Paper short abstract:

This proposal brings infrastructure maintenance and security literatures into conversation with the concept of technological autonomy. It considers this through fieldwork undertaken in Oaxaca, exploring how digital systems have been constructed, operated, and maintained in autonomous communities.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal studies the maintenance of digital systems operated by autonomous indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, nominally framed as technological autonomy (Baca-Feldman et al. 2021). This proposal considers maintenance not simply as material restoration, but as a fundamental rethinking of architectures (Jackson 2014). It brings these perspectives into conversation with infrastructure centred security studies work (McClearn et al. 2023), exploring maintenance as a form of security, aligned to the preservation of certain value orders.

This proposal will centre its analysis on Santa María Yaviche, an autonomous rural Xhidza community situated in the mountains of the Sierra Juárez. Drawing on fieldwork-based observations and interviews with NGOs including FUSAMPIAAC, an NGO based, established and run by members of the community, this proposal considers processes of technological appropriation in Yaviche: from community radio, to telephony, intranet, television, and Starlink. It investigates everyday workarounds and the aesthetics of technological autonomy, considering how maintaining this resilient, yet fragile, multi-layered ecosystem, generates certain forms of security and insecurity.

Baca-Feldman, Carlos, Daniela Bello López, Alejandra Carrillo Olano, Daniela Parra Hinojosa, and Alma Patricia Soto Sánchez. 2021. Technological Autonomy as a Constellation of Experiences: A Guide to Collective Creation and Development of Training Programmes for Technical Community Promoters. Association for Progressive Communications.

Jackson, Steven J. 2014. ‘Rethinking Repair’. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, 221–39. The MIT Press.

McClearn, Jessica, Rikke Bjerg Jensen, and Reem Talhouk. 2023. ‘Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing Infrastructures’. arXiv.