Latinas on the Line

Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications

By Melissa Villa-Nicholas

SERIES: Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States

Rutgers University Press

Latinas on the Line provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015. Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor.

Villa-Nicholas weaves together oral histories and social politics to deliver an encompassing history about Latina information laborers and how they were embedded into telecommunications. It is a deeply compassionate book about community and resilience amidst discrimination and corporate uncertainties at AT&T. Sharra Vostral, author of Toxic Shock: A Social History

Melissa Villa-Nicholas deftly shows how our telecommunications infrastructure, and the labor that undergirds it, have been central to struggles for civil rights. Latinas On The Line is a beautifully written, deeply personal history of a tech labor force that has been simultaneously ubiquitous and hidden—it is a history that holds important lessons about modernization, marginalization, and the exclusion still built in to STEM workforces. Mar Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

Villa-Nicholas weaves together oral histories and social politics to deliver an encompassing history about Latina information laborers and how they were embedded into telecommunications. It is a deeply compassionate book about community and resilience amidst discrimination and corporate uncertainties at ATT. Sharra Vostral, author of Toxic Shock: A Social History

Melissa Villa-Nicholas deftly shows how our telecommunications infrastructure, and the labor that undergirds it, have been central to struggles for civil rights. Latinas On The Line is a beautifully written, deeply personal history of a tech labor force that has been simultaneously ubiquitous and hidden—it is a history that holds important lessons about modernization, marginalization, and the exclusion still built in to STEM workforces. Mar Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Comp

MELISSA VILLA-NICHOLAS is an assistant professor at the Harrington School of Media and Communications and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her publications include “Data Body Milieu: The Latinx immigrant at the center of technological development” in Feminist Media Studies and “Missing Cells: The Growing Economic Value of Immigrant and Refugee Biological Data" in Bitch Media.

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1          Why Latinas? Overlapping Technology Histories
2          The Invisible Information Worker
3          Latinas on the Line
4          We Were Family
5          The Telecommunications Life Cycle: Lorraine
6          Conclusion
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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