Biography

Héctor Beltrán is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his background in computer science to understand how the technical aspects of computing intersect with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation. He completed his PhD in Anthropology (2018) and MA in Folklore (2012) at UC Berkeley and holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT (2007). Before coming to MIT, he was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine. Beltrán’s current book manuscript, Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Borderlands, follows the lives of Mexican hackers as they navigate the political and economic unevenness of North America’s computer programming sector. The ethnographic research and writing for this project has been funded by the School for Advanced Research, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, UC-Mexus, and UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Beltrán is currently also working on an anthropological history of the intertwining development of computer science and hacking in modern México. At MIT, 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.

Research

My current book manuscript, Code Work: Hacking Across the U.S./México Borderlands, investigates emerging forms of hacking and tech entrepreneurship by moving between key physical sites in México and the US. This project aims to unpack the specific ways people immersed in code worlds construct models for (and against) technology-driven capitalism as they project their livelihoods into the future. At one level, I comparatively analyze how communities positioned on separate sides of the U.S./México border make small modifications to established expert models, promoting everyday practices of hacking and entrepreneurship. On another level, I focus on the ways these tech communities coalesce by participating in events aimed at empowering a transnational Latinx collective. I thus highlight the striking ways “hacker-entrepreneurs” navigate seemingly contradictory domains as they contest (and construct) new forms of racialization, racism, and capitalism across the techno-borderlands. 

I am currently collaborating with colleagues in México on a wide-ranging historical study of Mexican cultures of computing. Combining archival research and oral historiography, we highlight the developers and users behind early computing platforms as well as their roles and contributions to the field of computer science. We focus on how agendas and cultural practices have changed over the last 60 years, as university programs strive to keep curricula up-to-date with latest computing infrastructures, while also inculcating an unofficial hacking ethos among students. By re-focusing on the voices and bodies behind these cultures of computing, we aim to connect the history of machines with constructions of identity, class, gender, and nation.

Publications|Selected Publications

Teaching

21A.131J / 21H.270J
Latinx in the Age of Empire

Analyzes the histories and presence of the Latinx population in the context of US territorial expansion, foreign intervention and economic policy toward Latin America. Combines both historical and anthropological approaches to analyze local conditions that lead people to migrate within the broader forces of international political economy. Pays attention to the historical context in the home countries, especially as impacted by US policy. Explores Latinx community dynamics, politics of migrant labor, relational formations of race and transnational forms of belonging. Historically and ethnographically seeks to understand structures of criminalization, activist practices of resistance and the development of deportation regimes.

21A.504J / STS.086J / WGS.276J
Cultures of Computing

Examines computers anthropologically, as artifacts revealing the social orders and cultural practices that create them. Students read classic texts in computer science along with cultural analyses of computing history and contemporary configurations. Explores the history of automata, automation and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; robots, cyborgs, and artificial life; creation and commoditization of the personal computer; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; hackers and gamers; technobodies and virtual sociality. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender and other social differences shape labor practices, models of cognition, hacking culture, and social media.

21A.511
Hacking from the South

Using anthropological perspectives to propose critically reflexive modes of participation in existing socio-technical systems, students draw on ethnographic case studies to understand how practices and definitions of "hacking" are grounded in specific political and cultural contexts. With a focus on the Global South (Africa, Caribbean, Middle East, Asia and Southeast Asia, Oceania), examines the relationship between international development and technological empowerment by interrogating assumptions associated with particular locations and peoples, especially those constructed as peripheral to geographic centers of power.

Link to students' projects from Hacking from the South
 

Awards

[News]

Links

Interview with Data and Society Research Institute for #unsettle: Strategies for Decolonizing Tech Research post, December 9, 2019.

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