Texas Border Business
By Veronica Salinas
South Texas College Center for Mexican American Studies has named Héctor Beltrán Ph.D., author of Code Work: Hacking Across the US-Mexico Techno-Borderlands, the winner of the 2023 Américo Paredes Book Award.
Américo Paredes, a Brownsville native is regarded as one of the foremost Mexican American scholars of the 20th century and was a leading scholar in folklore. Paredes contributed significantly to the formation of various intellectual trends and in particular to the scholarship on “native” folklorists and anthropologists.
South Texas College History Instructor Trinidad Gonzales said the award was established not only to honor the enduring legacy of Américo Paredes, a pioneering figure in Latino literature and cultural studies, but also to celebrate and recognize the important contributions of Latino scholars in academia.
“The book award was created to honor him and to celebrate Latino scholarship,” Gonzales said.
Beltrán’s book was nominated by various academic presses around the country and has won multiple awards including: Winner of the Labor Tech Book Award, Winner of the Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists Book Award, Honorable Mention for the Arthur J. Rubel Book Prize and now, the Américo Paredes Book Award.
The book is part of the Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology series at Princeton University. The goal of the series is to showcase the best work in the field of anthropological inquiry and demonstrate the relevance of anthropology to emerging forms of digital culture.
Beltrán is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latin American Migrations.”
In this book, Beltrán examines the political economy of knowledge, work and manifestations of hacking between the US and Mexico.
He draws on his computer science background as he develops theoretical frameworks that examine the technical aspects of computing along with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender and nation.
“It’s an absolute honor to receive an award recognizing Américo Paredes’ legacy,” said Beltrán. “His methodological frameworks for approaching ethnographic work in the US-México border have served as an inspiration ever since I was introduced to his work in graduate school. I can only hope Code Work continues his vision for border thinking as an epistemological intervention but also as a way of life.”
Gonzales said this award represents the first time a college or institution has formally recognized interdisciplinary scholarship focused on Latino studies.
“The reason we do this is so the community and students we serve can be familiar with the scholarship that is presently being created related to their experiences,” Gonzales said.
