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 connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.

Héctor Beltrán is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches classes on subjects such as the cultural dimensions of computing; practices of hacking from the Global South; and Latinx and Latin American identities, politics, and social movements. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his interdisciplinary background to study how the technical aspects of computing inform and are shaped by social structures and lived experiences of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation. He received his PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Graduate Student Researcher for the Latinxs and Tech Initiative of the Latinx Research Center.