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It took courage and a splash of audacity for Argentine Congresswoman Laura Alonso to oppose the nationalization of Spanish oil giant Repsol’s stake in Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), her country’s largest energy company. Her remarks in the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) earlier this year earned her taunts even from fellow deputies from the ruling Peronist coalition of being “traitorous” and an “española” (Spaniard). Alonso gave as good as she got, calling officials in President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government who orchestrated the takeover mistaken, corrupt and contaminated. “You can’t just wave a national flag and evoke patriotism, while at the same time you’re signing corrupt deals contrary to the rights of the people behind their backs,” she said in interviews after the speech. Such outspokenness is typical of Alonso, 39, who has become well known as a crusader for government transparency, gender rights and social justice since she was elected in 2009 on the Propuesta Republicana (Republican Proposal—PRO) ticket to represent the capital of Buenos Aires. Promoting transparency has been Alonso’s top legislative priority. In 2010, she introduced the Ley de Transparencia, Gobierno Abierto y Acceso a La Información Pública (Transparency, Open Government and Access to Public Information Law), which would increase government transparency and accountability by putting in place a mechanism for citizens to access public information. The bill has not yet passed. (Argentina is one of the few countries in the Western Hemisphere without a freedom of access to information law.) In 2011, Alonso called attention to the fact that only 3 percent of national deputies had complied with rules requiring them to release financial statements for their offices and related campaign activities. Although she admits to being more liberal on many issues than her fellow deputies in her right-of-center party, Alonso is a fierce believer in the need to move beyond traditional Argentine notions of Left and Right toward a modern, blended platform designed to actually get things done. Alonso, who was born and raised in the city of Buenos Aires, says she always expected to seek public office, but the year she spent studying at the London School of Economics accelerated her decision. “A year away from Argentina really helped put things in perspective,” she recalls, “and I realized that people can push for change at any age if they are disciplined and determined.” After returning to Buenos Aires, she served as executive director of Poder Ciudadano, the Argentine chapter of Transparency International, where she developed her track record on transparency issues. Women’s empowerment is another priority. She recently proposed a bill to ensure parity in the salaries of male and female workers. “In modern-day Argentina,” says Alonso, “the idea that female workers are so grossly underpaid when compared to their male counterparts is a travesty.” The solution, she adds, is a comprehensive approach that includes not only legislative action, but also social programs that empower women to demand equal treatment in the workplace. Alonso’s work with the U.S.-based NGO Vital Voices, which is dedicated to identifying and empowering new generations of women leaders, strongly influenced her career. She continues to collaborate with Vital Voices, working with Argentine women to build their capacity as politicians, and with La Pietra Coalition, which seeks to empower women economically. She has also received international recognition. In 2008, she was awarded the Vital Voices Global Leadership Award for her work in combating corruption and promoting good governance. Traveling to Washington DC to accept the award, Alonso met U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—an experience she describes as “transformational.” She adds, admiringly, “Few world leaders have done more to advance the role of women in domestic and foreign policy than Secretary Clinton.” Will she follow Clinton’s example by making a run for national office in Argentina? Alonso is silent on the subject. For now, she’s concentrating on her re-election campaign in 2013. Back to top Business Innovator: Martha Debayle, Mexico BY NINA AGRAWAL When Mexican media personality Martha Debayle gave birth to her first child 16 years ago, like many new moms, she felt “clueless about what it meant to be a mother.” To make things worse, when she looked for information in the media about parenthood, all she found were clichés and patronizing language. Other parents might have given up and muddled through on their own; Debayle turned her frustration into a multimedia empire. BBMundo (“Baby World”), which she founded as a web startup in 2000, is now the destination of choice for 680,000 Mexican mothers and mothers-to-be eager to learn about reproductive and prenatal health and child-rearing. Debayle, now 44, had worked in Mexican radio and