Musings on Mal de Ojo and San Francisco
At the Latinas in Tech Summit 2024, Dr. Nutmeg expresses gratitudes and receives Mal de Ojo jewelry from a Career Tia to ward off her own Sharky tendencies.
Welcome back to the FACTory. I’m Dr. Nutmeg, your hostess, and tonight, after spending four days in San Francisco at the 2024 Latinas in Tech Summit, it’s time to say thank you to everyone.
Thanks to Anajeli Resendiz and Jennifer Madera, MS for the opportunity this week to lead on-camera interviews with so many inspiring Latinas in Tech at #LiTSummit2024 in San Francisco!! 📽
The experience felt like another step forward in my 15-year journey to sell a story about a Latina in Tech to Netflix or Hulu or HBO. I could see with my own two eyeballs that the audience and market exist now:
More than 1,500 attendees at the 8th (!) annual Latinas in Tech conference
Sponsors like Comcast, Deloitte, Google, Autodesk, Salesforce, Zillow
More than 90 million views of the hashtag #LatinasinTech on TikTok!
Gotta give shoutouts to all the previous collaborators I've been lucky enough to work with over the years on this project: My film school cohort at AU -- Angeli Gabriel, Angela Pinaglia, Sonia Herrero, Ana Elisa Sotelo van Oordt, Sarah Nelson, Jonathan Jarrett, Christina Pamies, Tom Fish -- and so many others not on LinkedIn, who helped me shoot a live action pilot about a Latina mad scientist (Dr. Nutmeg) who builds robotic women (TheFemmebots.com), as well as Lavonne Luquis Shelton, Angello Pizarro and Andrew Conklin, who helped me launch a successful Kickstarter in 2017 for the animated version of the series. We've had so much fun over the years, just like I had so much fun interviewing all the REAL Latinas in Tech convening at the Palace of Fine Arts last week!!
I’m also thankful to all of you on this Substack newsletter, and all the peeps helping with Season 3: Isabel Custer Marisa Diaz Gilda Alvarez Alejandra Fernandez Edith Quintanilla, MPA - Client Services Nefertari Carranza Jonathan Jarrett Stephen Meier Maria Ibañez and my husband Tic Bowen. Our work together fulfills my soul as an artist, but it doesn't pay the bills, so I'm SUPER grateful for my new role as Web Developer with the amazing Jane Watrel and communications team at Orange County Government. I'm still a "Latina working in Tech," y'all! 27 years and counting...
Meantime, I'll keep writing, animating, and editing on weekends with a new goal of entering film festivals..... slip into my DMs if you have new animation ideas for posting on the TikTok channel.
May 20 is Josephine Baker Day!
If you’re a new subscriber, Josephine Baker is a crucial character in “The Nine Lives of Maria La Gata,” a novel about my bisabuela who was a rum runner in 1920s Harlem and Puerto Rico. We’ll resume posting chapters in June. Meantime, catch up!
Musings on Mal de Ojo and San Francisco
And now, let’s talk about what we’re not talking about.
The buried bodies in the backyard.
The bridges burned.
The shame that eats away at my flesh like a poison…
La Envidia!
Femmebot 2.024: Ay, Dr. Nutz, que dramatica tu eres.
Femmebot 4.0: At least she’s not heartless like you.
Femmebot 2.024: Me? Heartless? I’m all heart, baby. And it keeps me truthful and on my own path instead of constantly comparing myself to others…like Dr. Nutz.
Dr. Nutmeg: Si, exacto - la envidia, I admit it. This is the thing we’re not talking about. La envidia is inevitably part of any woman’s story of evolution to something bigger than herself. La envidia is the thing that keeps us lying like those bodies in the cemetery —
Femmebot 2.024: Except, those bodies don’t stink anymore like you do.
Femmebot 4.0: Dr. Nutz doesn’t stink.
Femmebot 2.024: Yes she does. Apesta como farts, siempre.
