Pioneer Winners - Ranson, - Oppositional Postcolonialism in Quebecois Science Fi

Pioneer Winners -- Ranson, "Oppositional Postcolonialismin Quebecois Science Fiction"
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/pioneers/rivera118.html[25/05/2014 08:17:03 p. m.]

Science Fiction Studies
#118 = Volume 39, Part 3 = November 2012
Lysa Rivera
Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands
Science Fiction after NAFTA
For decades, writers of the US/Mexico borderlands have mined the icons and language
of science fiction to articulate experiences not only of alienation, displacement, and
marginalization but also those of survival, resistance, and resilience.
1
During the rise
of the Chicano Movement (el movimiento) in 1967, Chicano agitprop playwright Luis
Valdez cleverly used the symbol of the drone to examine and mock Chicano/a
stereotypes in California in his stage act (acto) Los Vendidos (The Sellouts). In Oscar
Zeta Acostas hallucinatory self-portrait, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1971), the
brilliantly cynical Oscar aspires to write science fiction in a sudden fit of artistic
rebellion during a creative-writing seminar. The post-movimiento 1990s saw a far more
pronounced interest in science fictionmore specifically, the subgenre cyberpunkin
Chicano art and literature. Visual and performance artists Guillermo Gmez-Pea,
Roberto Sifuentes, and Rubn Ortiz Torres, for instance, militated against anti-
immigration racism in the Southland area by creating sf narratives of resistance and
parody. Whereas Gomez-Penas ethno-cyborgs dramatized the ways in which mass-
media technologies simultaneously criminalize and police brown bodies (see
Dangerous 45-57, 246-60), Ortiz Torress 1997 video installation Alien Toy spliced
Hollywood images of alien encounters with footage of alleged UFO sightings around
the US/Mexico border to comment on the bizarre resonance of the official misnomer
illegal alien and the various ways the phrase physically and ideologically patrol[s]
US national borders (Chavoya 157). In literature, Alejandro Moraless Rag Doll
Plagues (1991) and Ernest Hogans High-Aztech (1992)both uncannily similar to Neal
Stephensons Snow Crash (1992)depart from their Anglo counterparts by relocating
the familiar cyberpunk cityscape to south of the border.
Chicana feminists Gloria Anzalda and Chela Sandoval have turned to science fiction
as well to theorize Chicano/a subjectivity in the postmodern era. Whereas Anzalda
describes mestiza subjectivity as alien consciousness that speaks to an
otherworldly experience beyond the confines of the normal (25), Sandoval argues
that colonized peoples of the Americas possess a type of cyborg consciousness, an
oppositional consciousness that can provide the guides for survival and resistance
under First World transnational cultural conditions (375). These examples point to the
existence of an under-examined history of Chicano/a cultural practice that employs
science-fictional metaphors to render experiences of marginalization visible and to
imagine alternative scenarios that are at once critically informed and imaginative. They
speak to what Catherine Ramirez has called the concept of Chicanafuturism, a
cultural practice that questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism
for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color and reflects colonial and
postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival in the
Americas (187). Chicanafuturism has become so pervasive that John Morn Gonzlez,
in his forecast of Chican@ literary studies in the next fifty years, has predicted that
Chicano/a writers will continue to turn to science fiction to articulate their political
and social concerns and to outline the increasingly complicated relationship of
Chican@s with digital technologies, corporate globalization, and the future of cyborg
labor (176).
2
This essay wishes to extend these conversations by putting Chicano/a science fiction
produced north of the border in conversation with science fiction from the other side
(el otro lado). Specifically, I look at Mexican writer Guillermo Lavns short-story
Reaching the Shore (1994), the sf films of US filmmaker Alex Rivera, and Rosaura
Sanchez and Beatrice Pitas Chicanafuturistic novel Lunar Braceros (2009). Analyzing
these texts together invites a transnational reading of science fiction from a specific
geopolitical region (the US/Mexico border) and during a particular moment in
contemporary history (the era of multinational capitalism). All three borderlands sf
texts not only offer critical visions of globalization both today and in the near future
but also insist on reading late capitalism as a troubling and enduring extension of
colonial relations of power between the United States and Mexico.
