Héctor Beltrán

Héctor Beltrán received his M.A. in Folklore in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology in 2018 from the UC Berkeley. He connects his graduate work to his computer science background, having received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from M.I.T. For his M.A. thesis, Héctor conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a community organization in Oakland where he taught a basic computing class to migrants who identify as indigenous Maya, mostly from Central America. He focused on the negotiations migrants make when they use digital or “new” media. As representations of the “hard-working migrant” circulate in popular media and subtly incorporate La Frontera Sur (the border between Mexico and Central America), there are high stakes for migrants who circulate their own representations and enter the politics of labor and Latinidad. Thus, Héctor’s work highlighted the ways in which migrants who dwell in complex transnational worlds re-produce (and attempt to re-arrange) a hierarchical migrant Latinx indexical order vis-a-vis the political economy of migration and labor, circulating imaginaries of violence and criminality, and notions of “the state.” A central argument in his thesis is that the multiple experiences of racialization that research participants encountered as they crossed multiple borders provided them with the critical toolkit to deconstruct the institutionalized borders of new media; they use humor and irony to position themselves and other social actors along the participation and production maps at the core of new infrastructures of circulation.