Gracias a America’s Voice I am in Pittsburgh for the Netroots Nation conference. After a almost full day here I have many thoughts on Netroots Nation and the role of independent activist bloggers within the wider blogosphere or netroots, if you will. Pero even before that, I was invited to be part of a summit hosted by the New Organizing Institute . The summit specifically joined LGBT and immigrant bloggers to sit at the mesa. The conversation included some people whom I consider not just co-luchadrores pero amigos as well.

The conversation was centered on how we can cross support each others’ efforts especially in the context of marriage equity and comprehensive immigration reform. Unfortunately, especially in the mainstream progressive blogosphere, these issues are still viewd as mutually exclusive, as if there are no gay undocumented families. DreamActivist talks on this intersectionality specifically.

What was more interesting for me personally, given my 16 year history of activism on various levels and in various mediums, was an issue of language if you will. Semantics. Word choice. It’s a theme that has reared its head here in Pittsburgh a few times. For example, is calling a legislator pushing for a specific legislation to be passed the moves of an organizer? Is that the activist thing to do? Is a desire to work with the Hill activist? What about this huge move towards list building as a strategy? Can activist bloggers also be wed to mainstream orgs and maintain legitimacy? Can you be both outsider and insider?

Nope.

Well that’s just me speaking from my experiences. Mike Rogers from blogActive, who called himself a journoactivist at the Summit, gave some really excellent concrete examples on how mainstream orgs can work with independent activist bloggers in a way that is mutually beneficial and doesn’t sell either side short. Porque what usually happens is that mainstream orgs and blogs, especially those that work in the beltway, have a hard time distinguishing between using us as resources and tokenizing us. One thing that orgs can do is buy adspace on smaller, independent blogs. Trust me, I’d rather have an ad for America’s Voice than “Meet Latina Women to Date” . And I’m not just shouting them out porque they funded my trip here, pero because the relationship between that specific D.C. based org working on Comprehensive Immigration Reform and independent, especially radical bloggers hasn’t been an easy one. We who are not career bloggers write from a place of personal experience so we are not fond of being told to stick with agreed upon language, especially if that means selling out portions of not just our communities pero our actual families,ourselves. Pero America’s Voice deserves some props porque while they do their thing, they have supported bloggers like myself, via ads and sponsorships/scholarships, knowing full well that we will still call out beltway politics.

Stay Tuned for Part 2: The Art of Speaking Past One Another