UpRooted NuyoRicans

This episode of Model Ricans is brought to you by: Gratitude.

Thank you, Edith Quintanilla, Founder of PoderosaDivina, for this past year of partnership. Your new Sisterly Love prints reminded me that the story of “Model Ricans” is ultimately about the impact our sisters have on us. The prints are the perfect gift not only for my older sister, but for all the “spiritual sisters” I’ve had the privilege of leaning on throughout my life.

Hola and welcome back to the Latinas in Tech show on Substack! In last week’s episode of “Model Ricans,” a grown-up Desiree Sanchez becomes a beta tester of Dr. Nutmeg’s Virtual Reality Subconscious Extractor just before pitching her own app at a women’s tech conference in 2019.

In this week’s episode, the memories extracted from Desiree’s subconscious spin the clock backwards to 1987. Suddenly, Desiree is 12 years old again, sitting in the back of her family’s station wagon driving from New York to Florida.

Is Desiree actually time traveling?

Or is she lost in Dr. Nutmeg’s VR Subconscious Extractor?

Sponsored by “Gratitude,” both free and paid subscribers can find out what happens next by scrolling down (no paywall)! Oh, and for those of you who are DYING to see this week’s Javascript workshop, you can skip today’s episode and go straight to “short circuiting” and “nullish coalescing.” Sounds fun, verdad? (haha).

But wait…if Dr. Nutmeg made an appearance in “Model Ricans” last week, does this mean she woke up from a coma?

Dr. Nutmeg’s eyes fluttered open last week, but only for a minute…

At first we weren’t sure if we wanted Dr. Nutmeg to wake up. She is, after all, a representation of Mal de Ojo jealousy spawned by grief and sadness. She is the hacker of The FACTory located in Downtown Orlando, so it’s been nice running the show without her. The FACTory’s network has been balanced and peaceful now that Chakra Girl is in charge with her rainbow bright lights.

But who ever said the darkness is not useful?

Dr. Nutmeg’s dark energies usually perk up to fuel and motivate the machine-learning Femmebots, who keep The FACTory spinning.

Entiendes? No? OK, in spiritual-speak: The emotions of jealousy and grief can be forces for good, IF they are transmuted into opportunity, which then allows a human to evolve.

In the case of Desiree Sanchez, her grief drives her to success — if she can just get her head out of her big Puerto Rican ass….

Episode 3: UpRooted NuyoRicans

2019

The New York winter bites at my face as I wander out of the Williamsburg Hotel. Am I wearing a coat? Oh, good. I guess I can still do that thing I do where I’m basically blacked out but going through the motions of normal human things like paying the coat check lady and wrapping a scarf around my face.

Grab a Citibike, aka, my trusty economic cycle.

Move stiff legs. Pedal, pedal. Face is freezing but the emotions are bubbling up like a volcano. It’s. Just. Too. Much. I’m racing to the Williamsburg Bridge. The bitter cold will cure me. Apparently I am still the baby overheating in an ice cold bathtub — more than 40 years later.

I find myself standing on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City, looking down at the foreboding waters. Is this where my circular journey of failures will finally end? I could have stayed and faced those bitches. But those memories showed me exactly why I will fail again. For two decades, I’ve been trying to make FETCH happen like Gretchen Weiners from “Mean Girls.” No one in the tech world has understood any of my stupid inventions. Why will they now? That stage is reserved for brilliant techies, not emotional messes like me who fuck up relationships. unintentionally because…well, because why?

I look at my phone. Marga hasn’t texted back. She most definitely is mad at me again. I look down at the water again. How cliché of me, wanting to throw myself into the East River. Someone else had already done it last year. I guess New Yorkers want to commit suicide in January. The bitter winter lasts for decades. In my case, two: 1999-2019.

Maybe that could have been part of my speech?

Winter has become my default after two decades of failures.

Uggg! I’m so stupid! How do I know this pinche app for Puerto Rico is going to hit? My ideas NEVER hit!

Grief lodges itself in my throat. I can’t swallow.

What am I grieving? Who am I grieving? I didn’t want to have kids. Is that it? No. There are enough kids in the world. I was supposed to be the first fabulous feminist tech entrepreneur “of color.” Right? I don’t even know why I thought that could be who I became. Seeing all those young women whose hearts are not broken, I know now this title will never be mine. I’m too much of a mess. Marga won’t speak to me, which means I’ve fucked up again without knowing it. There is nothing left now. Some women can go home to their rich investor husbands and accept their roles as the hottie pilates instructor who manages the kids.

But I won’t have that either when I get to the other side of this bridge. 

I look up at the Freedom Tower, as if truly noticing it for the first time. Everything and nothing has changed since two towers became one. I am aging out. I wonder if this is how women who have gone through three rounds of IVF and still don’t get pregnant feel. No, it’s worse. I have been giving birth every three years and watching my children die every three years. My window is closing. Menopause means I won’t birth any children, human or digital. The Hula Hoop campaign was supposed to my success, but I flaked out again. I’m running away agin, just before my big moment. Maybe all of it’s just over and I’ll never build anything useful for an unapologetically fickle market. 

