At the Border of the Digital Divide: San José Unified School District and Evangelina Vigil-Piñon’s The Computer Is Down

This essay clarifies the political stakes of digital humanistic scholarship through an analysis of the digital divide, a term that emerged in the 1990s to characterize the widening gap between the United States’ information “haves” and information “have-nots.” The first half of the essay addresses the shortcomings of the digital divide concept, employing a case study of San José Unified School District—the largest school district in Silicon Valley—to show how this concept disregarded the very same Latino students it was intended to help. The second half proposes a counterlexical concept derived from the Chicana poet Evangelina Vigil-Piñon’s collection The Computer Is Down (1987), which, unlike the digital divide, can address digital culture in its historical, racial, and economic complexity. By theorizing the digital divide from below, I show how the ostensibly “nondigital” fields of critical race and multiethnic American studies can challenge the digital divisions—the perceived gap between information haves and information have-nots—that currently structure humanistic inquiry.