television since the age of 18. She was especially irritated by media stereotypes that assumed mothers only wanted to talk about diapers and strollers. “I thought there must be other women like me,” she recalls. In 1997, Debayle persuaded executives at Televisa, Mexico’s biggest media group, to air “bbtips,” a 20-minute morning television segment. Her hunch paid off: ratings of the program soared, and in three years viewership grew to 1 million. Debayle soon set her sights on the growing Internet phenomenon. She used her credit card to buy a web domain, and in September 2000 launched www.bbmundo.com with the slogan “Inspired by love, guided by knowledge.” Despite limited financing and limited traffic at first, Debayle turned down purchase offers from Televisa, Grupo Bursátil and Kimberly Clark-Mexico. “I knew that if I sold, I would lose control of the philosophy that I wanted the company to abide by,” she explains. Debayle’s quest for independence led her to formulate a unique business model. Instead of selling ads, Debayle offered companies like Nestlé and Gerber space on bbmundo.com through “micro-sites”—essentially, individual pages on the site where they could post information about pregnancy and parenting. To ensure editorial independence, BBMundo would check all content before it was posted, and would reserve the right not to publish material it judged unreliable, and to post competing views. Advertisers bought into it. Today, BBMundo has over 60 clients, including pharmaceutical giants like Sanofi, kid-friendly brands like Disney, and consumer and food product companies like Froot Loops. The brand has expanded to multiple media platforms: what originated as a TV segment and morphed into a website is now a print publication, radio talk show and iPad application. Revista BBMundo, a lavishly illustrated monthly magazine, has a monthly circulation of 40,000. “Martha Debayle en W,” a daily three-hour radio program, has 600,000 listeners. There’s also “bbcard,” through which users receive discounts on everything from diapers to doctor’s appointments. And the BBMundo database itself—with precise information on users’ sex, age and number of children—is an asset; outside companies are increasingly contracting BBMundo to conduct market research and develop communication strategies. Today, 94 percent of BBMundo.com’s users are women between the ages of 18 and 44. The vast majority (85 percent) live in Mexico (most in Mexico City), though the website also reaches users in the U.S., Spain and the rest of Latin America. Registration is free, and readers can access tools such as a fertility calendar and a height-and-weight calculator for babies at different stages of development, as well as in-depth articles with pregnancy and parenting tips, from the right way to breastfeed to navigating a son’s adolescence. Users can also participate in online forums with health professionals and with one another. That’s a long way from diapers and strollers. Back to top Arts Innovator: Aurora Guerrero, U.S./Mexico BY NINA AGRAWAL "Write what you know.” It’s an age-old dictum for aspiring writers—and it applies to filmmakers, too. Aurora Guerrero, a self-defined queer Chicana, followed that rule to create Mosquita y Mari, a coming-of-age film about a friendship between two Chicana teenagers that deepens into a romance. The film, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, is also a celebration of identity—cultural as well as sexual. Mosquita y Mari’s protagonists are Yolanda (Mosquita—“little fly”), a straight-A student under the careful watch of her parents; and Mari, the oldest child of an undocumented family struggling to make ends meet. The story is set in Los Angeles’ Huntington Park neighborhood, but it draws deeply on Guerrero’s upbringing in northern California as a child of Mexican immigrants and a middle-school friendship she describes as “more than just a friendship—it was also my first love.” The importance of cultural identity was instilled in her from an early age. Guerrero, now 40, remembers how her mother would march into school and instruct the teachers to pronounce her brothers’ names José and Alejandro instead of Joseph and Alex. Mosquita y Mari is political as well as personal. Guerrero, who received a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1999, wanted to give voice to LGBT, Chicano and undocumented immigrant communities, which “are very marginalized and very much silenced by mainstream media,” she says. A love story would dispel the notion that same-sex relationships are unnatural. “I wanted people who don’t identify as queer [to] watch and all of a sudden find themselves reminiscing about their young loves,” says Guerrero. “And [it would be] these two girls who are evoking those feelings [. . .] not so much different than what they experienced.” Guerrero also hoped that LGBT Latino audiences would see themselves validated by the film—much as Guerrero herself felt when, as an undergraduate student, she encountered the work of feminist Chicana writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. “[Their work] broke down all these stereotypes of what I thought it meant to be queer,” she recalls. “I, in turn, wanted to put out films showing characters [whose] identities are intersecting in very real, authentic ways.” Guerrero’s strong community roots and sense of ethnic identity have been crucial to her development as a filmmaker. After graduating from CalArts, she formed the filmmaking collective Womyn Image-Makers with three other queer Chicana artist-activists. Together, they made the widely successful Pura Lengua and Viernes Girl. When it came time to raise money for Mosquita y Mari in 2011, Guerrero again turned to her community—this time via Kickstarter, a popular crowd-funding platform. During a 30-day campaign, she and her team raised $82,000, the entire production budget for the film. Mosquita y Mari is currently on the film festival circuit, taking Guerrero home to San Francisco and as far away as Japan and Switzerland. It airs in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles in August 2012, and will be broadcast on cable and online at the end of this year. Guerrero is already developing ideas for new projects, including another independent film and a TV pilot. She says she will continue to explore themes of immigration, class and Latino identity generally, but “always [with] a queer algo” to reflect the LGBT voice. Back to top Civic Innovator: Public Lab for Open Technology and Science, Regional BY RICHARD ANDRÉ The advent of Google Maps, Google Earth and other easily accessible satellite imaging technology would seem to have made most forms of personal, small-scale cartography obsolete. But outside high-density population centers, many of the images these services provide are often out of date or nonexistent. This is especially a problem in Latin America, where unmapped informal communities spread out from the edges of cites for miles—making it difficult for residents to receive land titles and, by extension, adequate public services. The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS)—an open-source, grassroots data-gathering and research initiative—is now putting these communities on the map. Founded in 2010, PLOTS grew out of Grassroots Mapping, a project developed by Jeffrey Warren, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Warren was invited by Peruvian NGOs Escuelab and Shuawa Arts Organization to Cantagallo, an informal shantytown built over a landfill in Lima. The community was inhabited by 100 Shipibo Indigenous families who had been unable to win title to the land due to lack of evidence supporting their claims of residency. With Warren’s instruction, Cantagallo’s residents attached a camera with continuous-mode shooting to a helium balloon to take the first clear overhead photos of the entire settlement and delineate its borders. Though Cantagallo did not receive the title, Warren’s successful mapping led him to undertake similar projects in other informal communities in Lima, and a different group used his balloon-mapping prototype for environmental monitoring of the Gulf Coast following the BP oil spill in April 2010. The project delivered some of the only images available of the damage at the time. As the Grassroots Mapping community took shape, seven individuals who had used the technology joined with Warren to found PLOTS. Today, Public Lab, as it is called by members, has regional chapters in seven U.S. cities, and a digital network of over 200 social scientists, engineers, biologists, cartographers, activists, and community developers across the globe. Together, they develop technologies that can be used by communities to identify and address environmental issues like air pollution or water contamination—what the Lab calls “civic science.” In 2011, PLOTS received a three-year, $500-million grant from the Knight Foundation News Challenge, which funds innovative uses of technology. The information PLOTS produces is accessible to lay persons as well as experts. According to Liz Barry, co-founder and director of the Lab’s urban environment unit, the community’s signature tools—balloon and kite mapping, near-infrared and thermal photography, spectrometers, and indoor air quality mapping—are all inexpensive and easy to replicate. “The idea is to share what you do and how you do it with your community,” says Barry. The hardware, software and data PLOTS generates are produced under a number of open-source licenses and anyone can add or edit content on the PLOTS website. The groups that use Lab tools cover a broad spectrum of interests. In 2011, PLOTS partnered with Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente to live-stream the student protests in Chile using an iPhone; it also worked with activists in New York to monitor Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal using near-infrared cameras that revealed plumes of pollution inflow not included in the Environmental Protection Agency report when it granted the Gowanus Canal “Superfund” status in May 2010.