How to Make Friends
Online
or How I Stopped
Buying or Reading Vanity Fair
Now I read La Diva Latina’s
online magazine

By:  Frances M. Pabón
fountainwish@msn.com
Granted, there are many other ways of making
friends online.  You may have heard of My
Space, of Yahoo! even of AOL, but being brought
together by an outrage, I’d say has a more
lasting effect than all those three combined.

Three years passed.  La Diva Latina, who I refer
to by her first name Jennese, and I met in person
for the first time last summer.  She was here in
Puerto Rico with her family. When I pulled up in
my car to the spot in Old San Juan where we
had agreed to meet, I was stunned.  It was as if
I'd known her for twenty years.

When she asked me to write about making
friends online, Jennese told me she still
remembers how on the day we met in Old San
Juan, I taught her son to make a wish by
throwing a coin into a fountain with his back
turned to it, giving meaning to my email
username: “fountainwish”.  I chuckled because
many of my wishes have come true,
I hope his have too!
Old San Juan Fountain      victoriansociety.org
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I stopped buying, even reading in the library or the supermarket check-out line, Vanity Fair, when it published the trite, derogatory joke that Latinos were “the leafblowers, the help” so learning Spanish would not be worthwhile. To this day that tasteless joke makes my heart sink.

I learned of it thru an email posted on Princeton University's “Pueblo-Latino,” the online Latino alumni discussion group. The group, mostly calm, some would say almost inactive, populated sparsely by requests for career opportunities or advice, lit up as if set on fire.

In a span of a week, more messages were posted than at anytime in the previous year. One posting recommended joining Brown-Ivy [Ivy for “Ivy League” and Brown for “Latino”] an online discussion group for Latino alumni of all Ivy League colleges: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Logging onto Brown Ivy I saw Wendy Maldonado's post. She lead the outraged charge against this popular magazine. She who holds three Ivy League degrees and is a successful Mexican-American professional working in New York City. Wendy herself introduced me to La Diva Latina who with her own flair and energy, had also written a cutting reply to Vanity Fair.