Narrator: In 2014, three groups of young, ambitious Mexicans set out to change their world with technology. One group, led by a teenage prodigy, toured the countryside in a VW bus, bringing refurbished computers to rural children and earning national acclaim. Another group, on a bus bound for a Texas tech festival, conceived an app for offline communication that would eventually secure millions in Silicon Valley investment. The third group, students from a rural teachers' college, commandeered buses to attend a political protest in Mexico City. They were intercepted by state forces, and forty-three of them were never seen again.

Why were some of these "disruptive" acts celebrated as progress while another was met with lethal violence? This is the central question at the heart of Héctor Beltrán's groundbreaking ethnographic study, Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands. The book takes us deep into the world of young Mexican and Latinx hackers to reveal how they use the logic of coding not just to build apps, but to navigate and challenge the complex, often brutal, realities of nation, race, class, and identity.

Narrator: The book opens by establishing a stark paradox: in the US/México techno-borderlands, not all disruption is created equal. Beltrán contrasts the fates of the three groups of young Mexicans. The first, "La Combi de la Ciencia" or "the science VW bus," was led by a 17-year-old who built a particle accelerator and aimed to find "the next computer genius" in the mountains of Mexico. This initiative was celebrated by the media and aligned perfectly with the government's narrative of individual uplift and national progress. The second, a startup called Pingafy, was born on a hackathon bus trip to the US. Its founders pivoted from a politically charged idea to a commercial app, eventually securing millions from Silicon Valley investors. Their success was hailed as a triumph of market-driven innovation.

In tragic contrast stands the third group: the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers' college. Their act of commandeering buses—a long-standing tactic to protest government neglect—was seen not as innovation but as a threat. Their "disruption" challenged state power directly and was met with violent suppression. Beltrán argues that this selective valuation reveals a deep-seated political logic. Disruption is rewarded when it is technical, entrepreneurial, and aligns with neoliberal ideals of progress. When it becomes political, confrontational, and emerges from marginalized communities, it is criminalized and crushed.

Narrator: For the hackers Beltrán studies, coding is more than a technical skill; it's a way of thinking and a tool for social critique. At a Mexico City hackathon, the very first "hack" of the day had nothing to do with computers. While waiting in a long line, participants watched government officials in black SUVs bypass the queue. Annoyed, one young man spotted a sign on a nearby door that read "knock on the curtain around the corner." With a marker, he changed the word cortina (curtain) to cantina (bar), declaring, "There it is, the first hack of the day."

This small act of playful subversion captures the hacker ethos. These individuals apply the logic of their craft to the world around them. They see society as a system full of bugs, inefficiencies, and arbitrary rules that can be tweaked, exploited, or subverted. The book shows how they use coding concepts as metaphors to navigate their precarious lives. For instance, a veteran coder named Leo describes his flexible, project-based work in Mexico's unstable economy as "loose coupling"—a software design principle where components interact without being rigidly dependent on one another. This allows him to frame his precarity not as a weakness, but as a strategic choice for autonomy and adaptability in a neoliberal world.

Narrator: The book explores the deep-seated cultural and class dynamics that shape the identity of a hacker. At a male-dominated hackathon in Mexico City, technical skill is celebrated with the term chingón, a complex word that translates roughly to "badass." Being chingón is about demonstrating superior coding ability, but it's also a performance of a specific technical masculinity, negotiated through aggressive banter and subtle power plays that often exclude women.

This performance is partly a response to a fundamental problem: the devaluing of their labor. A hacker named Cofi, whose father is a car mechanic, struggles for recognition at home. His father sees his long hours in front of a computer not as "hard work" but as laziness. This misrecognition is a common experience, pushing coders to seek validation in spaces like hackathons where their skills are understood and praised. The book complicates this by introducing Esteban, a Chicano MIT graduate. In the US, despite his elite credentials, he is racialized and seen as a "Latino coder." He prefers hackathons in Mexico, where he feels he is "just a coder." This reveals how race, class, and nationality intersect to determine how technical labor is valued, forcing individuals to constantly navigate their identity across borders.

