Members of Latinx communities from across the Americas have a history of building technologies that span space and time, as Traqueros who built the U.S. transcontinental railroad, in the Mexican border maquiladoras, in the telecommunications sector, and in the development of Spanish language podcasting and radio systems (Jimenez 2016, 2019, 2020; Pena 1997; Villa-Nicholas 2022). Today, however, as the transnational gig work of the Americas is increasingly datafied (Posada 2022), as technology companies regularly contract with ICE and look to tech innovations for the securing of national borders, as the securing of borders has entered the popular imagination through first-person shooter games that target immigrants (Llamas-Rodriguez 2021), as misinformation campaigns impact Latinx communities’ trust in evidence-based health prevention (Rivera et al. 2021) and reshape older forms of authoritarianism in Latin America (Magalhães 2019), and new methodologies of mutuality are embraced to combat this distrust (Gonzales et al. 2021; Rivera 2018; Jimenez et al. 2021), issues of migration and human rights are at this field's forefront.

Scholars who identify with this area draw upon work in anti-Blackness and technology, digital Black feminism, and critical race and internet studies (Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Florini, 2019; Noble, 2018; Steele 2021). But of particular concern is the fact that Today, members of Latinx communities are acutely subjected to what Melissa Villa-Nicholas (2023) has termed ambiguous “data borders,” as they are increasingly denied the right to see, feel, or recognize the borders between their own bodies and the systems of surveillance and data extraction that track them.

Each roundtable member speaks for 5 minutes, describing a major theme in Latinx Internet studies that runs through their own work and offering a starting point for a robust discussion of how the field builds on past and current efforts and where it is going in the future.