would be a good way to network, get your name and your skillset out there, and to land a new contract or two.”
So I reached out to two Latinas I knew could bring amazing perspectives to a panel:
Alejandra Fernandez, my spiritual hermana who owned a metaphysical bookstore on Calle 8 when I met her in 2004. She was my unofficial maid of honor at my wedding and one of my former colleagues at the infamous tech startup in Miami, which spawned The Femmebots. We’ve been through all kinds of shite together over the last 20 years, and now this poderosa is earning a PhD in education at FIU — of course she needed to speak at SXSW EDU!
Martha Hernandez, a venture capitalist in the East Bay, who moderated a Latinas in Tech panel that I was on at the Wonder Women Tech Conference in 2019.
Both said yes, but I felt like I needed a third super hero from Orlando to show the SXSW audience that Central Florida is a major tech center — not everything techie happens in Silicon Valley! We got Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, the Space Center, Disney, Lockheed Martin, but no one knows or thinks about this because well…Mickey Mouse hogs the spotlight!
So I reached out to Gilda Alvarez, whose posts on LinkedIn captured my interest. I didn’t know any other Latinas working in Tech in Central Florida because the Latinas in Tech chapter here hadn’t launched yet (it finally did in Oct 2023). Once I learned that Gilda’s focus was on data, we changed the panel name to “The Super Invisible Latinas in Data.”
Our panel made it to the second round of voting, but ultimately didn’t get chosen for the 2024 SXSW EDU conference…and that’s OK, because the whole point of putting the panel together was to follow my mentor’s suggestion: start reconnecting with former colleagues and friends, while potentially finding new contracts.
Gilda ended up calling me a few weeks later to tell me she was starting a nonprofit to educate, promote, and level up Latinas in the Data Industry. It was by far the coolest proposition I’d heard from anyone in my hometown circle — EVER. So Gilda and I met up at the Melrose Center in Downtown Orlando — yes, next door to Dr. Nutmeg’s FACTory inside the Blue Ball, haha — and brainstormed ideas for building up the local Latina community’s tech skills. She already had all the relationships and infrastructure — she just had to assemble it, which is no easy task, pero homegirl has been doing the damn thing and continues to do so, shout out to Gilda, go girl.
Anyways, Gilda was the one who told me about the Grace Hopper Conference happening right here in Orlando. So I coughed up the cash to register, and I attended with Gilda and a few other Latinas in Data.
Was it worth it? I didn’t meet Janelle Monae. I uploaded my resume to multiple company servers at the job fair, but none of them called or emailed back. I networked with dozens of other Latinas in Tech, from Seattle to New York, but none of them had a job or a contract for an old lady in her late 40s. Even when I pitched my fancy tech skills live and direct from the conference to one of my clients, nothing panned out.
Not much came out of GHC23…
But I did meet Val.Java, a Latina software engineer with almost 22k followers on TikTok, which led me to “discover” that #LatinasinTech had more than 28 million views.
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Is Substack the platform for this Latinas in Tech TV series?
Once I learned that the younger generation of Latinas in Tech were all on TikTok, I had to decide if it was just me holding myself back from the success I’d been trying for with this Latinas in Tech TV series. But I was reluctant to create yet another username and password for yet another platform that would require me to “build my own audience.” Cuz bro — I am NOT a marketer…sure I can do SEO, but doing all the branding and promoting and obsessive networking that people must do to get their shit out there?
God knows I had already tried with Kickstarter, YouTube, Vimeo, Wattpad, Patreon, Facebook, Wordpress, LinkedIn, bla blah bla. As it turns out, the Universe, God, the Force from Star Wars, and my other mentor Lavonne Luquis eventually led me here, to Substack. Even though a few friends in the past had suggested Substack, I couldn’t bear yet another online place to promote shit.
But here I am. And there you are.
I’m thinking now…I don’t have to go to Philly.
I don’t have to pitch anything to America Ferrera or Janelle Monae.
All I have to do is keep writing and creating short episodes of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® right here on Substack, which may very well be the poor producer’s Netflix.
And maybe if one of you readers attends GH24 next week, and happens to be standing next to La America Ferrera in the bathroom, just tell her: “Hey — do you wanna produce a series about Latinas in Tech? It would be like Barbie meets HBO’s Silicon Valley.”