Hispanic Fanatic

We here at Hispanic Fanatic world headquarters have always had a complicated relationship with Jennifer Lopez.

On the one hand, she’s a beautiful and talented Latina who has had an enormous impact on an industry that is notoriously dismissive of Hispanics.

On the other hand, she is responsible for an ungodly amount of bad movies and wretched music.

So you see the dilemma.

Well, news came out recently that puts J Lo firmly on the positive side of history. It seems that you have her to thank for the invention of Google Images.

One of the founders of Google claims that it was Lopez’s infamous green dress, which she wore to the 2000 Grammys, that provided the impetus to catalogue images on the search engine.

Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says that “J Lo green dress” (or some variation on that) was the most popular search query the company had ever seen. But they had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted, which was Ms. Lopez wearing that dress.

So they tinkered with the code, allowing pictures and graphics to come up in queries, and in the words of Schmidt, “Google Image Search was born.”

That settles it. Jennifer Lopez is all right with us.

And as a public service, and just in case you don’t remember that famous dress, here it is.

Yes, that’s very little fabric for such a cultural milestone and technological breakthrough. But that’s just J Lo for you.

Recently, I wrote about how Hispanics are underrepresented in the STEM fields. Well, this underrepresentation creeps up in strange ways.

For example, Hispanics are big on video games. We are 32% more likely to consider video games our main source of entertainment, and we are 54% more likely to buy a video game the day it’s released.

Personally, I used to be king of the arcade back in the days when Galaga ruled the Earth.

But for the most part, the video game industry has ignored their large Latino fan base. Just 3 percent of video game characters are Latino, and many of those are — to no one’s surprise — cliché or offensive stereotypes.

So what can be done about this? Well, big guns like Google have plugged in and are trying to get Hispanic kids excited about technology. And lots of organizations have sprung up to teach coding and programming to Latino children. And the Latino STEM Alliance partners with schools, industry groups and community leaders to bring enrichment programs to Latino kids.

While the goal is to create better job opportunities for Hispanics, an even more crucial objective is to accelerate the nation’s pace of scientific and technological innovation. You see, without the input of Latinos, that’s just not gonna happen.

As for me, I plan to encourage my toddler son to love science and technology. It’s not only smart for society and good for my boy, it’s my master plan for retirement. I figure in twenty years, my son will come up with the next Facebook, and the family will be set.

Hey, why not?