Code Work - Hacking Across the Us/mexico Techno-Borderlands

"éHctor Beltárn examines Mexican and Latinx coders' personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltárn shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions--at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in éMxico and the United States--during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences--to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural éMxico to Silicon Valley.Beltárn chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking--the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender--and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/éMxico border."

About the author

Héctor Beltrán is assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Product details

• Authors: Hector Beltran, Héctor Beltrán
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 14.11.2023
• EAN: 9780691245034
• ISBN: 978-0-691-24503-4
• No. of pages: 240
• Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > Social education, social work; USA, Mexico, COMPUTERS / General, SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Social Aspects, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Social discrimination & inequality, United States of America, USA, Social and cultural anthropology, Impact of science & technology on society, Impact of science and technology on society, Computing & Information Technology, Computing and Information Technology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies, Social discrimination and social justice