Narrator: The logic of coding, with its emphasis on efficiency, optimization, and control, doesn't always translate well to the messy, emotional world of human relationships. The book humorously and poignantly illustrates what happens when "hacking" is applied to love. A developer named Rodo recounts how his girlfriend once told him she "didn't want MIT in bed with us." She was frustrated that he was translating the "fastness and efficiency of a good algorithm" into his sexual performance.

This friction between the "code worlds" and "love worlds" is a recurring theme. Another hacker, Hiro, devises a "hack" to make dating in expensive San Francisco more cost-effective, but his attempt to apply technical concepts like "redundancy" to dating two women with the same name backfires spectacularly. More seriously, the book introduces the concept of a "dual paranoia." A US-born developer named Armios describes his intense anxiety during his partner's infertility appointment. His "coder's paranoia"—the fear that a single flipped bit can crash a system—intersects with his "migrant paranoia"—the fear that a simple linguistic mistake will cause them to be seen as "Mexicans taking advantage of the system." This reveals how sociopolitical realities can amplify the psychological frameworks of code work for marginalized individuals.

Narrator: To challenge the male-dominated culture of tech, organizers in Mexico created the country's "first all-women's hackathon." The event was designed to be inclusive, shutting down overnight for safety and focusing on "intelligent home" projects that allowed women to reclaim a traditionally feminized space as a site of innovation. The participants felt an intense pressure to be productive, to prove they could outperform their male counterparts.

The most profound moment, however, was entirely unscripted. During the final project pitches, the participants' mothers and grandmothers—their abuelitas—began to arrive, cheering enthusiastically from the audience. Their presence was a powerful intervention. As one participant, Ío, reflected on her grandmother, "She's the one that helps with everything in the day to day. She is the one that is in charge of everything." Beltrán argues that these abuelitas became a visible representation of the invisible infrastructure of care—the domestic labor, emotional support, and daily management, overwhelmingly performed by women—that makes all other forms of work, including code work, possible. This redefines "infrastructure" not as just servers and cables, but as the web of human relationships and undervalued labor that underpins technological progress.

Narrator: The final chapters focus on Javo, the entrepreneur who pivoted his anti-corruption app into a pizza delivery service. His story becomes a case study in how hacker-entrepreneurs from the Global South must strategically "pivot" not just their products, but their very identities, to succeed. To appeal to US investors, Javo registers his company in Delaware, uses a San Francisco address, and ensures all documentation is in English.

He also learns to pivot his cultural identity. In "safe" spaces, he might perform an exaggerated "Mexicanness," wearing a sombrero at a tech festival. But when speaking to investors or on panels, he emphasizes his family's "perfect English" and distances himself from working-class Latinx stereotypes, like the comedian George Lopez. He adopts the language of Silicon Valley's colorblind meritocracy, arguing that success should be based on "talent" alone. This constant pivoting is a "hack" of the system—a strategic navigation of the racialized and nationalized biases of global capitalism. In a final, ironic twist, Javo's commercial app, Pingafy, finds its greatest success when it is adopted by protestors in Hong Kong and Ukraine, returning his code work to the realm of social and political impact he originally intended.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Code Work is that technology is never neutral. For the hackers, entrepreneurs, and activists in the US/México techno-borderlands, writing code is an inherently social, cultural, and political act. It is a language used to critique power, a tool to navigate inequality, and a method for constructing identity in a world that constantly tries to impose rigid boundaries. Beltrán introduces the "ethno-stack" as a powerful framework to see how the personal, interpersonal, sociopolitical, and sociotechnical layers of our lives are inextricably linked.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It forces us to look past the sleek interfaces and abstract algorithms to see the human hands, the cultural contexts, and the political struggles embedded in the technologies that shape our world. It asks a vital question for our time: In a future increasingly built on software, who gets to write the code, and whose reality are they programming?