🙋🏽👧🏿👱🏾👧🏻The Latinx Collective: Issue #17: This week's five

THIS WEEK'S FIVE:

If you only read one of this week's articles in full, I'd recommend this one for both his story and the incredible photos. Bad Bunny, the 24 year old Puerto Rican trap star, is clearly SUPER talented. He self-directed the music video for his single "Estamos Bien," he declines working with a stylist even though he's got one of the most unique looks of his peers, and has become a big star over the past 2 years without having released a full-length album.

He has become an unequivocal superstar across Latin America and the diaspora. His irreverent, emotional, trumpet-like verses have been dominating on near-ubiquitous features with some of rap and reggaetón’s biggest names — Ozuna, Arcangel, Farruko, Alexis y Fido, Daddy Yankee, and soon, Drake, who sings his verse in Spanish — and on his own songs, which notoriously started out as SoundCloud singles he uploaded while he was attending the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo as a communications student interested in radio, moonlighting as a bagger at the ECONO grocery store.

Y'lan Noel, who is of Panamanian descent, is an actor best known for his roles as Daniel King in "Insecure" and Dmitri (or Black Rambo as someone called him) in "The First Purge." In this Q&A, he talks about all of the weird, eccentric qualities of blackness being explored on TV. If you haven't yet watched Season 3 of "Insecure" be careful, this has some spoilers.

This is definitely the first Latinx in sports I've featured! Kelsey Martinez is a strength and conditioning assistant for the Oakland Raiders. She's the first female coach in the team's history and currently the NFL’s only female strength coach. Kelsey grew up playing softball because she hated being indoors. Without a college softball career, she sought ways to stay around athletes. That’s where her desire to be a trainer bloomed. She interned with NFL strength coaches & once she sampled a taste of the NFL trainer life, she wanted in. 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽

Here's a win for Latinx inventors and techies: Luis von Ahn, Duolingo's CEO and co-founder as well as the co-founder of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, is the recipient of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT prize of $500,000, which awards a mid-career inventor whose patented product or process has significantly improved society. He was born and raised in Guatemala and moved to the U.S. at 17 to study at Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He went on to earn his doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. There's also a video feature embedded in the article from 2017 if you'd like to hear more of his story.

Gadiel from BuzzFeed's Pero Like goes to Miami to meet a celebrity chef who happens to be Japanese-Dominican. Chef "Ninja" shares his story, which includes a bit about former Dominican dictator Trujillo accepting Japanese families into the D.R. He also shares some advice for young Latinx following their dreams and talks about his annoyance when other Latinos don't believe he's Dominican or speaks Spanish, when in fact he no longer speaks Japanese and knows minimal English. Fun video!

SPOTLIGHT SERIES:

Karen Vidángos, who works in the museum industry, has always had a passion for the arts, but as a Latina she rarely saw herself represented in the cultural institutions she visited. So she created this Instagram account to share photos of herself at different exhibits and it's now become a movement with Latinxs in museums all over the country doing so. Go follow @LatinxCurated on Instagram and when you post photos of yourself at museum exhibits, tag them with #Latinxcurated to be featured on the account.

A Latina at an exhibit in Mexico, via the @LatinxCurated account

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💖Mil gracias to subscriber Dori King (Director of Inclusion, Oregon Episcopal School) for the kind words:

Thank you for this wonderful newsletter! It is a wonderful way for non-latinx folks to build some cultural knowledge. I have recommended it to our educators.