Our one-day symposium Digitizing Race: Making Latinxs in the 21st Century explored how Latinx people navigate the digital realm and the issues at play when they are turned into data, as well as what could be learned about contemporary racism by examining these processes.
As we continue our discussion, we’ve invited activists, content creators, and scholars to discuss key issues at stake at the intersection of social media and Latinx identity, including how identity is constructed, performed and examined on social media platforms; the ways digital technology is used to tell new stories through cultural production and archiving; as well as the role that technology companies play in the surveillance and oppression of Latinx people.
Speakers
Ashley Crooks-Allen (They/Them) is a Sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, where they focus on Black immigrant identity and social movements. Their dissertation is titled, “Mestizaje Undone: A Qualitative Social Media Analysis of Afro-Latinx Identity & Social Movements.” This work takes a qualitative approach to understanding how Afro-Latinx people use social media to make identity claims in relation to the Black Lives Matter Movement. Their master's research, also at the University of Georgia, focused on Afro-Caribbean Identity & Experiences with the Black Lives Matter Movement in Georgia. They also completed a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. They graduated from Emory University with a major in creative writing and a minor in sociology. While at Emory, they were a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. They are from Irvington, NJ and are of Afro-Costa Rican descent. What happens when Afro-Latinx people enter the U.S. context with completely different notions of race? Their interest in Black migratory identity formation came from living the effects of their parents migrating to the U.S. and settling into Black prescribed spaces. In conjunction with academia, they also devote time to spoken word poetry and activism.
Eduard Arriaga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies at University of Indianapolis. He holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies and Migration Studies from Western University (Canada). His teaching and research revolve around issues of race/ethnicity and digital production, digital humanities and knowledge production, and Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American cultural production. He is the author of several books and articles. His most recent book is Afro-Latinx Digital Connection (University Press of Florida 2021), a co-edited volume published with Andrés Villar.
Jacinta González is a senior campaign organizer at Mijente and an expert in organizing against Big Tech companies’ involvement in immigration enforcement and criminalization of Latinx and immigrant communities.
Marcel Rosa-Salas is a visiting scholar and The Latinx Project’s Media and Cultural Politics Fellow. A cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn, NY. Her research centers on the racial politics of American advertising and consumer culture. Her forthcoming book, under contract with Duke University Press, explores the business of racially targeted marketing in the U.S, and the role of racial theories in the creation of ad campaigns. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Wenner Gren Foundation. Marcel co-hosts the Top Rank Podcast with Isabel Flower, and together they are also co-editors of the forthcoming book Documenting the Nameplate, a deep-dive into the cultural phenomenon of nameplate jewelry, which will be published with Penguin Random House in Fall 2022.
Gabriella Torres & Ali Rosa-Salas are co-editors of Nuyorican Mag, a digital storytelling platform founded by Torres in 2018 and joined by Rosa-Salas in 2020. Grounded in research from institutional and personal collections, Nuyorican Mag shares rarely-seen archival photos and videos that amplify the social, political, and cultural innovations by New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent.
Event Recap
On December 8th, The Latinx Project invited scholars to discuss the ways in which social media, technology, and digital infrastructures have to come to be important sites for scholars to understand new horizons in archive building, community organizing and solidarity building, and the creation of new and diverse identities that combat the erasure and homogenization within the Latinx community. Moderated by Media and Cultural Politics Fellow Marcel Rosa-Salas, the discussion traced a number of key considerations in examining new modes of Latinx identity production and the contestation of processes of digital abstraction and reduction. Additionally, this conversation highlighted the need to adapt to the constantly evolving digital modes that are and have been forming, including the reclamation of data from Data brokers. We thank Ashley Crooks-Allen, Professor Eduard Arriaga, Jacinta González, Gabriella Torres, and Ali Rosa-Salas for their robust contributions to the field, as well as for coming together to share their important thoughts on the intersections of digital technology, race, archival work, and the production of counter spaces that afford novel forms of resistance and movement.