If I blur my vision, the Freedom Tower becomes the Twin Towers. 

If I blink, I hear static.

If I jump, I might lose it. 

But our station wagon is within range of the radio station.

From the Top of the World Trade Center! 

H-H-H-H-ot! 103.5! Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. I wonder if I take you home…

1987

Blilnk-blink-blink. I’m sitting in the back of my family’s station wagon, facing the cars speeding behind us on the highway. Watching the road we’ve already covered. Soon we will disconnect. New York is fading. Empire State Building shrinking. World Trade Center going, going gone. No skyline. The sound is getting choppy. Staticky. Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. I wonder if I take you home… Turning my head 180 degrees, I see Dad is driving. He changes the radio station. 

Disconnected.

Uprooted.

Tree fallen at the end of my street in Long Island after Hurricane Gloria.

Stomach lurches. I want to cry. Tears blur my view. Our brown station wagon speeds away from the only home I've ever known. My chest collapses. A single tear slides down my left cheek. Surrounded by baggage in the fold-up backseat, my hands grasping my Cabbage Patch Kid, I am completely powerless as I watch New York taxi cabs and banged up cars race behind and around my backwards ride to a future I do not want.

A silver car with an "Outtatime," license plate swerves into our lane, reminding me of the movie Back to the Future. A time machine would be perfect right now. I could go back in time and be with my friends again.

If only my life were a movie.

The station wagon bounces up and down on the potholed road.

Dad lands on Richard Marx singing, “Time was all we had until the day we said goodbye…” He turns the volume down. He is facing the other direction. He is driving like Doc Brown toward a future he's been dreaming about for decades. But I'm looking backwards to the future I had been dreaming about since he interviewed me with his video camera a couple years ago.

"What do you want to be when you grow up, Desiree?"

"An actress and a lawyer," I said in a hoity toity voice.

"Just because you were born in Queens doesn't mean you’re a Queen," Big Sister yelled while me and Dad laughed.

That's the last time Dad and I laughed.

Together.

Since he announced we are moving to Florida, we haven't spoken. I'm trapped in this brown station wagon for the next two days with no air conditioning in August. I want to sing, Stop...before you break my heart! But that would be melodramatic, according to Mom and Big Sister. I look over at them…do they understand anything about me, at all?

Mom seems happy about this move, even though she told me on my birthday that I was destined to conquer Nueva Yol. "Because this is the 80s! Women can do anything," she would say as we jumped up and down to Jane Fonda's workout. Now she sits up front, in the passenger side, using her handy tray to make us sandwiches to eat inside the car. "So we can make good time," she says in unison with Dad.

Big Sister faces forward listening to her gray walkman. She doesn't care about leaving New York. She's got her Pat Benetar haircut and college ahead of her. No one in our family has ever gone to college. And no one in our family, boy or girl, has ever said they were going to be an astronaut. She's gonna have so much fun in outer space while the rest of us are stuck in Orlando Borelando.

Lil Bro isn't looking backwards or forwards. He's busy writing down his weekly list of Casey's Top 40 hits. He is seven so geography is irrelevant.

Me? I'm the only one silently kicking and screaming in the backseat, my legs dangling like roots pulled up from the soil that had been nurturing the person I was becoming. I wish I could drive myself and control our direction. My chest hurts. I can't take all this sadness. I put my pink walkman headphones in my ears. Janet Jackson sings to me about control, but I make up my own words:

I let my father drive
I let him think he owns me
Hmm...
but Imma come right BACK.
Control! To get what I want.

Twelve isn't too young for a License to Drive. Right?

"When you're 18, you're outta heayah!" That's what Dad said after packing up the moving truck and our brown station wagon for the long ride down I-95.

"But I could stay with Diana Rodriguez until I finish school," I insisted, trying hard to make my case like a lawyer on TV. "I know which way I wanna go and it's NOT tah Flahrida."

Back-talk is close to sacrilege in our family. But I couldn't help it. I kept fighting him. There was a lot of crying and yelling. When Dad yells the conversation is over. "No twelve-year-old is gonna ruin my retirement," he said like a final exclamation point. 

That's when I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut.

Can't bring it up again.

Case closed.

I'll make a terrible lawyer.

The station wagon swishes past trees on I-95 heading into New Jersey. Signs for Great Adventure seem to punch me in the chest. I pull off my headphones. "Can we stop at Great Adventure? This might be the last time we’ll ever go,” I whine.

"Orlando has Disney World," says Mom with her positive sing-song spin.

"Pffft," I mutter. "Great Adventure is betta." The least we can do is stop and have some fun on the way to hell. I blow a kiss at my favorite theme park as it shrinks from view and fades away.

"Flahhhrida has all kinds of theme parks that are better than Great Adventure," says Dad. "Flahhhrida has palm trees and beaches and warm weather. Flahhhrida, Flahhhrida, Flahhhrida..."