Femmebot 4.0: Pues, Dr. Nutmeg — what are you lying about?
Dr. Nutmeg: I’ve been lying about who I am.
Femmebot 4.0: Who are you?
Dr. Nutmeg: I’ve been everyone but me.
Femmebot 4.0: I don’t get it.
Femmebot 2.024: I don’t either.
Dr. Nutmeg: OK, lemme show you, instead of telling you.
Dystopian Homeless San Francisco
Upon landing at SFO on Wednesday, May 15, I slid right into my usual program when I lived in the Tendernob and Russian Hill between 1999-2003: Rode the BART to Civic Center feeling hopeful about innovation, technology, and the future. But instead of being present, I was trying to write a thank you email to my new employers — because the first two weeks went great and I felt this desperate need to tell them so they wouldn’t think I was coming to San Francisco to find a different job. The words were clunky and not coming easily so I put my phone down to scan the BART scene:
Two high school kids with backwards baseball caps and a swagger that rhymes with hella this, hella that. Made me smile.
A seasoned Asian lady sitting with her knees up against a push cart full of plastic grocery bags. Reminded me of why I left San Francisco.
A white boy in a black hoodie hunched over his phone. Annoyed me.
Hmm. Am I projecting? I was just doing the same thing, tap-typing an email into my phone, not finding the right words because my spirit was split between past and present.
Breathe.
As the escalator brought me up to the surface, I noticed immediately that the city looked straight-up dystopian. More homeless folks and mental health patients were carousing the streets than any of the years I lived here, or during visits in 2009 and 2018. Storefronts and buildings were vacant. Waymo driverless cars rolled by.
The positive energy that always used to fill me up was completely gone. Where did it go?
I didn’t want to judge the city so quickly, so I continued walking with my roller suitcase behind me toward an outdoor farmer’s market in Civic Center. The scene reminded me of my travels through poorer countries like India or Honduras, not the place that birthed all the technology that was supposed to improve our quality of life on this little blue planet.
I walked up to a table piled with jars of local honey. The guy with salt-and-peppered hair looked like an old San Francisco hippie, but he wasn’t friendly like an old San Francisco hippie. In spite of my smiles and asking questions about his honey operations, he was short and impatient. Usually I would walk away from an unfriendly vendor, but I needed to flip this heavy feeling into a positive interaction, so I bought a jar of honey with the intention of giving it to my Airbnb hostess in the Marina District.
The 49 Muni
The massive, double-bus 49 is still the main mode of transportation heading north and south on Van Ness, except now the stops are in the middle of the street like the streetcars throughout the city. This development got me excited until I boarded the packed bus that would barely fit tiny me and my suitcase. Either I have no more tolerance for public transportation in my old age, things are more crowded, or I’m still adjusting to post-pandemic travel.
Sneeze. Cough. Gross.
Thank goodness my Airbnb hostess welcomed me like a long-lost Tia. I could tell from her pictures that she is a mother to daughters, so I felt at ease immediately with her coffee and ice-breaker.
Mission Street
As I headed down to the Mission to meet my friend Leticia Hernandez-Linares, wearing an outfit inspired by my mom and my bisabuela Maria La Gata, I realized this moment was a repeat of the past when I used to meet her and two other Latinas for our weekly writing circle. I was late catching the Muni in 2002, and I was late catching it again in 2024.
Mission Street looked relatively the same — stores full of mops, plastic household items and toys, young girls pushing strollers with babies that looked like dolls, a few more murals than I remember — one of which featured Santana — and this one located just off Mission and 26th streets:
Valencia Avenue
It’s Valencia Avenue that looks totally different. It’s as gentrified as my mom’s old hood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The tech industry had made its mark. “Progress” had erased the flavor.
