Before social media influencers existed, a Miami pioneer shared and connected

Long before the word “influencer” came to define some celebrities and attention-seeking college students who often have more followers on social media than common sense, there was Miami’s direct, friendly social conduit Maria de los Angeles Lemus Campino.

She was a journalist, a multimedia storyteller and social media producer, a web content manager and editor — all freelance for publications including the Miami Herald’s former Indulge magazine, Miami New Times, Newsweek and for the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District’s website, for which she interviewed pioneering Miami activist Thelma Gibson on the eve of her 95th birthday in December 2017 for a profile story.

De Los Angeles’ final role: a digital publisher and teacher of heart-centered living based in Cantabria, Spain, she described on her Heart-Centered Maria webpage she’d revised in September.

De Los Angeles brought connection in a pre-divided nation. She did so by tapping into the new resource known as social media as early as 2007, the year she joined Twitter, long before it morphed into X under billionaire Elon Musk’s leadership.

Followers take to social media

Hours and days after learning of de Los Angeles’ death from esophageal cancer in Spain on Nov. 21 just a couple of weeks after turning 58, her local friends and followers expressed gratitude and grief over the news on the pioneering platforms she helped make user-friendly. They expressed shock. Wasn’t she beating the damned disease? Her recent posts seemed so positive.

WARNING: Explicit language in some of these posts in reference to cancer

She shared an all-caps post to her Facebook page on Nov. 8: “A HARD EARNED BIRTHDAY.” She wrote on the post from Oviedo, Spain, with her usual candor and flair.

A daughter of Cuban refugees, she had left Miami, her native home, to live in her ancestral Spain after the 2024 election. She made no bones about her dislike of the second Trump administration. She made friends, instead.

And plans.

A birthday message of hope

“Four months ago, as I walked out of the doctor’s office with a confirmed cancer diagnosis, my first thought was if I would make it to my next birthday on November 9th.

“All kinds of scenes flashed through my mind. Sad scenes. Scary scenes. But then I noticed some beautiful pink blooms and a gourmet chocolate shop and I thought ‘f*ck it.’

“No, no, not today Satan. I am choosing this NOW over fear.

“I then brought a fancy chocolate bar that I’m saving for a some future milestone news in treatment. And I walked, walked for what seemed like hours along Santander’s gorgeous bay. Suddenly, everything sparkled.

“Getting to this birthday was hard-earned. And it was also a journey filled with gratitude.”

Just before, on Halloween, de Los Angeles celebrated Halloween in costume for an hour or so with members of her “chemo crew” at The Floridita Santander cocktail lounge.

“Make no bones about it, when you celebrate Halloween with your steadfast chemo crew, nothing outside the hospital is too scary,” she quipped.

Gratitude for vicequeenmaria

Sean O’ Hanlon, a Miami-based climate tech expert and former contractor at the U.S. Department of State, celebrated that side of this optimistic communicator on his Facebook post on Monday.

“I had completely forgotten how we met and became friends — via Twitter and Tweetups over 15 years ago. Then I realized just how influential Maria was. Not in the traditional mover & shaker or pop culture ‘influencer’ way but in a much deeper sense because she literally influenced all of us — and we never knew it until now. She was a catalyst for change and we are all better for having had her in our lives,” O’Hanlon posted.

“I firmly believe that Maria was an angel sent to connect us and brighten our lives in ways we couldn’t comprehend back then,” he wrote.

Her followers, in the thousands on Facebook, Instagram and X, a fraction of the millions modern influencers attract, still had a reach and impact, her friends wrote. They credit de Los Angeles, who attended Coral Gables High and graduated with a bachelor’s in English and film and master’s in English from the University of Miami between 1985 and 1995, with sparking interest in social media in South Florida.

When tweetups were a thing — public gatherings among Twitter’s earliest users to put a face to the tweet in the platform’s more civil infancy nearly 20 years ago — and when it seemed possible we could really all come together over the internet, de los Angeles showed us the possibilities.

“We met through Twitter back when the platform was still finding its rhythm; Maria was part of every tweetup, always showing up with her warmth and her creativity. She had a beautiful way of expressing herself; her writing was thoughtful and honest,” wrote her friend Jami Reyes, director of strategic partnerships at Americaribe.

“I will always remember her kindness, her talent, and her generous spirit. The world is a little dimmer without her, but those of us who knew her carry a bit of her light forward,” Reyes said.

De Los Angeles operated on Twitter under the nom de plume @vicequeenmaria, and she had other handles like the more recent @heartcenteredmaria on X and Instagram over the years.

Her final post

Her warm, confident and amusing voice and eye-catching graphics cut through the noise.

In her final post on Nov. 16, she’s an angel spreading her wings. She used the image to detail her realization that the night sweats soaking her sheets in Spain were from chemo and not a recurring trip through menopause again. She had largely ignored those “hot flashes” because eight years ago she was too busy tending to her ailing father as his caretaker. She had since lost both parents. The woman who taught others life lessons learned from them, too.

“For me, menopause was the most liberating event in my life, other than becoming sober. I was, at both times, reborn into an older and more grounded, centered version of myself.

“It’s been 8 years. I honestly feel younger now than I ever did. I carried too much baggage to fly. I had lead weights on my wings.”

Journalists from the Miami Herald attended some of those tweetups to meet other early adopters and to learn how to navigate the fledgling world of social media long before the youth-popularized TikTok and the polarizing rise of AI. The Herald’s then visual journalist, Lori Todd, who promoted the Herald’s first two social media events in the new millennium’s first decade, discovered @vicequeenmaria.

“We met back in 2009, when locals from the Miami social media community began to meetup in person. Maria challenged me to think deeply and reminded us all that life should be heart-felt,” Todd, now a multimedia journalism adjunct instructor at the University at Albany, SUNY, wrote on Facebook.

“I don’t often have regrets,” Todd continued, tagging de Los Angeles as so many did, “but having kept you at an arm’s distance instead of leaning in and getting to know you even more, is a regret that will inform how I live life moving forward. Thank you for that lesson.”

And so the earliest of social media influencers who taught others to harness the power of the post, Reel, TikTok and whatever we call a tweet on X, has inspired an array of posts after her passing. There are poems, photographs and memories, her friend Bob Pursell’s Facebook announcement of a celebration of life in her honor in Percellville, Virginia, on Dec. 6, and hopes for more meetups to honor de Los Angeles.

Honoring a friend