Happy Hispanic Heritage Month & Did You Catch Us at GatherVerse?

Carmen Milagro

Oct 5

3 min read

Welcome to the Fall Season and for those honoring Hispanic Heritage month, thank you for celebrating with us. We’re halfway through the month but nowhere near done honoring the histories, cultures, and contributions of Americans whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

For this Hispanic Heritage Month, we’d love to highlight a woman who truly needs no introduction: the incredible Shakira! For years I have admired (and danced to) her music, but I’ve also connected deeply with her impact off the stage. At the very start of her international career, Shakira was wise enough to understand that for more young people from Colombia to be successful she needed to invest in her community. At only 18 years old, she started Fundación Pies Descalzos (Barefoot Foundation).

Inspired by her breakthrough album Pies Descalzos, the foundation focuses on helping vulnerable and displaced children in Colombia by building schools and providing quality education, nutrition, and psycho-social support. We’re so inspired by her early and overarching commitment to her community. Shakira serves as a powerful reminder of not only the power of music to entertain and bring people together on the dance floor, but music’s life-changing ability to build change and inspire systemic change.

I also had the honor of presenting at this year’s GatherVerse Women’s AI Summit. This summit was dedicated to women building the future of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. At DIVINA WORLD Foundation, we’re pioneering what AI can do for preserving cultural heritage by building the Indigenous & World Music Hall of Fame, Museum & Library.

I hope you’ll watch my whole presentation—”When the Last Wise Woman Speaks, Humanity Loses More Than a Language”—below, but let me leave you with a quote that holds the heart of my talk:

"Somewhere in the world,

in another room, the last true wise woman

is speaking right now.

The question is whether we are building technology

wise enough to hear her."

~ Carmen Milagro

"When the Last Wise Woman Speaks, Humanity Loses More Than a Language" examines what the world loses when ancestral and Indigenous languages disappear with their last fluent speakers. So often those final keepers are women. They hold the lullabies, the plant medicine, the prayers and the stories that shape a people's identity.

As AI becomes part of how we document and share culture we have a responsibility to design it with consent, community authority and deep respect for the knowledge holders themselves. This work sits at the heart of what we are building at DIVINA WORLD Foundation through our Virtual Reality Indigenous & World Music Hall of Fame, Museum & Library.

▶️ Watch my full presentation, starting from the 2:56:00 mark, and I hope you’ll consider making a gift to support our work in honor of the women protecting ancestral information in your life. Click on the image below to go directly to my presentation.