#unsettle: Border Thinking

An interview with Anthropologist Héctor Beltrán

This is the second post in our series #unsettle: Strategies for Decolonizing Tech Research. The series aims to unsettle existing research practices by centering Indigenous, Asian, and Black feminist perspectives and unpacking technology’s myriad relationships to the historical, unfinished, and everyday effects of empire. Check out the first post here.

Data & Society Events Production Assistant Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Communications Associate Natalie Kerby interview Anthropologist Héctor Beltrán about his strategies for decolonizing tech research. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: We want to hear a little bit about you and your background. Where are you coming from? What was your journey to MIT?

Héctor Beltrán: First of all, thank you for starting with that question. I feel like even that in itself is an intervention and signals to the kind of project you are developing. From the beginning, we should position our researchers so that it doesn’t appear as if their knowledge is coming from nowhere. In my particular case, it’s very important to why I am here at MIT, now as a Professor, and how I got here in the first place for undergrad.

I am from the East San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Where I grew up, it was all Mexican, Central American migrants. My parents are migrants from the North of Mexico, from Chihuahua and Durango. I grew up speaking Spanish until I went to school, where I was in a bilingual program until about the second or third grade, when I switched to classes all in English.

Many kids didn’t graduate from high school where I went. I was the first generation from my high school, along with my roommate, to get into MIT. We were recruited as students of color from this large public high school.

It was a culture shock, to say the least, when we arrived at MIT. But I also met a small community of people from lower income neighborhoods — first generation college students — that I thought I could connect with to get through college. I ended up studying computer science.

It was my first encounter with differences in access to knowledge and different forms of education.

Growing up we didn’t have a personal computer, we had a standalone word processor. We got one some time when I was in high school, but one of my early memories of using a computer was for some high school science project. My partner was one of the white kids in my magnet program. I went over to his house and he had a computer with internet, and it was like, wow, this is how this kid knows so much, he has all this information available. It was my first encounter with differences in access to knowledge and different forms of education.

I wish I could say I came to MIT because I really loved computers and computing, but that came slowly. Really, I came here because I wanted a good job, so I could potentially help my family out after graduating.

After graduation, I joined a technology consulting company where I worked for a large multinational corporation that starts with “W.” I wound up on a project in Mexico City, where I was building little reporting tools using Excel and Visual Basic — easy stuff, despite having been sold as an “MIT grad” who they could charge a lot of money for.

They ended up using me as a bicultural, bilingual mediator — I was translating between the Mexican workers and the U.S. consultants. This is where I started to really see that the change we were implementing wasn’t actually about technology or even efficiency, but more about cultural differences. This led me to want to go back to school and study anthropology.

I moved to Mexico, to a small city called Xalapa in Veracruz and took college courses there in anthropology, and then enrolled in a folklore program at UC Berkeley. With the encouragement of my mentor, Charles Briggs, I pursued a PhD in anthropology. I fell in love with the discipline’s ethnographic methodologies and frameworks for critical thinking.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: What about his mentorship style influenced you or inspired you?

Héctor Beltrán: Anyone that’s willing to sit down with you and treat you like an equal and work through problems, even if your project doesn’t exactly align with theirs, is a great mentor. My Ph.D. advisor, Charles Briggs, builds a lot on the work of Américo Paredes. One of Paredes’ classic texts is an article called “on ethnographic work among minority groups.” Briggs is trained in linguistic anthropology and one of the main points in his work is that when you work with people, especially people from minoritized backgrounds, you want to understand the stereotypes about them, but not necessarily believe them or help perpetuate them.

There has to be a level of trust with the people you’re working with, whether it’s your mentee or your research participants; a level of understanding; a level of working on the same project against racism, against colonialism; shared commitments. It’s not easy to reach across particular boundaries of class and race to work with students who are very different from yourself. There weren’t any latino professors, black professors. So if you’re a white professor at U.C. Berkeley, you have to mitigate commitment and fight for students of color to get into the program, which Briggs did.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: Thank you for sharing your trajectory and for situating yourself. I always say that the content is already within the container. Everything we need to unpack is already within us, in our personal experience.