Leticia brought me to a new Salvadoran restaurant, and it wasn’t as grounded in its roots as my friend, but it didn’t matter. We were cozy inside a bubble of memories. Her face, framed by beautiful long braids, shined as we laughed. I L-O-V-E this woman. She is the kind of spiritual hermana you can pick up where you left off, which happened to be 2018 for us. That was the year before I returned to Orlando, still a lost little girl who wanted to be like everyone else but herself:
I wanted to be like my mom, my sister, my BFF, my Tia, my prima, my brother, Karen (haha), Leticia, Marina, Alejandra, Claudia, Marisol, Marisa and Marisa, JJ, La Culona and La Fabrica…I think I just glitched [insert laugh track here].
Anyways…as I said: I didn’t know who I was. Therefore, I was a reflection of everyone else as I ran from place to place.
Leticia and I talked about this erratic behavior matter-of-factly while laughing simultaneously. This girl knows me. She can roast me because she witnessed my wandering for 20-something years. She saw I was a homeless runaway like the teen writers in the Roaddawgz Magazine that I was editing at Pacific News Service and New America Media. That’s where Leticia and I first met.
Sidenote : Market Street, where our office was located, is so vacant post-pandemic there is now a Mid-Market Business Association & Foundation trying to attract more local entrepreneurs to set up their shops like Holy Stitch.
The media organizations that once employed Leticia and I no longer exist, but our friendship still does after all these years. Connecting with her was such a soulful way to land back in San Francisco. I felt fully grown for the first time in her presence because I had reconnected to my own roots. I felt grateful that I finally came back home. Thank you, sister, for making the time. I know how precious it is. ❤️
Tormented Dreams and Insomnia
As I rode an Uber back to my Airbnb in the Marina District, I recalled the reoccurring dreams I used to have in San Francisco between 1999-2003: driving the wrong way on the 101, barely crashing head-on into the drivers going the “right way.” It wasn’t that much different from the series of dreams I was having over the last two weeks while starting my new job and simultaneously trying to keep up with my dream of making a Latinas in Tech TV show:
Swimming in a tank full of sharks
A woman destroying all my art in a wheelbarrow
Attending the Latinas in Tech Summit, and “cheating” on my new job, the one I just got with the Orange County government.
That’s a lot of dreams for someone who is also having insomnia, but the overarching feeling I had was that I was lying to myself. About what exactly, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to be related to a shark intent on gobbling my wheelbarrow of art. It’s OK. You can laugh at that.
This is when Career Tia Liliana stepped in and gave me a Mal de Ojo charm to ward off the shark. I was convinced the shark was someone else, but after watching “She Said” at 3am Pacific Time because I was still on East Coast time, I understood the TRUTH, because someone had already called it out for me, and I was in denial: “You’re the shark, Dr. Nutz!”
Yup. I am the shark. And I am the only one who can destroy what I’ve built.
Better to fess up to it than to keep it buried inside my body cuz you know what? Constipation and insomnia SUCK. Tell the truth, and you shall be healthy, y’all — inside and OUT.
And sooooo, on Saturday, I changed my LinkedIn status to “Web Developer at Orange County Government,” gave shoutouts to my new boss, and acknowledged absolutely EVERYONE I could for helping me develop Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots as a TV series about a Latina working in tech (essentially the same opening text of this newsletter). I didn’t feel split between two priorities anymore. And then I slept for 24 hours straight without any dreams or waking up with my heart pounding up into my chest and throat.
I felt like I had “come out.”
Coming clean. Being completely truthful and transparent with everyone in my life, from my new employers to my husband to my new Latinas in Tech mentees to all of you on this Substack subscription list that I am a full time employee AND a writer/filmmaker. It’s self-indulgent to write about my inner turmoil, but it’s also my way for not repeating mistakes unconsciously, so if you’ve read this far, thanks.
To end this long-ass newsletter, I want to say thank you, always, to my husband Tic, for believing in me, listening to my wacked ideas and anxieties, creating with me, dreaming with me, and not treating me like a dingbat. :)
And thanks to Avery and Belle, aka, Avelle. You’re both making me step up my game, in a more truthful way. 🌱