San Francisco de Analco

I’ve previously written about my family’s San Francisco, in Guanajuato state. It’s a town called San Francisco del Rincón, founded in the early 17th century as a república de indios, an “Indian republic.” This is the San Pancho my dad was born in and grew up in, the one I remember as a kid, and where I spent a bit of time as an adult.

That San Pancho was the hometown of María Isabel, my grandma. My paternal grandfather, José Isabel, only arrived there in the 1930s. He hailed from San Felipe “Torres Mochas” (San Felipe of the Unfinished Church Towers), a smaller town farther north in Guanajuato state, outside of the Bajío lowlands. I don’t remember visiting San Felipe growing up and my grandfather did not talk about it much. It was mostly my dad and his siblings who mentioned it, usually when complaining about how mean my great-grandmother Nemesia was.

Christmas Morning

The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internet?!

“The internet is dead,” many are saying. The arguments are persuasive: search engine results aren’t very useful anymore, ads are constant, and corporate social networks seem to be mostly bots sharing AI slop.

But the internet has died before. I spent my youth on Usenet groups, chatting on IRC channels and downloading games from FTP sites. Now those spaces are ghost towns—if they exist at all.

Today’s internet is heading in a similar direction and I think it’s fine. Maybe even better than fine, if the next iteration is less corporate and more human. Maybe the scale will be different (millions instead of billions of people), but the internet of the 80s and 90s was much smaller and it was still fun and useful.