Digital Nomads and the Politics of Remote Work in Mexico and Puerto Rico

Digital nomadism—forms of remote work that enable individuals to live and work across borders—has become increasingly important yet remains largely understudied. This talk explores the contradictions and consequences of digital nomadism in Mexico and Puerto Rico, highlighting how race, class, and infrastructure shape remote work across the Americas. Drawing from ethnographic research, it centers both privileged mobile workers and those made nomadic by structural precarity.

Héctor Beltrán is the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor at MIT Anthropology. A sociocultural anthropologist, he studies how the technical aspects of computing inform and are shaped by social structures and lived experiences of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation. He is the author of Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton, 2023) and is currently writing a book on the “digital nomad” as a global phenomenon. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the UC Berkeley and B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

This seminar will be held in E40-496 (Pye Room) and is co-sponsored by MIT-Mexico. Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.

Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions. 

This event is part of the CIS Global Research & Policy Seminar Series and is co-sponsored by MIT-Mexico. Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming seminars in the series.