Email:
manriquez@arizona.edu
Phone:(520) 313-0873
Research
Photo by Mario Jasso from Cuartoscuro.I use qualitative methods including ethnographic observations, participant observation, and interviews to illuminate the lived experiences and everyday negotiations and interpretations that workers have with the multiple and intersecting digital technologies embedded in labor platforms. My current primary research site is Mexico, where platform-based work has become an increasingly popular option among workers, and especially male workers, to generate income and make a living amid a labor market marked with informality and precarity.
Food Delivery Platform Work in Mexico, City: From 2022-2023, I conducted an ethnographic study of food delivery gig work in Mexico City. This research includes ethnographic observations at a base—a physical space, typically near restaurants and residences, where food delivery gig couriers congregate to wait to get algorithmically assigned a food order. Participant observation as a food delivery gig worker and as a coala (a local nickname given to assistants to couriers who sitbehind a courier on motorcycle or bicycle, resembling a koala hugging a tree) and 75 semi-structured interviews with food delivery gig couriers taught me how the cultural, social, geographical, and economic context of the city deeply informs how workers navigate, interpret, and resist food delivery platforms, while also shaping the multiple and intersecting digital technologies embedded in them.
Ride-Hailing Platform Work in Monterrey, Mexico: In 2016, I traveled to the Mexican metropolis of Monterrey—a city gripped by deep de-industrialization, where I spent my childhood—to interview 60 Uber drivers. While talking and driving alongside drivers, I learned the multiple strategies and routines that drivers employed to generate the most possible income while logged into the Uber app. Moreover, I learned that platform-based work was not experienced uniformly among drivers; rather, past employment trajectories shaped how workers experienced and navigated this work.