3
In so doing, they
speak to Masao Miyoshis insistence that the new millennium is not an age of
postcolonialism, but of intensified colonialism, even though it is under an unfamiliar
guise (734; emphasis in original)that guise being, above all, neoliberal economic
hegemony.
Borrowing from David Harvey, I understand neoliberal economic hegemony to refer to
specific social and economic conditions, including the commodification and
privatization of land and labor power, the suppression of alternative (indigenous)
forms of production and consumption, and neocolonial and imperial processes of
appropriation of assets (including natural resources), all in the service of
multinational corporate capitalism (159). Since the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), borderlandswriters and visual artists have increasingly
turned to the metaphors and motifs of science fiction to articulate concerns over the
problems of the so-called Fourth World, which ostensibly declares the utopian
elimination of national borders but actually promotes the multiplication of frontiers
and the smashing apart of nations and indigenous communities (Hayden 280). More
specifically, these writers and artists enlist the dystopian motifs and sentiments of
cyberpunk, a subgenre of sf that emerged in the 1980s as a speculative response to late
capitalism and information technologies, to militate against global capitalisms
starvation of the indigenous to fatten the capitalists, thereby suggesting a timely
reconsideration of the subgenres hallmark ethos to live fast, die young, and leave a
highly augmented corpse (Foster xiv).
Speculative or not, borderlands labor narratives are always tales of migration and
movement, departures and arrivals, of reaching and sometimes crossing the rivers
shore. Works such as Tmas Riveras And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971),
Ernesto Galarzas Barrio Boy (1971), and Helena Mara Viramontess Under the Feet of
Jesus (1996) wrestle with the physical and psychological experiences of displacement
that attend the itinerant and often unstable lives of migrants whose labor makes
possible the affordability of bourgeois US consumerism. Yet within these narratives,
movement also signifies the process of collective engagement in social and political
issues that have been central to shaping a distinct borderlands literary history. The
emergence of borderlands narratives are, then, the formal result of very specific
political and historical conditions: the annexation of northern Mexico, the subsequent
and steady industrialization of the borderlands, and within that, the creation of a vast
working class, now the long-suffering disposables of neoliberalism (Hayden 271).
Ramon Saldvars pioneering work on Chicano narrative offers important insight into
the relationship between borderlands history and Chicano/a literature specifically:
History, he argues, cannot be conceived as the mere background or context for
[Chicano] literature; rather, history turns out to be the decisive determinant of the
form itself (6). Just as the US annexation of northern Mexico in 1848 gave rise to a
borderlands vernacular (the border ballad, specifically), so have contemporary
neoliberal hegemonic conditions after NAFTA given rise to an increase in borderlands
science fictionwhich, as I will show, repeatedly interrogates iniquitous labor
practices (as we will see, a type of cyborg labor, to recall Gonzlez) in this
economically depressed region. Post-NAFTA borderlands science fiction, in other
words, is the formal articulation of a specific historical narrative: namely the history of
US/Mexico capitalist labor relations in the region and militant fights for an alternative
framework.
