#latinattack the status quo

Hey Latinattackers.

I haven’t posted here in a good long while. I don’t know if anyone following is even still active enough to see this note. But I just want to write something here for posterity. Maybe I’ll come back to this blog but as of right now I have no solid guarantee.

Obviously, both us mods have been busy with our lives, college and work taking priority. That’s not an unusual reason to be absent. However, there is another, greater reason I haven’t posted here in a while.

When Mod Jay and I started this blog, we had many ideas, but we had one specific goal we wanted to maintain above all else: we wanted this to be a positive space. We wanted to focus on things that were happy, constructive, and peaceful. There are many places on Tumblr where the discourse is focused on negativity, attacking others, and spreading despair. Even when this is done with good intentions, we felt that there needed to be spaces where we could just relax and enjoy the positive aspects of our cultures, or at least engage with the negative parts in a way that didn’t bring us down. We wanted to provide education in a welcoming environment that didn’t scare people off.

This blog started winding down in 2015 and I’m sure you can understand why if you recall that time period. The US election was looming and the discourse on all fronts was terrifying. Don’t get me wrong: It is necessary to address those issues in order to do something about them. Both of us did so on our personal blogs, twitters, and facebooks, as well as in person. But this blog, Latinattack, was always meant to be a positive space. We could not allow the discourse to reach it. And if I’m being honest, I was too tired, depressed, and freaked out to really focus on anything positive. Hence, the silence on the Latinattack blog.

In the time since then the news hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, it has steadily gotten worse. Every day I look at what is happening in the world and I feel more and more despair. I feel more and more like the work I’ve done with Latinattack has been useless. What role do we have in a world like this? I just don’t know.

Yesterday, Brazil elected a fascist, and now I really don’t have anything more to feel about this. My will to focus on positive things is gone.

So that is the state of Latinattack at present. We really tried to make this a space where people could genuinely feel safe. But as things have gotten more dangerous in the outside world I no longer know if that is possible, and looking for positive news to share just feels disingenuous. I suppose, at this point, it is up to the Latinattack community — if there still is one — to figure this out.

In the meantime: The mods are taking care of their own families. We’re trying our best. Thank you for being here with us.

-Mod QU