This dissertation explores the intricate articulations of life with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) inside a group of Bolivian households within the metropolitan area of Washington DC. In this study, I investigate the ways in which ICTs mediate Bolivian immigrants’ lives within the home and in relation to the outside or host culture. Through a qualitative ethnographic analysis, I explore twelve Bolivian families with different compositions and cultural competencies with the intention of unveiling the different ways in which they have used ICTs to learn to live, negotiate, survive and preserve their family, culture, identities and symbolic practices in everyday life in relation to the outside world or host culture.
I present the context in which these households develop a sense of themselves,starting from the appropriation process, through objectification, incorporation and conversion moments of the “technology mediated consumption” process (Silverstone, Hirsh & Morley, 1992) articulated in the “circuit of culture” (Du Gay et al., 1997). In order to do this, I provide an interpretive model that organizes the production of meaning interlaced with a topology of an immigrant Bolivian household resulting in an analysis of the household’s territories. Further, I evaluate how ICTs have structured the immigrant home spaces in the center, margins and periphery, according to the families’ uses of shared and private places. Two thresholds will connect the home with the outside – both to the host culture, the Latino realm or the homeland. This conformation constitutes an important identity preservation mode and also a strategic means of survival inside the host culture. These schemes of interpretation of the families’ daily life within the home in relation to ICT consumption as the result of the articulation of main theoretical and methodological frameworks are the main contributions of this study to the field.
I conclude that ICTs, when consumed in the families’ daily life inside the home, are essential instruments in the survival, assimilation and preservation of each family’s particular practices, rituals and values, which in turn conform their identity to the external world and their connections to the homeland.