Representatives of cultural communities not normally associated with this First World
genre, borderlandssf writers defamiliarize borderlands topographies, both social and
political, to provoke a prolonged and deeper consideration of the devastating human
and environmental tolls of neoliberal economic hegemony, the communications
technologies that accelerate it, and the impoverished border communities that are
forced to live under its so-called invisible hands. In doing so, they demonstrate Carl
Freedmans point, building on Darko Suvin, that science fiction is determined by the
dialectic between estrangement and cognition (16). Here, estrangement refers to the
construction of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane
environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical
interrogation of the latter (17; emphasis in original). The critical edge of the genre is
made possible by the process of cognition, which enables the science-fictional text to
account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the
disconnections of the latter to our own empirical world (17). By inviting readers to
rationalize the eerily familiar futures confronting them, science fiction thus raises an
incisive question: what have we as a society done to get here? What in our collective
history and our current historical moment has caused this strange, troubling, and
uncannily familiar future to take shape? Readers of borderlands science fiction
confront not only near and distant futures, but also how the histories of US/Mexico
colonial and neo-colonial relations of power have provided and continue to provide
the material conditions for this future.
Particularly relevant to borderlands science fiction is the concept of the future
history, a phrase John W. Campbell, Jr. used to describe elaborately constructed
temporal universes. Future history enables sf writers to situate their imaginary futures
somewhere along a projected historical time line, one that often begins during or
shortly after their real-life historical moment and extends into the future. More
generally (that is, beyond Heinlein), the phrase future history is most meaningfully
applied to texts in which the processes of historical change are as important as the
characters stories themselves (Sawyer 491). The telling of history has, in fact, been
central to the development of a distinct Chicano/a literary tradition, which is itself the
direct result of shared historical, social, and economic conditions specific to Chicano/a
lived experiences (Saldvar 6; McKenna 10). What most interests me in this essay, then,
is the possibility for social and political critique at the intersection of science fiction
and borderlands fictionthe latter encompassing both Chicana/a border narratives as
well as sf from northern Mexican (fronterizo) writers. Although nationally distinct,
these authors speak for a shared psychic terrain: the US/Mexico borderlands, where the
Third World grates against the first and bleeds (Anzalda 25). In all three texts, the
future represents not so much a site of progress and humanistic harmony as a return
to the colonial past. Without alternatives, these futures promise to repeat the worst of
colonial histories along the US/Mexico border.
For an example of fronterizo sf that immediately responded to the success of NAFTA
in 1994, one need look no further than Mexican writer Guillermo Lavns 1994 short
story Reaching the Shore (Llegar a la orilla), which originally appeared in Frontera
de espejos rotos (Border of Broken Mirrors), an anthology of sf stories that diversely
interrogate the uncertain economy of millennial capitalism along the US/Mexico
border (Schwarz and Webb ii). With contributions from both US and Mexican sf
writers, Frontera de espejos rotos literally offers a transnational sampling of
borderlands science fiction. In their introduction, entitled La bsqueda de un espejo
fiel [The Search for a Faithful Mirror], the editorsDon Webb of the US and
Mauricio-Jos Schwarz of Mexicoframe the anthology as offering two perspectives
on the same geopolitical terrain in order to give readers a more authentic and complete
image of this politically volatile and complicated region. That the two editors never
met in person but instead collaborated by email to complete the project suggests that
its very production appropriates the information technologies and transnational social
relations imagined in the stories themselves. The metaphor in the title is fitting as it
underscores the optical rhetoric of a border aesthetic, which is marked by a type of
double vision that is the result of perceiving reality through two different
interference patterns (Hicks xxii). In this way, the border text is structurally similar to
the holographic image, with both optics reflecting the collision of two referential
codes, namely the juxtaposed cultural matrices of the United States and Mexico
(Hicks xxiv).
Reaching the Shore takes place in Reynosa, a border city in the Northern Mexican
state of Tamaulipas. Like the sprawling hyperborder cities of Tijuana and Jurez,
Reynosa has experienced relentless urbanization and offers hospitable (cheap and
deregulated) real estate for hundreds of maquiladoras large foreign-owned assembly
factories that absorb indigenous labor from the nations interior (see Romero 223). The
story centers on eleven-year-old Jos Paul and his father Fragoso, the latter a middle-
aged maquiladora worker who is literally working himself to death. The story begins
on the special afternoon of Christmas Eve and narrates Jos Pauls desire for a new
modern bicycle, clearly a symbol for social mobility: with it he could journey far
beyond the Rio Bravo to the other, more economically prosperous side of the border
(Lavn 234). It is not insignificant that the story takes place on Christmas Eve, a holiday
characterized, especially in the United States, by mass consumption of commodities
often manufactured on foreign soil.
