ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION:

Disruptive Domésticas: Immigrant Latina Workers, Data-driven Discipline and Information Activism

Disruptive Domésticas: Immigrant Latina Domestic Workers, Data-driven Discipline, and Information Activism examines the complex realities of immigrant Latina domestic workers in the hyperconnected world, exploring how racialized and gendered workers navigate, resist, and reshape neoliberal care labor structures. Central to this work is an exploration of the politics of care, the essential yet often excluded and invisible social reproduction activities such as childcare, eldercare, and household management which is disproportionately performed in the United States by immigrant women of color from Latin America.  This study is grounded in a critical investigation of how neoliberalism commodifies care work. The dissertation critically examines Silicon Valley's narrative of “disruption,” contrasting its celebration of innovation with the lived realities of marginalized workers. For instance, new technologies compatible with neoliberalism that prioritize efficiency and control, like platforms, often reduce these workers to data points for optimization, and perpetuate historical legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism in the process. Technologies of surveillance, particularly in platforms like Care.com, reintroduce historical norms of control, further encoding intimate spaces like homes into sites of gendered and racialized discipline.

***

However, this dissertation is also concerned with the ways that immigrant Latinas subvert and repurpose such technologies, transforming their digital engagement into forms of agency, solidarity, and resistance. Harness Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), these women engage in what I term “Latina information activism,” sharing vital knowledge, coordinating, and challenging exploitative practices. Employing acompañamiento ethnography, this study incorporates fifteen in-depth interviews with domestic workers and media analysis to highlight how immigrant Latina workers creatively engage with digital platforms, both to circumvent isolation and to build counterpublics of solidarity. These workers use ICTs to reclaim visibility and dignity, building networks that connect them across isolated labor environments. This dissertation intervenes in labor and technology studies by focusing on care work and precarious labor, underscoring the specificity of platform-mediated intimate labor and how it reinforces historical labor divisions. It broadens the scope of labor resistance, recognizing the informal organizing of domestic workers who, excluded from traditional labor protections, engage in everyday forms of digital activism. Ultimately, Disruptive Domésticas reveals the transformative potential of ICTs when wielded by those at the peripheries of network culture, proposing a vision of disruption that reimagines labor activism in the digital age. The stories of these workers, disruptive domésticas, underscores the possibilities of a more inclusive, equitable networked world, where technology is not only a mechanism of control but also a tool of resistance.