It’s been a week since I left Pittsburgh, pero drama from NN09, a mounting stack of bills, and la vida have prevented me from writing out this second part in a more timely manner.

The Movement is in the Messenging?
As I mentioned before, I was able to attend Netroots Nation gracias to a scholarship from America’s Voice because of my history of writing on immigration. Understandably, this was a decision that wasn’t popular with everyone since I am constantly pushing back on the beltway and their “progressive” supporters. Pero that is what I consider my job to be. I am not beholden to anyone except myself and my community which is why I think it’s really important to look at how the issue of immigration and the parties that claim to represent the issue in the real world and blogosphere are represented, specifically in the Netroots Nation ’09 context.

The issue of Comprehensive Immigration Reform was front and center at #NN09, as evidenced by the sheer number of promigrant/immigration bloggers present. Many of these attended the NOI blogger Summit I wrote about here. While I came out of the NOI Summit annoyed with the progressive blogosphere’s attempt to frame the issue from a strictly legislative perspective, I was (and still am) excited about working more with lgbt bloggers.

Even when immigration wasn’t the purpose of the panel, peeps, from inside the beltway and out, were discussing strategies pushing comprehensive immigration reform. Pero that doesn’t mean there was consensus or agreement and what was visible was that there is a rift within the promigrant blogger movement, a fault line that separates based on power, privilege, race and gender.

To be honest, the first day of #NN09, the day of the infamous confrontation, the only space I made an attempt to go to was the Women’s Caucus, and honestly it was awash with white women’s faces, with few WOC, which made me opt for a walk along the river instead. I returned to the convention center for overpriced drinks (Thanks Jackie) and jokes about the big dog Clinton, whose speech I also opted out of in favor of dinner with America’s Voice Spanish language blogger (and new amiga) Maribel Hastings. When we weren’t waxing nostalgic on Ricaness, we were discussing the ways in which Spanish language blogging has fallen behind and why and what we could personally do, especially around issues of immigration, to bring multiple tongued discussions together.

On Day 2, I decided to make a more concerted effort to attend panels and events related to immigration and to meet up with some of the other immigrant blogger scholarship winners. After some morning blogging, it was to a lunch time screening of 9500 Liberty.

The independently made documentary by Annabel Park and Eric Byler takes the audience through Virginia’s Prince William County’s anti-immigrant and anti-Latino legislative actions and the protests against them. I thought it was really important for people to see how local initiatives across the country help add to the wider anti-immigrant rhetoric. It was also interesting to see how in progressive spaces, lip service can be paid to bloggers of color, specifically Latinos, while the hustle and dance is all about self-promotion and marketing.

Pero I cast aside those feelings to attend the panel, Stepping it up: Creating Powerful Multiracial Alliances with Progressive Bloggers. The panel was packed with people I knew, including some i have worked with personally, and the room was full of people I knew, some who said hello to me, many who didn’t. Rinku Sen, from the Applied Research Center, did an amazing job of connecting the issue of immigration to racial politics and the wider prison industrial complex. I also appreciated that the Latino blogosphere was described as the womb which incubated the pro-migrant blogosphere. Pero this is when I also felt compelled to leave that panel because of the way that Latino wombs, especially the wombs of Latinas are colonized and used and then discarded without being named. From fears of Latina wombs as carriers of anchor babies causing global economic and environmental destruction, it is hard, as a latina to accept not being acknowledged not once, but twice, in so called pro-migrant progressive spaces, especially when my male counterparts are named.

It was this similar sense of deliberate erasure that made me make myself invisible, that is not attend, the panel Four Perspectives from the Social Change blogosphere. It’s more than just an issue of sour grapes when you analyze who was at that panel and who was supposed to be on that panel. It’s about being honest about internal politics and interpersonal relationships when it comes to tokenizing more radical, independent people of color. It’s about inventing narratives of collaborations and mutual decisions for the sake of not airing dirty laundry while co-opting the language and history of people’s lives, not their careers or the size of their lists. I sincerely hope the panel went well and will bring forth concrete justice and love driven actions.

On the third and final day, I was probably the most deliberate in terms of being present as myself. At the Latino caucus, yes I did raise the incident with Carlos QC, porque if we cannot talk about how we interact with each other and treat each other in a Latino caucus than where can we? I also raised the issue of how bigger, progressive organizations and beltway orgs work with independent Latino bloggers beyond tokenizing and from a place of mutual trust and honesty. It is not an impossibility. I have worked in the corporate and non-profit world and understand how money is tied to messaging, pero there are ways that independent media activists/makers can work with orgs in a respectful way that doesn’t take anything away from either side. Also, I am a big fan of intentionally closed spaces. For people so worried about airing of dirty laundry, everyone is more than happy to have a Latino caucus open to non-Latinos as audience and/or particiapants. De facto, the spaces at conferences such as Netroots Nation are open. What is wrong with a Latino centered conversation among Latinos? Don’t we need to take care of our own communities if we are to successfully work with others?

The final panel I attended was Si Se Puede 2.0 , which talked about the different ways new tech, including video, games, and text messaging are being used successfully in the immigration struggle. What struck me most in this panel, was the tendency to take issues on , on the micro level without connecting them, For example, how can we talk about immigrant detention without talking about the wider prison industrial complex? How can we talk about individual DREAM act students and stop/pause their deportations one by one when the Department of Homeland Security has stated that they will keep deporting people as this “debate” goes on.

All in all, what I always come away from these spaces with, is a reminder of the kind of work I have been doing, am doing, and want to do. I also am much more clear on who I will be doing the work with. Who are my familia and allies, not just polite colleagues. Most of the time the work that needs to be done on the ground and how that information is shared via various media is as a response to non-polite, often violent actions against our communities. In order to move beyond mere reactionary politics and into real sustainable movement and community building we sometimes need to stop being so polite with one another and confront co-option and invisibility within our own ranks. This is not about us protecting other communities, speaking for others, or acting as saviors, this is about creating space for our own lives and agency.