4
Although the story is set in the near future, it is steeped in labor history familiar to the
US/Mexico borderlands. Its clear denunciation of Northern capitalism is even
reminiscent of earlier American proletarian fiction that sought to define and coalesce
an oppositional group within the political and economic realm of American
capitalism (Schocket 65).This is most evident in the storys first sentence, which
describes a maquiladora whistle split[ting] the air exactly fifteen minutes before six
p.m. (224). The whistle, likened to an authoritative order from the team captain,
spreads through the city to tell some of the workers that their shift had ended (224).
Preceding any mention of humans in the story, the whistle becomes a metonym for US
capitalism and its subordination of the human worker to the mechanical demands of
the factory. Here, the living cogs-in-a-machine are all but dehumanized and the
ominous factories personified. The shrill of the whistle literally confines and controls
the daily lives of the maquiladora workers, whose shifts are compared to a long jail
sentence (225). It echoes earlier proletarian literature from the borderlands, most
notably Amrico Paredess The Hammon and the Beans (wr. 1939, pub. 1963) and
Rudolfo Anayas Heart of Aztln (1976).
5
Both narratives were written during times of
Chicano/a political dissent, Paredess during the Mexican American Era, when
Mexican Americans began to interact heavily with the CPUSA (Communist Party of
the United States) to address migrant labor exploitation, and Anayaswhose
protagonist Clmente Chavez is a thinly veiled reference to labor activist Cesar Chavez
at the end of the Chicano Movement itself. In both narratives, a whistle symbolizes
US economic dominance over a racially subordinated working-class population.
Paredes likens the whistle to authoritative power, like some insistent elder person
who was always there to tell you it was time [to work] (Hammon 172). Similarly,
the shrill blast of the Barelas barrio whistle in Heart of Aztln not only signals
looming disaster but also dictates and structures the everyday lives of the barrio
inhabitants (25). Itself a type of whistle-blowing critique of NAFTA, Lavns story,
although set in an imaginary future, echoes a long trajectory of labor history and the
anticapitalist borderlands literature that has militated against that history. His future
history is clear: this is a story not only about the future of labor practices in a hyper-
urbanized border city, Reynosa; it is also a story about the deep colonial relations that
have ledand continue to leadto this grim future.
Published in 1994, immediately following the ratification of NAFTA, the storys critical
target would have resonated in the minds of those who opposed the trade agreement
and understood it to be a rhetorical euphemism for what is essentially a new
manifestation of colonialism (to many, neocolonialism) and the systemic
exploitation of a vulnerable indigenous Mexican population. On the eve of NAFTAs
signing, Mexican journalist Carlos Monsivis criticized the utopian stance of the PRI
(Mexicos Institutional Revolutionary Party), exemplified by Octavio Pazs reference to
NAFTA as a chance finally for [Mexico] to be modern (Fox 19). In his critique,
Monsivis argued that NAFTA proponents such as Paz demonstrate too much
optimism in the agreement and take as a given that the single act of the signature
liquidates centuries of backwardness and scarcity (20). Monsiviss articles spoke in
fact for an overwhelming number of Mexicansincluding students, progressives, and
independent farmers (campesinos)who believed the agreement promised neither
progress nor economic harmony, but rather a new class of dependent, underpaid
workers for foreign-owned factories and agricultural corporations. Critics of the
agreement foresaw what it eventually would become: a renewed form of transnational
capitalism that is realized in the exploitation and administration of workers and
consumers through a worldwide division of labor. As one character put it in describing
an economic bloc to young Jos, free trade is, in Mexico, the cause of all problems
(Lavn 227).
