One of the biggest trends I’m seeing in the writing industry is subscription-based newsletters on Substack.

As a writer and tech entrepreneur since 1997, I found myself feeling both enticed and annoyed by this trend. It was like, “Yay. Another freaking platform.” Reasonable reaction for someone who has been watching trends come and go for almost 30 years! From Friendster to Myspace to Ustream.tv to running a successful Kickstarter in 2017 for my musings and animations about being a “Latina in Tech” at TheFemmebots.com, I wasn’t convinced this platform would be any different for holding the attention of the famously fickle audiences of the interwebs.

But three other trends emerged in the past two years that have convinced me otherwise:

1. B*tch Magazine and Jezebel went out of business in 2022 and 2023 respectively, so there’s a hole in the feminist market, and someone’s gotta fill it with all the feminist and tech things through a GenX Latina lens!

2. ChatGPT and all things AI went mainstream in 2023, and suddenly the culture had caught up with my trademarked brand Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots®, which I had conceptualized at Miami Art Basel in 2009. My film school cohorts at American University in Washington, DC and my writing community in Miami were suddenly hitting me up on LinkedIn last year asking if I wanted to re-launch the series using all the emerging AI tools on the market. I said, “Hmm. Maybe.”

3. In September 2023, after attending the AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando — the largest convening of women working as computer scientists, data analysts, and software engineers at Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Disney, Adobe, Google, Meta (among all the other big tech honchos) — I discovered the hashtag #LatinasinTech had earned more than 28 million views on TikTok. What???

As one of the VERY few Latinas still surviving in tech, this number blew me away. It was a trend I NEVER believed would become reality. I felt like Gretchen Wieners from “Mean Girls.” FETCH was happening! Aaack!!!

And so, I got to work. With the help of my husband Tic Bowen, who is an illustrator, and my American University film school colleague Jonathan Jarrett — who filtered the illustrations through AI apps like RunwayML, D-ID, and Midjourney — we mashed all these trends together like a yummy Puerto Rican “mofongo” to launch Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® Substack in the Fall of 2023. The initial email list consisted of the most VIP of my 2017 Kickstarter backers and a few members of LatinasinTech.org and LatinasinData.com. I was thrilled to see the 82.4% open rate, which is a number I’ve never seen with my nonprofit clients in Washington, DC.

I’m jumping on the Substack trend a bit late in the game, in 2024, because I am seeing that the culture has finally caught up with us Latinas who have been trailblazing in the tech industry.

Born in Queens, NY to blue collar Puerto Rican parents – Dad was a NYPD police officer for 22 years – I was the quintessential overeducated, overconfident Long Island princess until Dad retired and brought my entire family of aunts and cousins to Orlando.

I like to say we transformed from Nuyoricans into Mickey Ricans since Central Florida has the largest diaspora of Puerto Ricans on the mainland now. That wasn’t the case 30 years ago when I was a senior in High School. I was a swimmer and played Water Polo among kids who went to Ivy League schools. With my less-than-posh background, I was lucky enough to get a full scholarship to Palm Beach Atlantic College, which incidentally turned out to be too religious for my tastes so I escaped to London for a study abroad semester before transferring to UNC-Chapel Hill to major in journalism.

That’s where I started learning HTML and landed a scholarship from the National Association for Hispanic Journalists which led me to MLive.com for my first job in 1997 and then eventually to a women’s tech incubator in San Francisco. I was a writer and producer for Latino.com until everyone got laid off in 2001 which led me to New America Media where I was managing editor and web producer for a magazine called YouthOutlook.org. I loved that job and stayed for two years but I wanted to improve my Spanish so I backpacked through Central America for 4 months before moving to Miami where I became managing editor of the Biscayne Times and won a Sunshine State Award for best humor column The Devil’s Advocate.

Yeah, After all the travels, my snarky overconfident Nuyorican voice came out in Miami, which captured the attention of Cuban filmmaker Lisandro Perez-Rey, my official introduction to visual storytelling. We worked together on a documentary about Miami’s real estate and art boom through the Miami Light Project, and that’s when I knew I needed to evolve from “just being a writer and coder” to something more. But what?

After taking a massage and yoga teacher training certification, traveling through Thailand and India, landing at another startup in Miami which matched angel investors and entrepreneurs, meeting Stan Lee and getting him to guest host an online writing workshop platform I had built with other local writers in Miami, the “what?” finally revealed itself: Performance Art at Art Basel Miami in 2008 and 2009. I officially launched TheFemmebots.com in a Wynwood warehouse showcasing seven women dressed in black with iPhones attached to their chests. We called it the “Boob Tube,” because that’s what everyone was looking at.

The show was a hit. Advertisers contacted me to hire “The Femmebots” as “promotions girls” at various Miami parties. And that’s when I realized some people were not looking at my little art project as commentary on the experience of being a woman in our culture.

They were instead continuing to see us from their very narrow-minded Capitalistic lens. Ew.

As I read that, I laugh. Because the very Capitalistic real estate bust sent me packing to Washington, DC where I landed a very sensible, prestigious job as web manager and IT support at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. The life and the color and the art of Miami seemed to be completely erased. I wondered if The Femmebots was just a dream or a fantasy and now my real boring life was about to begin.

So I was like, Na. I’m going to film school. I did what I do best: I kept one foot in the world that paid me and the other firmly planted in the one that doesn’t want to pay me as an eccentric writer performance artist. I left the prestigious job and managed to land a part-time job at the National Academy for State Health Policy, which I stuck with for 10 years! After all that moving around, I learned to stick with two supervisors who believed in me and allowed me the kind of flexibility every woman dreams about.

If you’ve read this far, glad you’re not bored!

The products/services/creative works Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® provides are: educational workshops for Latinas working in tech like:

1. Maria La Gata’s Writing & Entrepreneurship User Journey Workshop
2. Adobe Character Animator Workshop
3. Latinas in SEO Workshop: How to use SEMrush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and other tools to track your marketing-to-sales progress.
4. Latinas in Merchandising
5. Latinas in Video Editing for TikTok and IG using AI tools like OpusClip

The biggest problems we are attempting to solve for our readers/subscribers are:
1. The loneliness we can often feel as “solopreneurs.”
2. Demonstrations of new technologies on the market so that younger Latinas can see themselves represented.
3. Improved skills to entice future jobs or contracts.