Remember when the internet was about personal experiences and tying those into wider, more universal realities?

When I started online many years ago it wasn’t about action alerts and news. It was about my life. It was about me as a single young activist boricua mami feeling mad isolated as I protested, mami’ed, spit poetry and fucked. Yes, I said it fucked. It was how I came into contact with amazing other mamis and eventually how I helped start VivirLatino, which has since blown up to a level that still bugs me out. Like for real, to think I go to national conferences and am on radio shows because so many years ago I started writing about my life is una locura. And I am constantly reminded that the way the internet has changed, shifted from personal to political to careerist and that changes how we deal with one another.

The internet used to be about communication and connection. It was a space that was an extension of real life experiences and where the way we talked with each other mattered. It was why the mami’hood was born, because white “radical” mami spaces had no problem using racial epithets and men had no problem moving their attacks on mujeres to new spaces. Pero now, with people making careers out of blogging, with the blogosphere being about what orgs pays you to parrot their message, suddenly talking about how we interact with other in public is considered divisive and airing dirty laundry and not fucking critical in terms of how we build movements together.

I call bullshit.

I call bullshit porque I have never been good about that line between the personal and political. It has gotten me into trouble, has made me feel unsafe physically, and has led to heartache, and not just my own. Pero if we cannot talk about how we interact with each other personally, how the fuck can we expect to work together to move shit forward in the struggles?
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