[Linganth] Héctor Beltrán on his book, Code Work

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Héctor Beltrán answers my questions about his book, *Code
Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands.*

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: 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.
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