Top 10 Reasons for Creating Season 3
Learn more about a few OG Latinas in Tech during San Francisco's first dot-com-bubble-boom bust-boom. And 9 other reasons for producing Season 3 of Dr. Nutmeg's Femmebots®.
Welcome back to The FACTory, my pretty little Femmebots! Tonight we’re sharing our top 10 reasons for creating a third season of a “Latinas in Tech” TV series. Why? Because time, energy, and money are running out, and we need to remind ourselves why we are pushing through the fumes. Like all tech startups, we’ve only got so much runway left for this endeavor. But the inspiration for the idea started more than 25 years ago, in the 1990s, to be exact…
#1: We were the first Latinas in Tech!
Pictured above on Aug. 2, 2024: One of the first cohorts of “Latinas in Tech” (from upper left to right and around) during the first dot-com bubble in San Francisco:
Lavonne Luquis, our Boricua boss and founder of Latino.com, a bilingual platform that connected U.S-based Latinos via chat rooms and weekly news articles about our community’s artists, politicians, business people, entertainers, and more. Our office was based in The Women’s Tech Incubator, a warehouse filled with women-owned startups located in the South of Market district of San Francisco.
Macarena Hernandez, the glamorous and genius Tejana journalist, filmmaker, and playwright representing the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.
Melanie Feliciano, aka me, representing Orlando’s growing Puerto Rican diaspora.
Marina Garcia-Vasquez, the sharpest native Bay Area Chicana who taught me the word “hella,” and now she’s schooling all the corporations about branding and marketing in NYC. A very happy birthday to Marina today.
We were Ponderosas!!!! Ha ha. That’s Poderosas, auto-correct.
And you know what else???
We were already Diverse.
We were already Equitable.
We were already Inclusive.
Even though it seems like DEI is this new and shiny hashtag, it existed for us back then. Yes. Believe it or not, shit was WAY more progressive in the 1990s, especially in West Coast cities like San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle. Zuckerberg was still a snot-nosed teenager, Google barely existed, and innovators like Lavonne Luquis were creating both online and physical spaces for U.S.-based Latinos…until all the dot-coms crashed, just a few months before the World Trade Center, in 2001.
The era lasted only a few years, but the lessons and experiences stayed with all of us for the next two decades. When I stayed in San Francisco to become editor and web master for YouthOutlook.org at New America Media, it wasn’t a novelty to be surrounded by Latino, Black, Native, and Asian colleagues — it was normal. When I moved to Miami and became editor and web master of The Biscayne Times, it was normal for me to be in charge. In other words, it didn’t occur to me that I was NOT a white man…until I landed a job at a tech startup spawned by a white Canadian man who had a fetish for Latinas. REALITY came falling down on me like a Pink Floyd Brick Wall…you can read that story here, and how it sprouted the first fleet of Femmebots in 2009.
Anyways, the place where me, Macarena, Marina, and Lavonne first met was at the 1999 Unity Conference in Seattle, where the National Association for Hispanic Journalists joined Native American, Black and Asian journalists. So…you can imagine how excited, but maybe also annoyed, we all were that DEI had to become a thing...post 2020.
And now, in 2024, DEI is becoming the four-letter word among tech circles. AnitaB.org had to downsize its staff last month. Many members of LatinasinTech.org are getting laid off left and right. Women Who Code and Girls in Tech totally dismantled after their Big Tech sponsors pulled funding. And my fav Wonder Woman Tech, where I promoted all the Latinas working in tech in the video below, is re-branding their conference to Wonder Tech, according to this Washington Post article.
What does all this mean?
In my mind, it means now, more than ever, we need to be represented on TV. Maybe my animation isn’t the best way…but at least it’s something. Gotta psych myself out for this last stretch of editing and revising, so here are the other 9 reasons for Season 3 of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots®:
#2: AI Became Mainstream
The timing for this story, about female robots doing the work for tech startups until they meltdown, is now.
#3: Latinas in Tech are Unicorns
We need to be represented on a Big Screen. I’m starting with my hometown, at the Enzian Theater in Orlando, which promotes local filmmakers, because there is a HUGE Latino population here now. In 1987, when I moved here from New York with my family, we were just a handful in the demographic landscape. Now there’s a freaking Puerto Rican parade downtown, click here to see for yourself.
#4: Mass Job Layoffs Hitting Our Community
Lots of us Latinas in Tech lost our jobs this past year because DEI suddenly isn’t trending anymore, but nobody knows about this because no one ever thinks of Latinas when they think of tech, unless they’re Googling porn, but…that’s another story. We DO exist in the tech world, and that’s what Season 3 shows the audience.
#5: Jonathan Jarrett
Jonathan was one of my classmates at film school who helped me edit the first season of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® in 2012. He reached out to me on LinkedIn asking if I wanted to use all the nifty new AI apps on the market to create a new season. Sometimes I can’t believe I said yes, because I was trying to put this whole Femmebots thing into a vault in history so I could focus on writing THE NINE LIVES OF MARIA LA GATA, but he knew I was a nutter who would get obsessed again. Gracias, Jonathan. :)
#6: To Continue the Healing…
If you’ve been subscribing since the beginning, you know that my dog Pip died in January. His departure affected me in a way that I’d never felt…or maybe I had, but did not allow myself to FEEL. The Femmebots has always been a “healing” project for me. I supposed I already feel mostly “healed” now so I could just end Season 3 now and stop trying to put something together for a film festival. The irony is that I have a real audience now. I feel accountable to YOU. We’re all always going through something. So perhaps my healing journey will assist yours.
#7: To Exercise My Trademark
Since 2018, I’ve had a trademark for Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® and I’m trying to build the brand in order to sell merch like t-shirts, lunchboxes, and socks. Why? Before I got my web developer job, I thought I had to try some kind of capitalistic monetization. Now I can’t be bothered with it. Too many other things to do but dude…this is my life’s work.
#8: We established this LLC
Georgic, LLC was originally my consulting umbrella for web development, SEO, filmmaking, and helping small business owners and nonprofits “solve their online problems.” But now that all the bills are covered from one full-time job, Georgic is pivoting from consulting to a “Media Tech Company” Ha. That’s so funny. Just making it all up as I go, apparently. But it sounded good while I was participating in the Latinas in Tech Entrepreneurship Program in April this year. If I can finish this season of the Femmebots, who knows…maybe there is something there to grow into.
#9: What’s the ninth reason?
Cuz it’s fun. :)
#10: The Story
The story makes more sense this time around because I’m less fragmented. Right? Jury still out on that. While I was traveling around the world, working different jobs, connecting with different people, never staying in one place long enough to root down and grow — well, it was hard for me (and others) to follow the story. Now that I’ve been grounded down for more than five years, did the therapy I needed to stop the ridiculous patterns that began when I was 14, married a man who doesn’t think I’m “Dr. Nutz,” and landing another tech job in my hometown, the story makes more sense. I know who my characters are!
Whereas Seasons 1 and 2 were exploratory and incomplete because I hadn’t gone beneath the surface to understand why/how my main characters got triggered, Season 3 shows us:
Who is Dr. Nutmeg?
And how is she related to The Femmebots?
That’s coming next week so stay tuned, stay engaged, and please reach out if all of this is starting to get a bit absurd.