Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Code Work: Hacking Across the Us/México Techno-Borderlands

Code Work: Hacking Across the Us/México Techno-Borderlands

Beltrán, Héctor

Paperback

Series: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology, Book 33

Technology & EngineeringAnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0691245045
ISBN13: 9780691245041
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Nov 14 2023
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.90 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

How Mexican and Latinx hackers apply concepts from coding to their lived experiences

In Code Work, Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders' personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán 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 México 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 México to Silicon Valley.

Beltrán 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/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that innovative culture is seen as central in curing México's social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán's highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Beltrán, Héctor

View All

Also in

Anthropology

View All