The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : How to Stay Connected With Ethnic Roots While Cruising the Internet

The recent announcement of plans for LatinoNet, an online network dedicated to the Latino community, does not mean that Latinos--or Americans of Celtic, Filipino, Jewish, African or other descent--have to wait in order to find compatriots and resources in cyberspace. In fact, there is something for almost every ethnic group on-line, and for some groups the repository of material is truly vast.

What’s more, there’s no reason at all that a discussion group focusing on, say, Asian Americans shouldn’t be explored by users of Swedish, Irish or Mexican extraction. On the contrary, part of the fun of cyberspace is listening in on a conversation you wouldn’t otherwise get to hear--encountering up close that which you mightn’t otherwise encounter at all.

There is so much of ethnic interest out there that no one column could do it all justice. In future columns, we’ll explore some areas in greater detail, so please don’t be upset if your group was left out this time around. The idea right now is just to give the flavor of the thing.

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Consider Latinos, for example. If you have Internet access and want to explore resources of interest, use the gopher command to reach latino.sscnet.ucla.edu. This gopher site, a joint project of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA and the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at UC Santa Barbara, offers one-stop shopping for a host of Latino-oriented material.

From this site, you can access a variety of archives, university libraries, newsletters, course descriptions, job listings, California policy papers, student manifestoes and a lengthy report entitled “Getting the Green Card and Becoming a U.S. Citizen.” Written by an attorney, it seemed quite thorough and clear, and was available in both English and Spanish.

The site also offers WAIS searching; WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Servers, and is a powerful tool for scouring Internet databases when you want to find something.

The tenor of this gopher was basically left-leaning academic, leading me to wonder where in cyberspace a Latino entrepreneur might go to feel at home. Well, a WAIS search of the term “business” at latino.sscnet.ucla.edu turned up pages of resources, including a help-wanted ad for a chief economist at Hispanic Business magazine.

Blacks enjoy a huge array of cyberspace resources. For a remarkable guide to these, e-mail any old message (content and subject are irrelevant) to mcgee@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu. You’ll get back a document on the order of 138K from a mailbot run by Arthur McGee--one of those selfless Internet types who are so important in cyberspace--which lists every conceivable discussion group, mailing list, bulletin board and so forth that in any way relates to African Americans.

The range of resources is striking. There are a number of African American computer bulletin boards, or BBSes, and many of them are connected in a system known as Afronet, which echoes conferences so that users of a local board can discuss issues with users of other boards across the entire network.

There are also electronic mailing lists for black alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lovers of the blues, investing in black communities, and dozens of other topics. And on CompuServe, there is a large and active African American forum, where I read a fascinating discussion of politics, black conservatism and the recent Republican victory.

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In the Internet newsgroup soc.culture.african.american, I observed a thoughtful discussion of what non-blacks say among themselves about matters of race, and how this compares with what blacks might think is said. The discussion included both blacks and whites, as far as I could tell, and seemed far more frank than discussions of this kind held in person.

This newsgroup, like many of those in the soc.culture hierarchy, is on occasion hit by hate postings. Sometimes anonymously, sometimes using a stolen account, sometimes even using their own names, people decide to toss grenades into soc.culture.african.american, soc.culture.jewish and probably many other such groups. Responses to these attacks differ; some people flame back, others just create “kill files,” instructing their newsreading software not to show them postings by the person in question.

Despite this sort of thing, the soc.culture hierarchy is the place to go if you’re interested in a particular nationality or ethnicity. And although some of the groups focus on the country that gave them their name--most of the postings on soc.culture.poland are even in Polish--others seem to emphasize their respective diasporas.

Soc.culture.jewish is of course the ultimate example, and Jewish computer networking is quite extensive worldwide. But you’d be surprised by some of the other diasporas brought together, however tenuously, on the Internet.

In soc.culture.indian, for example, Ashok Viswanathan, posting from the University of New Mexico, politely announced that a close Indian friend would soon be arriving at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He hoped to smooth the newcomer’s way by finding an Indian Students Assn. there, “or for the matter, any kind soul’s phone/e-mail who would be able to help.”

Elsewhere in the same group, there was debate over where the best chaat or kulfi faluda might be had, and a report that golgappas could nowadays be found in Boston. Here and there I found Indian matrimonial postings from Internet users in search of a spouse. There were Hindi and Gujarati fonts for both Windows and Mac users, and ads for software developers too.

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In soc.culture.filipino, meanwhile, Celestino Alfafara reported on the Fil-American National Historical Society “concerning the First Wave Filipinos in America (circa 1929) . . . My father was one of those who arrived here in SF around that time.”

Elsewhere in the same group, there was debate over the new governor of Hawaii, Ben Cayetano, who was accused by some of hiding his Filipino heritage or of insufficiently advocating Filipino causes. One went so far as to complain that “he does consider himself to be more an American than a Filipino.” Another wondered what, in a governor, was so very wrong with that.

Ethnic offerings in cyberspace go on and on, like some giant traditional banquet. By all means partake of this great feast. Just promise me one thing: that you’ll taste more than one kind of food. If you get indigestion, you can always turn off the computer.