Intertexts

Search algorithms as media technologies present a cornucopia of differentiated subjects under one search query as archetype. For example, if one were to search the term "Mexican boy" in Google Images, the results would forefront photos of deceased and disabled children. They would then cascade into a range of stock vectors for sale—mostly cartoon caricatures of brown bodies in ponchos and sombreros. While these images are diverse, they all coalesce under the keywords deployed to index them. Taking a lesson from information studies scholar Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression, the indexing quality of search algorithms does not yield an objective truth about the pair of keywords deployed in this case; technologies are embedded with a host of oversights along with overt human biases which shape how we view the figure of the "Mexican boy."¹

A reading of these images results demonstrates how we are all embedded in cybernetic systems of representation: those that reduce people and their cultures to .jpg files, keyword identifiers, numbers, and bio-metric information through a series of feedback loops, networked infrastructures, and other technologies of communication and control. This sea of media masks its own curated nature through a "model of integration" into umbrella terms and cohesive interfaces, not unlike the "gene splicing" of the "media cyborg" identified by poet and scholar Harryette Mullen.² In the commodity production she assess, "black souls," or, the perceived essence of blackness, is artificially rendered transparent, knowable, and commodifiable as it is miscegenated into white bodies by [End Page 101] media representations and popular culture.³ This dynamic extends into the entire realm of media. Whether you are sending an instant message, amassing data, or writing an article, all of these processes involve limits on representation and abstractions from reality. These reductions are not carried out equally, however, as racial logics are embedded in everything from speech acts to computer coding. Therefore, the epistemological shortcuts we take to find knowledge, communicate information, and produce art, are not without political consequences for how we define, differentiate, and descry human subjects.

I use the theoretical term cybersujetos to refer to the array of border subjects who are impacted by these processes of mediation across various forms of cultural production as technologies. Cybersujetos include a vast spectrum of Latinx people whose agency is cybernetically modulated, controlled, or circumscribed by technologies, but also enabled when those same tools are repurposed.⁴ These technologies include media representations and their narrative structures—those that enable visibility and legibility. The narratological functions of these representations steer subjects towards political ends and profit motives deemed useful or desirable by their controllers and users, namely content producers and consumers. Latinx studies scholar Roy Pérez identifies an example of this dynamic in his use of narratological theory to unpack what he calls "homo-narrative capture": the dominant structures of media representations and the epistemological structures of LGBT studies scholarship that bind racialized figures to profitable narratives of queer suffering.⁵ An understanding of these cybernetic processes is crucial for discussing any representations of a racialized population that has been surveilled and contained by bureaucratic systems armed with drones, sensors, computers, and other technologies for decades if not longer. Such is the work of Iván Chaar-López, whose research in science and technology studies, and his concept of "the cybernetic border," traces a history of communications and control technologies used to manage and order Latinx subjects in the US-Mexico borderlands.⁶ To that end, my formulation of cybersujetos seeks to carry critical theoretical purchase in the interdisciplinary fields from which I draw insight, including but not limited to Latinx studies, race and technology studies, media, communication, and information studies. [End Page 102]

The "Mexican" boys negatively affected by the modulations of Google searches are examples of racialized cybersujetos caught in the trappings of representation. The logical sorting of discrete images via keywords promotes their legibility and identification as one, homogenous "brown" body, even as their individual differences are abundantly clear. This is a paradox of perception introduced by racialization as a form of mediation. In that vein, literary...