Last week I had a great conversation with Margarita Quihuis, who as part of Astia (formerly the Women's Technology Cluster) and the Open Capital Network, as well as the president of Hispanic-Net, helps to link up venture capital and women founding startup companies in technology, including biotech and medicine. Margarita isn't just a capitalist extraordinaire - she's also one of those interesting multiblogular people who puts her writing energy into many projects at once.

Though we started out talking about co-working, soon we were talking about Tierra Natal, a social networking site built to help Mexican-Americans keep in touch with their family home towns. Tierra Natal, in English and Spanish, has a page for every town in Mexico. I went into the site in English, clicked "Find your home town", and searched for Aguililla, in Michoacan, not because it's my home town but because it's a sort of sister city for the town where I live now, and has been since the 1940s. In fact the close ties between these two small towns has been an example for sociologists who study globalization and emigration. According to the sociologist and economist Roger Rouse, the two towns are no longer separate economies or communities. Tierra Natal aims to strengthen the social network for Mexican-American families who share roots in the same hometown. It also exposes the ways that social space is transnational and yet often rooted in specific geographies. The site might help the HTAs go online and accelerate their ties to each other as they begin to form Federaciones of smaller clubs, as they become politically active in the U.S. as well as in Mexico.

I say politically active, because the formation of HTAs is a grassroots movement awakening to the huge amount of power it has. Mexican-Americans send more than $23 billion a year to Mexico, mostly through individual and family ties. The HTAs or Clubs de Oriundos, by consolidating some of that money, are gaining political power. We'll see in the next few years how blogs and social network software will help that process. Other countries may also begin using social software to make the power of their remittance economies more transparent.

I have interesting blogger gossip about Tierra Natal, which is still in beta -- they went out and hired Jocotepec students and bloggers to go out and collect information and photos from some of the towns, to start getting content into a sister site, Jocotepec.com. I was thinking about other methods - maybe making Flickr groups for every town, and then feeding the group's photo pool straight into the Tierra Natal site. That would be particularly nice for people who might be homesick, but unable to return to their home town because of immigration status. Another tactic might be to use Tierra Natal to channel money to a blogger in every municipio - from people in the U.S. who want news and photos and video uploaded regularly. They'd be paying for their own hometown web journalist!

In another of Margarita's many web projects, the blog Indigo Financiera, she has been posting lately on HTAs, Hometown Associations. These informal networks raise millions and millions of dollars from Mexican-Americans and send them back to their state government. Often, the Mexican government matches the money sent from the U.S. associations. That's on top of any money sent by individuals back to their families, a pattern of remittance and migration which increasingly depends on women's labor. Margarita's vision is of grassroots venture capital:

In 2004, Mexican immigrants sent more than $16 billion back to their communities of origin. The remittances were used to take care of basic services such as food, clothing, healthcare. What if the Mexican diaspora could tap into a portion of those assets to create funding for their businesses? They wouldn't need Wall Street and they wouldn't have to wait around for some large institution to take a leap of faith and provide capital for them. The community could do it themselves.

To that end she has set up a microequity fund for HTAs, and is participating in events like this meeting to help get HTAs on the web.

From there we went on to talk a little bit about politics. I showed Margarita the Web 2.0 app for Ecuadorean politics. She showed me Voto Latino, which has its own blog, a group on Facebook and on myspace, and other sites.

We looked a bit at the HispanicNet blog, and I noted this post where Margarita speculates on the potential for the net to increase social capital:

The question remains though - do and will Latinos leverage social networking tools? I've been approached by more than one academic on this question. Do social networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook give further advantage to people with social capital and connections? Does it accelerate their access? Can Hispanics, women and other under-represented groups close the gap and increase their social capital?

I have to mention one more blog of Margarita's. It's called SIPAPA Reads!, and it's all reviews in English of children's books in Spanish. It seems extremely useful for school librarians, and for parents of kids in Spanish immersion programs! Excellent tagging by age and reading level, and subject, a tag cloud, links to buy the books, relevant sidebar links, along with the clear reviews, make this a a great blog.

Liz Henry blogs at Composite and many other places. You can contact her at liz@bookmaniac.net to say hello or to send her links to great blogs by women in Latin America or Latinas elsewhere in the world.