Making Latinx Makers

• In Event: Ethnic Studies and STS: Connections, Interruptions, Innovations

Abstract

While communities from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border put in the "code work" to resolve issues that they have deemed important to their livelihoods, they also put in the cultural work necessary to construct their Latinx identity. Popular discourse thinks about racial diversity in maker/hacker spaces by proposing ways to get different or "diverse" participants to join events aimed at empowering these communities; here I explore how members of racialized groups are called upon to construct and manage these differences themselves within maker collectives. To explore constructions of global Latinidad within tech spaces I bring together scholarship on prototypes and participatory models with conceptual work on mobilizations of Latinidad.

Researchers working with hackathons as their field sites have shown that participants at these events are less concerned with what is being made -- because most of the time the projects are never really made at all -- and instead focus on developing the mindsets, hopes, futures, participation models and subject positions to occupy these futures. Across my research sites, Latinx makers take on the responsibility of "making" their own Latinidad; as they prototype their projects, they also prototype a new way of embodying these newly forming descriptors -- "participatory," "collaborative," "engaged," "concerned," and of course - "hackers" and "makers." Their "Latinx" maker status, as well as their Latinx "maker" status, calls for completion.

If prototypes are by definition incomplete, how does the construction of prototypes and participation models in maker spaces contribute to the "incompleteness" of racialized populations?

Author

• Hector Beltran, MIT