Latinx culture is often seen as overlooked and neglected when it comes to celebrating it across mainstream media.
Hence why actor, activist, and entrepreneur Jesse Williams’ Visibility Media company has launched a new gaming app as its latest rollout honoring cultures across the diaspora.
After successfully launching BLeBRiTY — an award-winning Afrocentric trivia gaming app — Williams and his colleagues — conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and former Apple, Nike and NBA Latin America exec Arturo Nuñez — felt their newest app, “Ya Tú Sabes,” was the next step in bringing forth another revolutionary app that’s now uniting Latinx and American culture.
“Our vision is simply to develop and produce content to media that’s inclusive and actually representative of cultures that we value and see ourselves in,” Williams told AfroTech. “We wanted to make sure that we’re always building products that celebrate and center us first, and include as many people as we can in the process.”
Ya Tú Sabes — a trivia-inspired exploration of popular Latinx culture — features a diverse range of categories and regional themes that conceptualizes the authenticity and richness of Latinx culture today.
The new gaming app is designed to be a “culturally-connected, creatively-fused, trivia game for Latinx individuals, allies, culture seekers and Spanish speakers around the world.” The interactive platform challenges users to test their knowledge and also encourage friends and family to use the app as a way to come together for wholesome entertainment.
According to Williams, the newly-launched app is a means to both extend BLeBRiTY’s best practices and directly tap the expertise of our Latin brothers and sisters who helped develop the new gaming platform. In doing so, the app also works to showcase the best parts of their culture for everyone to experience.
While Williams takes lead in the creative elements of Visibility Media, for the app the company enlisted the help of Latinx-identified team members who spanned across several different key roles that include the writers’ room, creating graphics, and ultimately occupying ownership positions.
The company aims to be a model for how other media enterprises operate and also demonstrate ways in which they guarantee original content to their users ultimately contributing to the culture.
“We’re not outsiders dropping something into another community,” Williams said. “We want to be the example that you can grow and expand beyond your perspective as long as you have an authentic voice in the room and you’re doing it with the people that you claim that it’s for.”
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The launch of Ya Tú Sabes is a testament of how successful a platform can be when there are Black and brown professionals at the forefront creating the change we want to see. The app is also an example of how in-demand apps of this magnitude are right now, especially after the social reckoning we’ve experienced as a nation over the last year.
As stated by Williams, these apps “can be creative, daring, and edgy without being destructive or playing into the pathology of dysfunction that has very little to do with us as organic cultures.”
Diverse cultures deserve to be celebrated and memorialized in our society, which is what Ya Tú Sabes is aiming to accomplish with support from the communities that it’s catering to.
“It’s going to do really well because there’s a huge appetite for expressing your own culture,” Williams shared with AfroTech. “We spend so much time as Black and brown folks kind of fitting ourselves into white culture and seeing ourselves through their characters, storylines, and lens, it’s just nice to feel included.”
The hope for Ya Tú Sabes and Visibility Media as a whole is to continue being pillars that spark the creation of more apps and platforms uplifting Black and brown communities through genuine interactions.
“We want to be an example that you can form and shape real community, consumer products, and experience directly from your authentic self without having to filter it through anything else. Our mission is to be collectively creating things that are meaningful, helpful, fun, and worthy of celebration for the public, but in doing so in such a way that empowers those that are in our employ.”
Ya Tú Sabes is available to download in iOS and Android app stores now. For more updates on the app, click here.