Your story resonated with me personally as the son of migrant parents. I’ve always identified as a translator, but I like the idea of being a migrant “word processor.” Multilingual word processors in this country get tracked from an early age and it ends up determining their fate. This is where we can get into some of the structural elements, the ways in which certain communities get tracked along the lines of education. How would you address this idea of the word processor, being a migrant person?

Héctor Beltrán: Jonathan Rosa thinks about language ideologies in his book, “Looking Like a Language Sounding Like a Race.” In a recent presentation, he discussed the ironies of bilingualism and inter-Latino relations/ intra-Latinx distinctions, using language as an object of analysis. He quoted Toni Morrison saying, “the very serious function of racism is distraction.”

This idea of being tracked: In what? How are the same classisms and racisms recoded into each additional training? Language is perhaps the first training, but I also think about technology and how that functions as a distraction. You don’t speak English well enough. You don’t know technology well enough. You don’t know computing well enough. You don’t know how to navigate the computing stack well enough. It’s never enough.

You create a new domain of expertise, and with that, people who are not adept at navigating that domain. It’s a constant renewal and creation of “the other.”

It’s a constant renewal and creation of “the other.”

An idea I’ve been playing with is this idea of the computer as the stack, navigating the different layers of abstraction that make up the computer and thinking about it as a system — a social system, a political system. How the different layers of the structure or system create processes of inequality but might also give us the tools to think with or beyond these processes.

In creating these models and thinking through them, we can start to think outside the boxes we are put inside of, think of other possibilities. How do we use what’s already in the container, to reference your earlier point, by thinking about it as being made up of different layers?

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: Last night Ruha Benjamin was at Data & Society and she spoke about how in the academy, race is viewed as a social construct. Then, she pushed it a little further and said racism is a constructive technology. It’s efficient, it’s manipulated, it’s layered, it’s abstracted. It’s not only a social construct, but it actually constructs, and I think this goes into this idea you’re pulling out around the stack and what the structure is made out of.

Héctor Beltrán: Yeah, absolutely. Her work is foundational to my own thinking on race and technology. One of your questions is, what do you think of when you think about decolonizing tech research? And my first reaction is that even without the word “tech” in there, I still understand your project, “decolonizing research.” You’re signaling toward decentering a Euro-centric approach to research, you’re signaling toward the political economy of knowledge production.

And now let’s throw tech back in there, whether it’s surveillance, computing, whatever. Any of the tools we want to use for decolonizing research can also apply here. And then if we want to push it further and think critically with these tools, like the computing stack for instance, it’s a way to take the very tools of the object to decolonize the research.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: I’ve been thinking a lot about how we invoke the ancestors and indigeneity as practice, as research. I’m curious about your relationship to indigeneity and to indigenous forms of knowledge production. Especially around things like data sovereignty, but also within your own personal journey.

Héctor Beltrán: In any of these movements or tools we’re developing, people always get left out. One thing that stands out from folklore is precisely the project of modernity is always constructing an other. It’s always shifting, it’s always renewing — we need to think about the others we’re constructing, who we’re forgetting.

If I focus on the construction of Latinidad in tech spaces, who am I leaving behind? Across any marker of difference, whether it’s gendered, sexualized, raced, how can I push my research to connect with other movements and communities who are othered in the way this research is usually carried out?

Natalie Kerby: Alongside this construction, what do you feel like you are deconstructing in your research?

Héctor Beltrán: The other day a professor asked me when my article on hacking was going to come out because they wanted to share it with their students who think hacking isn’t happening in places like Mexico. Despite the very critical analysis we do, the one take away from that article for a student might be “Oh wow, people in Mexico aren’t all poor, they have computers and they program.” It didn’t even hit me that these assumptions still existed.

