“Disruptive Domésticas: Immigrant Latina Workers in the Shadow of the Disruptive Imaginary”

Maga’s dissertation traces shifts in the technological and digital media landscape and their impact on immigrant Latina nannies, cleaners and care workers in the domestic work industry. Her dissertation asks: What is the nature of the technologies affecting the work and lives of domestic workers? How do these technologies function, and what ideological or cultural work do they do? What new opportunities and challenges do these innovations create for domestic workers to bring about social change: with regards to things like pay and working conditions, connection, social movement organizing? What does this subaltern viewpoint help us understand about the past, present and future of work? Using a framework of disruption, their dissertation situates technological disruptions in the care work industry at the nexus of 1) the proliferation of disruptive technologies such as marketplace platforms, social networks and tools in the digital humanities 2) the globalization and commodification of care and other intimate labors and 3) a rising, global social movement of domestic workers. Maga’s research attends to the ways that networks and information technologies enable the commodification of care labor in transnational circuits, as well as how they encode racial and gendered difference in ways that (re)produce notions of value and valuelessness. 

Her research additionally subverts the commonsense notion of disruption beyond Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, engineers and other so-called disruptors, illuminating the practices engaged in by subjects who are marginalized or excluded by processes of neoliberal technocapitalism. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 15 Latina immigrant care workers, Maga’s research takes up a notion of feminist disruption that sheds light on the intimate, small scale and interstitial maneuvers or movidas that workers engage with at work, at home and in organizing spaces. Situated in feminist and workerist traditions of activist research and knowledge production, she engages Latina immigrant care workers as collaborators and co-producers of knowledge. The result is a project that brings forth their counterimaginaries of technological futures and presents an image of immigrant Latinas as technological beings with a right to determine the future of work.