Melissa Villa-Nicholas’s “Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications”

This book is concerned with the history of Latina information workers in the United States, during and after the 1973 EEOC v. AT&T case and is in production with Rutgers Press. The 1970s were impacted by the aftermath of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, increasing legislation on affirmative action in the workplace (Padilla, 1997). Although people of color and white women were integrated further into various blue and white- collar employment, the economic structure of the U.S. began to change, with the previous manufacturing industries broken down or sent overseas, the defunding of the public sector and increased government support of the private sectors, and the flourishing of new economic industries such as information technologies (Harvey, 2005). This book explores multiple discourses that arose from oral history interviews and archival texts: The deeply personal experience of telecommunications by Latinas, the experience and analysis of a constantly shifting information technology sector, the shifting identity formations and narratives in reflection of the liberalizing economy in their personal and public lives, a reflection on transnational (un)belonging, and the discourse around being Latina in a recently integrated and evolving field.