In this sense, we’re deconstructing stereotypes or myths about people outside of the U.S. or the Euro-American orbit, people in “developing countries.”

This border thinking and boundary work is difficult.

One thing I’ve struggled with in doing work on movements across the U.S. and Mexico, is the question, “well, are you doing the U.S. or are you doing Mexico?” This even comes from critical scholars who believe they’re thinking against the grain and across boundaries. This goes back to being trapped and the container — the nation state as a container.

In order to say what you want to say, you have to think about your trajectory as a scholar and what you have to prove and to whom. This border thinking and boundary work is difficult. You have to align yourself with an already constructed object of inquiry to prove yourself and then create a new way of thinking. It’s easy to get trapped into old school ways of thinking about research.

Going back to borderlands theory, you’re neither here nor there but also in both. It was written in the 80s and we think, we could just build new research from there. But once you move across the academic boundaries to other disciplines you still have to do the work to intervene, decolonize, and deconstruct.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: I want to show you an image we created to ground this project. It is a mythical creature designed by Building417 — the creative studio of Iranian artists Nooshin Rostami & Mani Nilchiani — for a symposium we did here at Data & Society called #unsettle: Decolonizing Technology Research.

I asked you about indigeneity because I’ve been in the process of reclaiming my own indio side, and part of that work has been about re-indigenizing the way I think about the world and knowledge production. I wanted to bring some relatives into the work from nature, from our own mythologies.

In mythology, the coyote is a shapeshifter or border crosser, a mediator of multiple worlds. The turtle is on top of the coyote, resting, as an inversion of the Turtle Island myth, which is the origin story of North America from an American Indian perspective, where the world sits on top of a turtle. And in this one, we imagined that the turtle is tired, and it’s up to border thinkers to carry it forward. People who are able to operate across multiple temporalities. And that’s why the moon is up there too. People who are able to live in these liminal zones as a way to move forward. This is a totem that I’ve been invoking to navigate the (veiled) mysticism of the technology space.

Héctor Beltrán: You know, my first reaction when you said the turtle is tired, was to think of women’s work, the work of care, the labor involved in creating social infrastructure, family infrastructure, which ultimately allows us to create the technical infrastructure and design work that we think about when we say technology, and which also leads to these “great male figures,” that circulate. This labor is often forgotten, the labor that allows them to even function in the world.

I also think about how tiring border thinking is — when you grow up bilingual, bicultural, bisexual, bi-anything. It goes back to having to prove yourself to both sides, but also the privilege that comes from being able to see both sides and put two different worlds into conversation.

When you get a taste for connecting two different ways of thinking or different domains of inquiry, it can be exhausting.

It’s about placing your own work and lifespan in a way that helps you understand how that could prepare the next generation.

One of the common things people talk about is as an activist, as a professor, as someone interested in social justice who comes from a different trajectory into these worlds of privilege, you’re often trying to do everything right. You want to be the best researcher, the best teacher, the best mentor. And the message is, hey, just kick back, you don’t have to do everything at once.

It’s best to think about your career in stages. In thinking about different stages and going back to indigeneity: I’m thinking across generations, this is something native people do very well. Thinking across lives, worlds, generations, and seeing yourself, seven years ahead, seven generations back, seven generations forward. It’s about placing your own work and lifespan in a way that helps you understand how that could prepare the next generation.

Natalie Kerby: I’d like to go back to the idea of expertise, and how you establish yours in a practical and abstract sense, and then how you understand the expertise of your subjects.

Héctor Beltrán: This reminds me of your earlier question about how I would describe my practice. That’s something we’re forced to do, to make ourselves legible to other academics or the rest of the world.

I was in these graduate school classes where I was othered and the ways students were performing their expertise was very foreign to me. I didn’t understand some of the dynamics and then when I enrolled in ethnic studies classes they were like my medicine because these professors were breaking everything apart — how the university is constructed, how expertise is constructed in the name of mainstream disciplines like sociology, anthropology, history. One of the decolonial thinkers would say, “don’t say the department of sociology, say ‘department of white male, heterosexual sociology,’ because that’s what the department is.”

