Research
As an anthropologist grounded in Latinx Studies with a background in Computer Science and Folklore, I combine interdisciplinary frameworks to ethnographically investigate politics of difference in relation to emerging forms of hacking, the information technology economy, "new" media, and open source movements.
Emerging and Contested Forms of Hacking and Tech Entrepreneurship Across the US/México Borderlands
My current book manuscript investigates emerging forms of hacking and tech entrepreneurship by moving between key physical sites in Mexico and the U.S. As an anthropologist with a computer science background, I unpack the specific ways people construct models for (and against) technology-driven capitalism as they project their livelihoods into the future.
At one level, my book makes a comparative analysis of how communities positioned on separate sides of the U.S./Mexico border make small re-inventions to established expert models that promote practices of hacking and entrepreneurship. On another level, I focus on the ways these two tech communities coalesce by participating in events aimed at empowering a Latina/o collective. Thus, I highlight the striking ways “hacker-entrepreneurs” navigate seemingly contradictory domains as they contest (and construct) new forms of racialization, racism, and capitalism across the complex techno-borderlands.
I wrote a short piece for Cultural Anthropology on border work and ethnography in Silicon Valley and a research article in American Anthropologist titled, "Code Work: Thinking with the System in México." In this article, I explore how young people position themselves in relation to promises of technology and progress during a time of political transition in Mexico. I show how hacker-entrepreneurs use fundamental coding principles to think alongside the institutions and systems responsible for reinstating unequal opportunities, iteration after iteration.
At one level, my book makes a comparative analysis of how communities positioned on separate sides of the U.S./Mexico border make small re-inventions to established expert models that promote practices of hacking and entrepreneurship. On another level, I focus on the ways these two tech communities coalesce by participating in events aimed at empowering a Latina/o collective. Thus, I highlight the striking ways “hacker-entrepreneurs” navigate seemingly contradictory domains as they contest (and construct) new forms of racialization, racism, and capitalism across the complex techno-borderlands.
I wrote a short piece for Cultural Anthropology on border work and ethnography in Silicon Valley and a research article in American Anthropologist titled, "Code Work: Thinking with the System in México." In this article, I explore how young people position themselves in relation to promises of technology and progress during a time of political transition in Mexico. I show how hacker-entrepreneurs use fundamental coding principles to think alongside the institutions and systems responsible for reinstating unequal opportunities, iteration after iteration.
Political Economy of Race and “Open Source” Media
My next project examines how the political economy of race intersects with the advancement of “open source” media projects that encourage young people to share, participate, collaborate, and innovate across all domains of life. By centering debates around intellectual property and piracy, these technological movements highlight concerns about how, where, when, and to whom a text can circulate.
Related discourse centers notions of creativity, expressivity, and circulation when debating the different aspects of the open source movement. In preliminary research with open source users and maintainers, I found people of color more frequently raise issues of authorship, citation, and appropriation. I thus aim to investigate the ways people of color differentially position themselves within these social/cultural movements. How are race, class, gender, or any other marker of difference constructed and performed in spaces where they are not supposed to matter? In this ethnographic project, I build on studies in the anthropology of media to highlight processes of racialization at the same time that I build dialogue with media theorists and historians who think about the “newness” of technologies and their corresponding social protocols.
Related discourse centers notions of creativity, expressivity, and circulation when debating the different aspects of the open source movement. In preliminary research with open source users and maintainers, I found people of color more frequently raise issues of authorship, citation, and appropriation. I thus aim to investigate the ways people of color differentially position themselves within these social/cultural movements. How are race, class, gender, or any other marker of difference constructed and performed in spaces where they are not supposed to matter? In this ethnographic project, I build on studies in the anthropology of media to highlight processes of racialization at the same time that I build dialogue with media theorists and historians who think about the “newness” of technologies and their corresponding social protocols.
Latinxs and Tech Initiative
My work at the Center for Latino Policy Research (CLPR) at U.C. Berkeley is grounded in the philosophy that theory and research should affect public policies in order to bring about real change. I founded the Latin@s and Tech Initiative at CLPR in order to coordinate encounters that bridge dialogue between scholars from local universities, community members (many already doing the groundwork), and representatives of the tech industry.
