The First Latina Hackathon

Abstract

An event advertised as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America was held in México in 2015. Highly ephemeral but also highly visible, the hackathon functions as a critical site to examine how communities crystallize and evaporate, and how participants actively negotiate their hacker identities and practices across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and ethnicity. Popular discourse poses inclusivity within maker/hacker groups by proposing ways to get different or “diverse” participants to join events aimed at empowering their communities. I explore how members of marked groups are called upon to construct and manage these differences themselves within hacker spaces and “maker” formations. I first highlight how participants at the women’s hackathon aligned themselves with structures of expertise as they negotiated normative constructions of gender and femininity. Hackers continue these negotiations when they get caught up in Mexican nationalist pushes for productivity. In the final section, I unpack a surprise visit by abuelitas (grandmothers), who taught everyone a lesson on the invisibilized labor that supports communities of hackers. In a space usually reserved for young makers who understand “new” technologies, they claimed their space within “progress” and reasserted undervalued domestic work as foundational for other type of work. By weaving these three threads together ethnographically, I suggest the ways in which differences become important as Latina hackers differentially position themselves, but also align themselves, with the contradictions of treating code work as coded labor.

Memories and Motherhood in the Rhythms of Ugandan Computing

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Designing Postdigital Futures—The Case of Hackathons

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“…While craftwork in the American high‐tech imagination can be associated with sustainable DIY practices and other progressive elite agendas, it quickly loses that status when it is performed by working‐class women. At Heliópolis, these women might not have been immediately recognized as innovators, but they ended up becoming central to the functioning of the lab, making their practices constitutive of that space rather than residual, adjacent, or supportive (Beltrán 2020b). Moreover, there was nothing pastime‐y about their work.…”