Who Was Your Bisabuela?

The poll results are in! 100% of you voted to read Maria La Gata’s fictionalized story as part of the Writing and Entrepreneurship Workshop, aka Brujeria Navigation 101.

At the Grace Hopper Conference last Fall, I met a few Latinas in Tech who said they knew nothing about their heritage. “English is my first language and my parents never told me any stories about my grandparents,” said one woman. “I feel lost.”

Girl. I felt the same way, and tried desperately to recover my own heritage by living in Miami, traveling to Puerto Rico, and dating men from South and Central America until finally, in my 40s, my Tia started telling me stories about my bisabuela, Maria La Gata — a rum-running entrepreneur who owned property in 1920s Puerto Rico. Woah!! What???? Total game changer. All my chaos finally started to make some sense.

And then my Dad surfaced this amazing video footage he shot of her smoking a cigar in the 1960s before she passed away.

Hypothesis: When you know who your bisabuelas/abuelas were, you’ll know who YOU are.

Who are you, really, underneath that code-switching Femmebot costume? What was life like for your bisabuela? More than likely, her life was DRASTICALLY different from yours. To understand your own User Journey better, write or draw or design a cool data visualization about your bisabuela using PowerBi which you can learn at Global Power Platform Bootcamp 2024 Orlando (hosted by Latinas in Data).

Share whatever you create — if you want to — in the comments so other Latinas reading this zine can connect and contrast their own experiences.

If you get stuck, check out my bisabuela’s story for ways to have fun with it!

The Nine Lives of Maria La Gata
by Melanie Feliciano

In 1920s Harlem, there are dancers and gangsters. Maria Nalgona knows she's working from the wrong POV. When she meets fellow dancer Josephine Baker in the first all-black produced Broadway Show "Shuffle Along," she finds herself breaking away from the stage and pursuing Cleo Lythgoe, aka, The Queen of Rum Row...

Will following the signs of the planets help Maria along the way, or will she get more lost? 

IF you liked "Griselda" on Netflix, THEN you will like "The Nine Lives of Maria La Gata."

 © All Rights Reserved

In this FICTIONAL story arc, I place my real bisabuela among famous characters in 1920s Harlem. Readers get to follow all the scary steps Maria takes to transform herself from dancer to gangster.

Why did I do this? I wanted to read a book and see a film about women in history who existed outside the social norms.

Other Hypothesis: My bisabuela can help all of us transform from Fembots to Femmebots in the 2020s. Yeah, that’s a t-shirt, haha.

A note to subscribers! Now that you voted, here is how we’ll be posting content through March 31, 2024:

• Mondays are FREE workshops and Dr. Nutmeg’s Turing Test interviews — coming next week, another animation workshop (see Part 1) showing the evolution of our interview with Miami Film Lab’s Isabel Custer!

• Thursdays are paid workshops and another chapter of “The Nine Lives of Maria La Gata.”

Chapter 1: Maria Nalgona

The shoes.

    They tell the whole story, but not a single man in Jack Johnson's Black and Tan hooch joint on 142nd Street in the summer of 1922 is looking at them. They're too juiced to notice the spotlight illuminating four cracked leather straps stretching across the top of a tiny foot on stage. The light glides up a shapely brown leg along with the haunting hum of a trombone. It stops at the knee when the trumpet player responds with a wat-wah-wa-wa.

It's a scarred knee, the kind that has seen too many scrapes and falls. It bends like a serpent around the back of a three-legged wooden stool. This is when the whistles usually ensue. But not tonight. The silence is too long after the horse-galloping drummer stops. Three in the morning was always a good slot in Ponce, but not here in Harlem. Not since the law changed.

    The hooch in a glass always trumps the hooch with the ass.

    That's what Maria Nalgona always says.       

Spotlight.

Trombone.

Brown Foot.

Nothing can re-focus the crowd’s gaze from rum tumblers, high balls, and whatever other kinds of illegal hooch that criminal from Havana smuggled through the back door.

Joaquin Cardona, they call him. Pft. That scoundrel. He didn't even tip his cheap hat at Maria after rushing through the dressing room with his boxes of hooch. That hat is always pulled over his eyes, as if he doesn't want anyone to know how ugly he is.

Word among the dancers, after his delivery, was that tips are getting cut from fifteen to ten percent of hooch sales. "Especially if you don't get enough eyeballs from the audience," emphasized the Bartender, passing along the message to Maria just before her show.

She's gotta do her crowd pleasers to make it worthwhile. There are too many mouths to feed for this not to be worthwhile.