Naming things for what they are is an intervention.

Naming things for what they are is an intervention. When I think about my own expertise, I usually say I’m a cultural anthropologist of computing and I always say grounded in Latino studies or grounded in ethnic studies. I think this signals towards my commitments, my position, and what kind of expertise I want to value.

The very act of research is political. In anthropology they have strict research protocols to protect research participants, so you’re not putting anyone in danger or stealing their knowledge. This is all important. But it’s funny that that’s where ethnic study starts. You’re already thinking about working with your research participants and building on a project or a movement together.

I work with relatively privileged research participants in the sense that some of them have access to computers, they’ve been trained how to code and how to do design work at universities.

The very act of research is political.

I recognize that it took a lot of training to be able to code and enter these computing worlds. Most of them don’t have the training in critical thinking and the same vocabulary I’ve been trained in now to think about decolonization or structures of racism, structures of capitalism. It’s very easy to criticize the tech worlds as techno-utopian, capitalistic spaces, but that doesn’t mean that my research participants don’t have the potential to develop the same language you’re using to think about how their work is problematic. Going back to this work across generations, or even in one lifespan, we can build on this slowly together. There’s a potential across these domains of expertise.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: I wrote down and circled my notes when you were talking about working for Walmart and how they sold your profile as an MIT graduate because I think it gets at this notion of coding as working class labor now, which you point to in several pieces, and also the way in which we have to shape-shift into avatars to participate in the digital world.

It makes me think about your observations at these hackathons of how people position themselves, what they highlight, what is transparent, what they obscure — how they position themselves to be competitive in this highly competitive world. You were also kind of using expertise as a tactic of obfuscation. You performed a certain level of expertise based on your background — being an MIT graduate — like this mystical expertise, while behind the curtain you were just using spreadsheets.

Héctor Beltrán: That’s exactly the appeal of software for a lot of people. How does it work behind the scenes? It can be empowering for those people that are very adept at thinking about how these layered components function and how different interfaces interact with each other. I mean, this is everyday life: You don’t present every version of yourself to different people. It can be very strategic or it can be unconscious and come from history, processes of racialization, how we think about silences, and how we read them. Software has this allure or calling…it seduces you in a sense.

Software has this allure or calling…it seduces you in a sense.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán: In closing, I want to ask you a very simple question: What are you excited about right now? What are you thinking? I know you have a book coming out, right?

I’m excited about conversations like this.

In my book I’m thinking about this movement across borders, specifically in my work between the U.S. and Mexico.

I’m excited about developing empirical tools, methodologies for how to do a transnational anthropology of computing. I’m also excited about our idea of being trapped and containers, whether that container is a nation state or a particular way of thinking or set of tools, and using border thinking to think critically about computing and technology.

Héctor Beltrán is a Postdoctoral Associate and incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He completed his PhD in Anthropology and MA in Folklore at UC Berkeley and holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Héctor’s current book manuscript, “Code Work: Hacking Across the U.S./Mexico Techno-Borderlands,” examines the political economy of knowledge work and manifestations of “hacking” between the U.S. and Mexico. Héctor draws on his computer science background as he develops theoretical frameworks that examine the technical aspects of computing along with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.

This series originates from an ongoing dialogue at Data & Society initiated by Director of Research Sareeta Amrute and Events Production Assistant Rigoberto Lara Guzmán. We acknowledge that “decolonization” as a word has become diluted with use and we run the risk of diminishing its rich and extensive history of struggle. We embrace this contradiction and use it to signal contemporary debate on the power and practice of sociotechnical inquiry. —Rigoberto Lara Guzmán

Thanks to Sareeta Amrute for providing vital guidance for the production of this blog post.