Abstract
After the civil rights movements of the 1960s and subsequent affirmative action legislation, the 1970s saw an influx of Latina/os into the telecommunications sector. Latina/o information workers have been employed in telecommunications for decades, experiencing the rapid transformation of information technologies and sweeping changes in the telecommunications industry amid the liberalization of the United States economy. This study focuses on interviews with seven Latina/o information workers in the greater Los Angeles region. Their oral histories, covering a period from the 1970s to today, articulate subject formation and resistance among telecommunications industry workers, suggesting that the “freedom” that this industry promises consumers is based on control and restriction of information labor. They offer new insights into formations of labor, reflections on digital capitalism, and intense personal experiences of neoliberal shifts in the political economy. The four themes of analysis developed from these oral histories are internal migration, the welfare state versus the merit system, information technology surveillance, and technological displacement. I conclude that Latina/o information workers’ narratives demonstrate how identity and work build belonging and dissonance within telecommunications.
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