Thursday, October 21, 2010

7th anniversary of HispanicNashville.com

Photo by Todd Sanders.  Licensed via Creative Commons.

Today is the seventh anniversary of HispanicNashville.com!

As I said this time last year on the site's sixth anniversary, HispanicNashville.com is really a celebration of you - your stories, your friends, your lives, your loves.  It's about getting to know Hispanic Nashvillians better.

Looking back on this seventh year, I noticed a few trends:
  • I'm getting more deliberate about denouncing the "i" word (click here for my stories on this subject on HispanicNashville.com, or here and here for what I wrote on the HeartSwitch framing blog).  
  • I may have avoided history in high school, but it gets eye-poppingly interesting when you dig into Tennessee's centuries-old relationships with Latin America and with immigrants from all over the globe (and I really have been meaning to run an ad in the Nashville Retrospect to point its readers to all the amazing history stories I've published)
  • Mack has always been worth paying attention to, either on his blog Coyote Chronicles or on his guest posts on this site. We get to hear not only his story but also the stories of his amazing family. So I gave Mack an entire page on this site, which is the HispanicNashville.com equivalent of a star on the Walk of Fame.
  • Occasionally, I do some original reporting and tell you what you haven't heard about elsewhere: how Hilario Razura came to town, what Miss Tennessee Latina thought about the national pageant, the fact that the newspapers published an unsigned copy of a report supposedly filed to report immigration violations at the Music City Center construction site, a local Latino rap/hip-hop compilation, the Peruvian history of a Peruvian-American CEO, the first Latina in the Tennessee legislature - stuff like that.
  • There are times that I tell you where my heart is, and this past year it came out sounding like this:
    • We are indivisible.
    • See the friend in every face.
    • Thank you for your work.
    • This reboot principle has to be brought over to immigration law.
    • We really kicked y'all's Tanton
    • Dedicated youth like Oscar who have no individual culpability for the fact that they don't have a visa deserve at least one chance to earn legal status.
    • I went looking for some "head of grain" verses, and three of the four times the word appears in the Gospels is in a story about Jesus and his disciples being rebuked for lawbreaking.
    • "You don't have the right to mention my laws"
    • A beautiful part of the first moments of being an American
    • An amazing story: ours

Like I said, these are your - our - stories. Happy 7th Birthday to all of us.

One last thing: this year was the year I came up with, "In the South, We Are All Related" as a tag line for the site, so I couldn't help putting it on some anniversary swag over at CafePress and Printfection. I'll be giving some of this stuff away, so keep your eyes posted here, on the @muybna Twitter feed, and on the HispanicNashville.com Facebook page. Who said you wouldn't get gifts at this birthday party?



3 comments:

  1. Congrats John, you do an excellent job keeping us informed, thanks for you hard work
    Fabian Bedne

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratulations to John and Hispanic Nashville Notebook!

    ReplyDelete

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