Border Circuits (in progress)
Computing’s rise as an economic and technological juggernaut is often associated to the historical development of Silicon Valley, an industrial district made through innovative practices and bodies of knowledge. This project flips the script of industrial and technological innovation by examining how the racialized invisible labor of Mexican women became integral to the development of electronics manufacturing and the computing industry since 1965. Mexican women’s labor was made invisible—simultaneously describable and rationalized for factory operations, and yet unimaginable as significant or worthy of attention in the public imaginary. Through archival research and oral history interviews, the project draws together the experiences, practices, and ideas of multiple communities including Mexican workers, United States and Mexican factory administrators, and Mexican government officials.
The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology and Intrusion
(Forthcoming with Duke University Press)
My book project, The Cybernetic Border, analyzes how communication and control became operative ideas and techniques through which the borderlands is governed. The cybernetic border is an arrangement around data capture, management, and processing meant to produce order, especially controlling Latina/o/x migrants. At its core are drones, electronics and computers, which together enact relations on the U.S. frontier, to nation-making, and to racial politics. The book mobilizes media archaeology, discourse analysis, and oral history interviews as it examines a broad archive comprising corporate and government memoranda, military and technical reports, newspaper coverage, film, and surveillance footage. An analysis of the politics coded in technology shows that immigration policies are articulated via media infrastructures with deleterious impacts on migrant wellbeing.
Images sources
"Intrusion Detection Systems," I and N Reporter (1978)
"1693 Ryan Firebee target 1962-12-11," Ryan Aeronautical Negative Collection,
San Diego Air & Space Museum
Technoprecarious (2020, Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press)
Technoprecarious is a co-written book project by Precarity Lab (Cassius Adair, Iván Chaar López, Anna Watkins Fisher, Cindy Lin, Silvia Lindtner, Lisa Nakamura, Cengiz Salman, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, McKenzie Wark with Meryem Kamil).
