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Overall, the discussion about emergent technologies and humanity’s relationships to them does not consider racialized and gendered bodies. The human in this relationship is at best, a white educated woman from the United States, and her experience is thought of as a universal experience prescriptive to the rest of the cuasi-humanity.
Indeed, colonized people, especially women, have always been cyborgs, almost humans but not quite yet. Some sort soulless/mindless machines designed to work for others, fleshy automatons that exist for the pleasure and amusement of their masters. As with technology, us, the savages are seen and represented both with fascination and repulsion. We signify depravity and virtue, lust and repugnance, promise and peril. Theoretical discussions around our humanity and worth are still in fashion, the questions asked might have changed but they still manage to put in doubt our very own existence as peers. Do they have a soul? What if they rebel against us? Black lives matter? Are they naturally violent? How to stop bad hombres from invading us? Hence, what is me or who I am, has always been crossed by the colonizer's gaze.
My current process of being othered as a ‘Latina’ in the United States, has allowed me to acknowledge that the weight of racism in the construction of Colombia as a nation and on my own experience is worth exploring. I am becoming a Latina in the United States, which means that I carry on my back, the history of this racist State plus the weight of my racist nation. I am becoming a general category that represents ¾ of the continent and its diaspora, I am not an I, I am a mere representation. But I also carry the rich cultural heritage and a rebel spirit of a continent oppressed but not defeated[1], a continent that has produced media and social theory committed with their context, I incarnate an ancestral gaze that looks back at the colonizer.
The history of theoretical perspectives about emerging media and technologies is the history of theoretical provincialism and colonialism. It is a history of racist epistemic violence, and bloody imperial war. Moreover, it is the history of the denial of that violence and the reproduction of the settler gaze. It is urgent to decolonize media theory.

With the intention of denaturalize the universality of white western experience with technology as human experience in general, this experiment will build on Turkle's idea of putting in the center intimacy and emotion to produce media theory. I will replicate the writing format of her book, as I will use a series of evocative objects such as books, and photographs, that have shaped my intimate and social world to reflect on the politics of the gaze when producing media theory. Inspired by Kittler’s archeological methodology and seemingly eclectic mode of writing this experimental paper aims at excavating, mixing and connecting fragments of philosophical writings, memories, personal anecdotes, and images to put in the center of the emerging technologies’ theories its racism and its refusal to acknowledge it. The title How I Became Latina is an obvious hint to Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, to signal that what theories of technology consider human/non-human has a racial history behind it that goes beyond the machine/non-machine binary.
The website is divided into two 'pages' that can be read in any order the reader wants, as the connection between pages is not chronological or even logical. Evocative imperial Objects is a reflection on the persistence of the colonizers gaze in the making of media theory and in research about technology. The Benetton Family narrates the process of training and racializing my gaze through fantasy, imagination, and storytelling. In the bonus section: 'Affects, Political Imagination and Social Media in Times Social Unrest', you can read a paper and watch a video written and produced for other class but inspired by the questionings, discussions, and work done during this class.

To access the pages please click on the images.