Dad’s Brooklyn accent is always stronger when he says the word “Florida.” And every time I hear him say the word "Florida" I go into some kind of zombie state. All I can hear is the buzz-buzz of chainsaws chopping the uprooted tree on our street into a million pieces, and the hum-hum of generators. It was the soundtrack of our neighborhood for a week until our electricity was restored, and everything went back to "normal."

Static zaps the music agin. Mom turns the knob this time, trying to find a new station. But the chainsaws are still buzzing and chopping the uprooted tree at the end of the street into a million pieces. All I can see when I close my eyes is the huge, gaping hole left in the ground afterwards.

Before we left, I ran down the street one last time to look inside the hole. I leaned forward, as if I could see down deeper. But it was just a mess of leftover roots, tangled up like the cables behind our TV. And then the hole echoed my dad's heavy New York accent.

"Weah movin ta Flahrida-da-da-da!"

It feels like the hole sucked me down as fast as the spinning Gravitron at Great Adventure. Ew. Someone threw up on that ride during the fifth grade field trip. I feel nauseous. What's happening? Where are we going? Why are we spinning?

Javascript Lesson!

Short Circuiting && and ||

|| means OR.

It separates “truthy” and “falsey” values.

Nullish Coalescing

Nullish values are null and undefined.

const rest1 = {
name: 'Capri',
numGuests: 20,
};

const rest2 = {
name: 'La Piazza',
owner: 'Giovanni Rossi',
};

So much of these lessons are conceptual. I need to apply these examples to something I'm really trying to solve in my real life.

// Coding Challenge #1

/* 
We're building a soccer betting app !

Suppose we get data from a web service about a certain game (below). In this challenge we're gonna work with the data. So here are your tasks:

1. Create one player array for each team (variables 'players1' and 'players2')

const [players1, players2] = game.players; 
console.log(players1, players2);

//I don't understand where the "game.players" came from. The instructor's explanation video shows a list of players' names like Neuer, Pavard, and Martinez, which I don't see in the code from his GitHub repository. So I did a "find" in the Visual Studio script.js file for "Neuer" and sure enough I found the code he references in the video, but it's under "Challenge #2" so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to follow when the instructions aren't clear. But oh well, here it is:

const game = {
  team1: 'Bayern Munich',
  team2: 'Borrussia Dortmund',
  players: [
    [
      'Neuer',
      'Pavard',
      'Martinez',
      'Alaba',
      'Davies',
      'Kimmich',
      'Goretzka',
      'Coman',
      'Muller',
      'Gnarby',
      'Lewandowski',
    ],
    [
      'Burki',
      'Schulz',
      'Hummels',
      'Akanji',
      'Hakimi',
      'Weigl',
      'Witsel',
      'Hazard',
      'Brandt',
      'Sancho',
      'Gotze',
    ],
  ],
  score: '4:0',
  scored: ['Lewandowski', 'Gnarby', 'Lewandowski', 'Hummels'],
  date: 'Nov 9th, 2037',
  odds: {
    team1: 1.33,
    x: 3.25,
    team2: 6.5,
  },
};

2. The first player in any player array is the goalkeeper and the others are field players. For Bayern Munich (team 1) create one variable ('gk') with the goalkeeper's name, and one array ('fieldPlayers') with all the remaining 10 field players

const [gk, ...fieldPlayers] = players1;
console.log(gk, fieldPlayers);

3. Create an array 'allPlayers' containing all players of both teams (22 players)

const allPlayers = [...players1, ...players2];

4. During the game, Bayern Munich (team 1) used 3 substitute players. So create a new array ('players1Final') containing all the original team1 players plus 'Thiago', 'Coutinho' and 'Perisic'

const players1Final = [...players1, 'Thiago', 'Coutinho', 'Perisic'];

5. Based on the game.odds object, create one variable for each odd (called 'team1', 'draw' and 'team2')

This is how I started trying to solve this challenge:
const team1 = 1.33;
const draw = 3.25;
const team2 = 6.5;

But clearly I have no idea what it was really asking for, because the answer was this:

const {
  odds: { team1, x: draw, team2 },
} = game;
console.log(team1, draw, team2);

6. Write a function ('printGoals') that receives an arbitrary number of player names (NOT an array) and prints each of them to the console, along with the number of goals that were scored in total (number of player names passed in)

My attempt:
const printGoals = players1, players2, scored;
printGoals function ();

The actual answer:
const printGoals = function (...players) {
  console.log(players);
  console.log(`${players.length} goals were scored`);
};

7. The team with the lower odd is more likely to win. Print to the console which team is more likely to win, WITHOUT using an if/else statement or the ternary operator.

My attempt:
const winningTeam <= 1.33;
console.log(winningTeam);

The real answer:
team1 < team2 && console.log('Team 1 is more likely to win');
team1 > team2 && console.log('Team 2 is more likely to win');