Digital Formations of In/visible Latina Information Labor
Through these histories a suite of ‘ideal’ characteristics for the Latina information service worker emerges: she is fungible, available, attractive, submissive, low-cost for the employer, and situated within a legacy of intersecting colonial and patriarchal disciplinary structures. These characteristics consolidate a number of intersecting ideologies of race and gender that work to reinforce the archetype of the ideal Latina information service worker. As it turns out, Airus Media’s virtual assistants draw on these same hegemonic cultural narratives to imagine digitized Latina information service workers as ideal customer service interfaces. Given the threads of history that we have woven together in this essay, the strategic visibility of Latina virtual assistants should be understood as both a counterpart and continuity to the long history of invisible labor by Latina workers in information technology industries. The “ideal” characteristics of Latina information service workers that have historically been used to maintain gendered and raced divisions of information labor are not only re-deployed through Latina virtual assistants, but are doubly emphasized as the desirable attributes of information technologies themselves.
With the economic boom around digital technology and the reorganization of the global economy around information technologies, Latina information service workers are now ostensibly appearing for a very specific role in information technology: as visible and front facing information laborers in highly surveilled spaces. In short, Latina information service workers have been coded to mirror the legion of invisible Latina information service workers whose labor props up the global circuit of ICT production and services. The Latina AVA embodies this duality as the ideal information service worker, while retaining the necessary cultural identity markers to simultaneously signal ethnic insiders (to Latinx communities) and assimilated Latina (to white, Anglo communities). Technological determinism fuels the development of these virtual workers, relying on rhetorics of efficiency and cost-effectiveness to obscure the racist/nationalist hierarchies that continue to shape and protect labor status in the United States.
Latina virtual assistants reveal a clear paradox within the broader information labor market: the demand for cheap labor solutions without the conflict around immigration, citizenship, and wages. Yet, the information services industries can’t not have the Latina body associated with this type of labor. Not historically, as we have documented, and not now under late-stage capitalism. The visible Latina information service worker solves this problem by allowing technology companies to superficially respond to representational politics without actually hiring Latinas into white collar information jobs. In this way, the invisible Latina information service worker remains intact and fundamental to the global information economy. Meanwhile, the allusion to the undocumented Latina laborer is always tacitly present in these digital labor formations. Latina virtual assistants are designed to be the undocumented Latina’s avatar; the visible– sanctioned– formation of the ideal Latina information service worker. These labor formations, visible and invisible, remain co-present and inextricably linked in Latina AVAs.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Designing Virtual Assistants as Virtual Workers
- Latinas as labor problem and solution
- Gender-coding controllable workers
- Designing the ‘right kind’ of Latina
- Consumable Latinidad
- Digital Formations of In/visible Latina Information Labor
- References