Silicon Valley is critiqued for its over-representation of White and Asian-American men and for its underlying structures that promote patriarchy, racialization, and exploitation. As the Silicon Valley increasingly becomes less of a place and more of a protocol for how to work and live, our academic inquiry has been guided by a desire to examine how related social/cultural forms and practices (hacking, responsible entrepreneurship, tech startup ecosystems) circulate and become re-assembled across boundaries of race, gender, class, and nation. How can classic and emerging social science methods and theoretical frameworks help us think critically about the complex processes that undergird the “Silicon Valley”?
With the help of a team of undergraduate researchers I wrote a policy brief, "Latina/os and Tech: Toward a Holistic Approach for Diversifying Silicon Valley." The report details our findings and recommendations and is available here; the brief was also presented at the Towards Inclusive Tech conference sponsored by the U.C. Berkeley School for Information.
Silicon Valley is critiqued for its over-representation of White and Asian-American men and for its underlying structures that promote patriarchy, racialization, and exploitation. As the Silicon Valley increasingly becomes less of a place and more of a protocol for how to work and live, our academic inquiry has been guided by a desire to examine how related social/cultural forms and practices (hacking, responsible entrepreneurship, tech startup ecosystems) circulate and become re-assembled across boundaries of race, gender, class, and nation. How can classic and emerging social science methods and theoretical frameworks help us think critically about the complex processes that undergird the “Silicon Valley”?
With the help of a team of undergraduate researchers I wrote a policy brief, "Latina/os and Tech: Toward a Holistic Approach for Diversifying Silicon Valley." The report details our findings and recommendations and is available here; the brief was also presented at the Towards Inclusive Tech conference sponsored by the U.C. Berkeley School for Information.
Racialization and New Media among New Migrants in the US
For my M.A. work in Foklore, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a community organization in Oakland where I taught a basic computing class to migrants who identified as indigenous Maya, mostly from Central America. I focused on the negotiations migrants make when they use digital or “new” media. As representations of the “hard-working migrant” circulate in popular media and subtly incorporate La Frontera Sur (the border between Mexico and Central America), there are high stakes for migrants who circulate their own representations and enter the politics of language, labor, and Latinidad. Thus, as these migrants decide which medium to use in relation to how these representations have circulated in other mediums, my research looked away from “the media” and instead focused on sites of mediatization, where the negotiations to mediatize objects are first made. At the same time, I focused on the way migrants who dwell in complex transnational worlds re-produce (and attempt to re-arrange) a hierarchical migrant Latinx indexical order vis-a-vis the political economy of migration and labor, circulating imaginaries of violence and criminality, and notions of “the state.”
My resulting M.A. thesis, "Echándole Ganas Across Borders: Narratives of La Frontera Sur from the Everyday into the Mainstream," connects scholarship in Latino/a Studies that focuses on an emerging Central American transnational imaginary to frameworks in the cultural anthropology of migration and linguistic anthropology that analyze racializing discourses and indexical order. A central argument in my thesis is that the multiple experiences of racialization that my research participants encountered as they crossed multiple borders provided them with the critical toolkit to deconstruct the institutionalized borders of "new" media; they used humor and irony to position themselves and other social actors along the participation and production maps at the core of "new" infrastructures of circulation.
My resulting M.A. thesis, "Echándole Ganas Across Borders: Narratives of La Frontera Sur from the Everyday into the Mainstream," connects scholarship in Latino/a Studies that focuses on an emerging Central American transnational imaginary to frameworks in the cultural anthropology of migration and linguistic anthropology that analyze racializing discourses and indexical order. A central argument in my thesis is that the multiple experiences of racialization that my research participants encountered as they crossed multiple borders provided them with the critical toolkit to deconstruct the institutionalized borders of "new" media; they used humor and irony to position themselves and other social actors along the participation and production maps at the core of "new" infrastructures of circulation.