Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

“No background check required!” boasts Airus Media’s brochure featuring a picture of a smiling virtual Latina information service worker, which the company refers to as an “Advanced Virtual Assistant (AVA).” These AVAs are life-sized holographic airport workers installed as wayfinding and informational kiosks that stand poised and at the ready to provide information to travelers passing by (figure 1). Airus Media, formerly AirportOne, is a multimedia marketing firm based in Plant City, Florida that specializes in developing AVAs and film projects for the airline industry.¹ Currently Airus Media reports having completed airport AVA installations at San Antonio International, Destin-Fort Walton, JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty International Airports. While most of Airus Media’s AVAs are represented as white or whitepassing women of European descent, the AVAs for the Long Beach and San Antonio airports— cities with significant Latinx populations and geographic proximity to the U.S./Mexico border— are culturally coded through phenotypic and linguistic signifiers to represent Latina identity. This suggests that Latina identity is being employed as a strategic design element in these border region airports, opening up questions about how Latina identity functions rhetorically in these AVAs and to what end.

Figure 1. Latina AVA installed at Long Beach airport, pictured in Airus Media’s brochure

The current information labor environment in the United States, heightened by the amped up xenophobia of the former Trump Administration, is characterized by cultural anxieties surrounding technology, immigration, and nationalism. These tensions are magnified in the U.S./Mexico border region. We argue that Latina AVAs can be placed at the center of these tensions where they provide a useful lens through which to explore connections between Latina information labor, past and present, via the design of a digitized workforce. Latina information service workers, though fundamental to technoscience, have been largely invisible in histories of computing. Digging into the past of information and technology history reveals that Latinas have always been part of and parcel of information work, though their labor has been largely rendered invisible through dominant computing histories. Latinas have often been relegated to the precarious and migrant work of the information labor sector, sectors that often depend on such invisibilities for viability. We define Latina information service workers as Latinas who work primarily in fields which include Telecommunications, customer service, blue collar fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). A turn in labor came with the ‘information age’ when, in the 1960s and 1970s, “Knowledge was supplanting capital and labor as the decisive factor of production.”² Latina information service workers can span across industries depending on their labor. Traditional forms of Latina labor are valued and represented in fields as migrant workers, domestic work, and retail industries. However with the commodification of information, Latinas are found in various sectors doing ‘Information work,’ working with various information technologies and often in the role of information service, such as telephone operators or customer service, and also limited in upward career mobility by their race, ethnicity, gender, and class.³

Latina virtual assistants mark an interesting shift in this labor history by relying on the strategic visibility of Latina identity in/as the technology interface and virtual service worker. This essay explores why and how these virtual assistants are designed as visible Latina information service workers, and what purposes these formations of visibility serve; particularly given the historic invisibility that has often cloaked Latinas’ labor in the global circuits of information labor. Donna Haraway famously argued that women of color’s bodies become part of the digital platform through their labor.⁴ Indeed, Latina virtual assistants prefigure the Latina body as the literal digital platform, raising questions about the interrelatedness of dominant cultural beliefs about the potentials of the Latina body as a technocultural labor resource.

To address these questions, we introduce the design rhetorics of virtual assistants as virtual workers, considering particularly how identity markers, such as race and gender, have served to amplify cultural ideas about technology, service work, and workers. Next, we explore Airus Media’s use of Latina identity in designing their AVAs by applying close reading techniques to their marketing materials and to the design of the AVAs themselves. Weaving this analysis together with threads of Latina information labor history, we find many continuities between the marketing of the Latina AVAs and the dominant cultural narratives about gender and race that have historically shaped Latinas as workers in information industries. Finally, we consider the question of visibility, and why Latina identity is foregrounded in the AVA technologies when Latina information service workers have historically been purposely obscured. We argue that Latina identity in the AVAs does political work as a cultural amplifier that recalls the archetype of Latinas as an ideal information worker. Wrapped in familiar discourses of Western capitalism and technoscience, the strategically visible digitized Latina information service worker functions as a socially acceptable avatar of the immigrant labor that continues to be foundational to the United States global economic position.

Introduction

Table of Contents