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Cybersecurity Research
  1. Designing the ‘right kind’ of Latina

Designing the ‘right kind’ of Latina

Latinx people in the United States occupy a complicated racial status. Latina racial formations “derive simultaneously from domestic racial projects- where ‘domestic’ refers to both the homeland and the host land- and the racialized geopolitics of US-Latin America relations.”55 Mexicans in particular had been conscripted in the ‘white’ category of race post-MexicanAmerican War, however were still subject to racialized forms of inequity through school segregation, employment and housing discrimination, and violence.56 While light-skinned and white-passing Latinxs have been valued for their potential to assimilate into American citizenship, nonwhite Latinxs have been hailed by the state as noncitizens and outsider threats to national identity. It is important to note that all Latinxs may be targets of xenophobia based on phenotype, culture, and English as a second language or speaking Spanish in U.S. public spaces.

In her study of commercial and media marketing to Latinxs in the U.S., Arlene Dávila names ‘the Latin look’ as the commonly cast Latinx in commercials and movies. She describes this “acceptable” Latina as having olive skin or otherwise having light-toned skin, with straight hair, and a light accent that indicates she can speak Spanish, but does not have a heavy accent when speaking English.57 This specific Latina identity formation gains its acceptability by serving as a model of assimilation (and citizenship) predicated on proximity to whiteness. This archetype does rhetorical work to ‘hail’ the Latinx consumer as well as non-Latinx U.S. citizens.

We see this Latin look echoed in both the Latina AVAs as well as throughout histories of Latina information work. In the manufacturing realm, maquila job advertisements “featured Anglo women, typically with flowing blonde hair, in high fashion poses to suggest the glamour, beauty and potential liberation of industrial labor at a transnational corporation.”58 In many ways this advertising recalls Mar Hicks’s research on the glamorous “girl operators” portrayed as smiling blond women in mini-dresses, that the British company Systemation employed in their 1970s computer advertisements.59 Whereas the Systemation advertisements were meant to sell computers to businesses, the maquila job advertisements aimed at young women leveraged colonial constructions of whiteness and European beauty standards as a promise for status mobility and lucrative employment potentials in industrial border factories. Though these advertisements were directed at different audiences, both convey the ways that racialized gender expectations are fundamentally woven into formations of information labor.

Racialized expectations and ideologies are also communicated in the Latina AVAs by way of the programmed language options. Among the customizations listed for AVA, “multilingual options” are highlighted, and elsewhere in the promotional material on Airus Media’s website, the Latina AVAs in San Antonio and Long Beach are described as bilingual, speaking English and Spanish. English is the default language programmed into all of the AVAs, with Spanish language (and the potential for others) positioned as an ethnic add-on, to an otherwise assimilated (white) interface. Halcyon Lawrence has noted how imperialism shapes voice technology design by “naturalizing” the Anglo American or European English accent, “These devices are based on ‘natural language processing’…they’re expecting that you’re going to speak ‘naturally.’”60 Technology design naturalizes the hegemony of language through the presentation of what is available. For AVAs it is English first, Spanish second, reinforcing these ideologies through code. AVAs default programming suggests that Spanish is seen as valuable only as a secondary skill, and perhaps also only in regions demarcated by their proximity to the geographic borderlands.

Beyond the interface, language plays an important role in shaping what kinds of information work Latinas could be considered for. For instance, Latinas have historically been strategically barred from upward mobility in technology based fields, often relegated to the monotonous and physically straining work of telephone operators, manual data entry, information customer service, and other blue collar information labor.61 Telecommunications positioned Latina information service workers for their potential for whiteness by using the telephone as a mediator for socially unaccepted forms of Latinidad- phenotype could be masked through the telephone. Those Latinas without accents could be positioned in the frontlines of customer service, while those with accents could work data entry and more manual labor jobs. This mirrors Jan Padios’s concept of “Filipino/American relatability” which describes the relational demands of Filipino call center workers to “identify and communicate with U.S.-based customers and therefore America as a material location and imaginary space.” 62 Padios’s research describes how affective notions of relatability, which are defined through the legacy of colonial architectures, become transformed into a kind of social and cultural capital within the call center industry.63 Similarly, Latina information service workers were operating within colonial architectures of race and gender that defined “relatability” through whiteness. Telephony utilized Latinidad’s racial spectrum and the flexibility of whiteness to maintain a segmented workforce that would strategically employ Latinas while preventing them from being fully incorporated (or promoted) into the higher tiers of the information technology industry.64

While Spanish-speaking Latina AVAs might be useful in other multicultural markets with Spanish speaking populations, the strategic deployment of these virtual assistants in the U.S./Mexico border regions speak to the continued “Latinx threat” present in the borderland state.65 This design choice demonstrates how Spanish, often viewed as a national threat to citizenship identity and assimilation in the United States, can be co-opted as a programming function that tampers that threat into acceptable geographical contexts.

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