Code Work: Thinking with the System in México

Abstract

This article explores how young people position themselves in relation to promises of technology and progress during a time of political transition in Mexico. My fieldwork took place between 2013 and 2017, just before a newly formed leftist political party gained power after a century of rule by Mexico's "revolutionary" party. For self-identified "disenchanted" youth in Mexico, skeptical of the promises of social mobility by means of formal education, "hacking" emerged as a way to make sense of their futures in a precarious state and economy and as a way to let their "code work" intervene in narratives that had only delivered false hopes. Coworking spaces, hackathons, entrepreneurial initiatives, and neoliberal "reforms" were seldom differentiated by politicians. FIGURE 2. The first "hack" of the day.

Culturas de prototipado y prototipado de caretas durante la pandemia: comunicación y economización de la participación cívica en México

“…En segundo lugar, el prototipo -entendido no como modelo y objeto, sino como proceso de diseño y prueba-fue importante para generar confianza entre los makers y el personal de primera línea, quienes contribuyeron al proceso de prototipado al brindar retroalimentación (Suchman et al, 2002). Los espacios híbridos generados por makers -canales de Discord, talleres de manufactura, reu-niones por Zoom, entre otros-evocaron implícita y explícitamente la figura del hackathon, un evento que reproduce las prácticas de prototipado rápido del estudio de diseño con el fin de resolver un problema específico en un corto periodo de tiempo (Beltrán, 2020;Irani, 2015Irani, , 2019.…”

Introduction: Computing in/from the South

“…Here we encounter the answer to the question of who gets to participate in this emergent "hacker scene," accessing distinctions that are more than markers of differential technical competence ("chingón," "newbie," "hacker," etc.) and refracting social distances and class belonging (Beltrán, 2020). Despite the efforts for carving out a space for being together as women-identified Sareeta Amrute & Luis Felipe R. Murillo, 2020 technologists, the specter of Silicon Valley looms large in the backdrop of the ethnographic scene of the hackathon.…”

The First Latina Hackathon

“…| Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 2) Héctor Beltrán, 2020 This has become important in México, as government programs (and many times academic work) frequently frame technology experts as passive recipients or followers, perpetually dependent on foreign "cultures of innovation" (Medina et al, 2014). In short, the liberatory potential of the technologies, for advocates of these hackathons, rested on the premise that users could now become producers.…”

“…3 While most of the hackathon participants were indeed students, some who showed up were recent graduates who were technically unemployed. Their participation in this and other hackathons reflects an overall preference by young people in México to prefer to work within community or university-sponsored events before participating formally in government and formal politics (Ricuarte Quijano, 2018), as well as a growing inclination to hone their "code work" within these hackerspaces to think with/against social and political institutions (Beltrán, 2020). As anthropologists have shown, the question of how young women from the Global South spend their time, and whether it's leisure, pleasure, or "work," is a critical site to investigate constructions of gender, productivity, and social change (Amrute, 2016;Fleming, 2018;Krishnan, 2018).…”

“…Whether it was an attempt to evade the nini category, or a conscious effort at selfimprovement (whether it was related to the job market or not), the young women took the call to be productive within the hackathon very seriously. Many I spoke | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 2) Héctor Beltrán, 2020 to agreed that the second panel of speakers should be cancelled; they claimed that the presentations were effectively "wasting their time." Those who had been to other hackathons felt that since those other events did not have any additional presentations, it was unfair that the extra time commitments at the women's hackathon cut into their hacking time.…”