ABSTRACT
However, most of what has been studied in the area of Latina/os and digital media has focused on how Latina/os use internet and mobile technology; these studies have infrequently addressed questions posed by qualitative-oriented scholars of race as to how cyberspace has or has not changed how race is articulated and represented. Even within these studies of online racial formations, Latina/os are infrequently mentioned. Lisa Nakamura’s invocation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as anathema to the forced racial/ ethnic identification of check boxes and drop-down menus is a prominent theorization of Latinidad online, and even so, is not primarily concerned with how Latina/os represent themselves in cyberspace (Nakamura 2002: 113). If the internet, as many digital media scholars have theorized, is a form or extension of the public sphere, and is a space where individuals and communities may be connected across geographic and temporal boundaries
(Castells 2000; Calhoun 1992; Edgerly et al. 2009), how are Latina/os fitting in to this space? Or, if as other scholars have suggested, the online sphere is largely similar to other media industries, where major corporations dominate production and distribution and exploit the labor of users and engineers (Gerhards and Schafer 2010; Sparks 2001), how have Latina/os bought in to or challenged this system?