Lavns laboring body is a cyborg body, the quintessential posthuman hybrid
produced at the intersection of technology and humanity. His cyborg, however,
functions metaphorically to symbolize not only the dehumanization involved in
turning a man into a stoop laborera being into a bracero; it also comments on the
invisibility of Mexican or indigenous labor in this region, a topic I will elaborate upon
in greater detail below. Tracing the function of the cyborg body throughout the story
reveals why this particular metaphor is so useful in articulating opposition to the
impact of Northern economic (and technological) hegemony on indigenous Mexicans.
The transnational corporation for which Fragoso works, a US leisure company, mass
produces a virtual-reality implant device known as the Dreamer, which Lavn
describes as a personalized bioconnecter that attaches to the base of the cranium and
provides virtual fantasies of consumption and recreation (229). The Dreamer, the most
modern and sophisticated North American technology ever, affirms the lure of the
modern, which Mexican pro-NAFTA rhetorical campaigns often promised its skeptics.
As someone fatally hooked on the idea of progress, Fragoso economically and
physically depends on the Dreamer, which is slowly destroying him and the
fronterizos among whom he lives (227). Having taken on the role of a corporate guinea
pig by volunteering to use his own body to test the quality of each computer chip,
Fragoso, now a cyborg, certainly evokes a dehumanized image of the maquiladora
laborer (227). Lavn here ascribes a critical valence to the cyborg metaphor through two
different uses of the idea of dependence: Fragoso is both addicted and attached to the
computer chip, now clearly a symbol of US consumerism. We can read this cyborg
body through two conceptual frames. First, the fact that the chip itself becomes a part
of Fragosos body by attaching to the base of his brain comments on the idea that
maquiladora workers bodies are mechanized, mere object-bodies that are almost one
with the machines they financially depend upon and produce. Fragoso is also fatally
addicted to the Dreamer and by extension the illusion of the American Dream. By
attributing Fragosos fatal addiction to a US consumer commodity, Lavn suggests that
the narcotic epidemic in the borderlands region is symptomatic of the presence and
influence of US neoliberal economic dominance and not some savage Mexican
predisposition to drugs and crime.
Through Fragoso, Lavn recasts the futuristic cyborg as a colonized subject, one whose
labor is extracted by US capitalism at the expense of Fragosos very humanity. Lavns
colonized cyborg clearly departs from Donna Haraways more utopian vision of the
cyborg as that which can subvert the informatics of domination, a new form of
power that I read as decentralized transnational capitalism that has replaced the
comfortable old hierarchical dominations under colonialism (Cyborg Manifesto
161). So problematic was Haraways sweeping claim that we are all cyborgs that even
she would revise it by being more careful to point out that [cyborgs] are subject
positions for people in certain regions of transnational systems of production
(Cyborgs at Large 12-13). One such region, I argue, is the hyper-urbanized border
city of the late-twentieth century, where the imperatives of multinational capitalism
and globalization have produced a new mechanized labor force that, vast as it is,
remains largely invisible to the consumers who benefit most from its production.
Though it might begin as science fiction, cyborg labor becomesin the borderlands
narrativenothing more than a politically-charged symbol for real-life labor practices
under late capitalism.
Lavns Dreamer invokes present-day technologies of visual media and marketing,
technologies that in fact pervade the rest of the story. As its name suggests, the
machine is a virtual product of empire, facilitating private fantasies of consumption,
dreams that in this case involve being able to escape the material conditions of factory
life. Because it offers merely the illusion of actual product consumption, however, the
Dreamer underscores Fragosos curious position of being both within and yet alienated
from the global market. Uncritical notions of hybridity and borderland third-space
identities are absent in Lavns border narrative. In their place is an image of the
borderlands as a site of proliferated borders and rigid socioeconomic hierarchies.
Lavns representation of the borderlands is one in which the colonial relations of
power materialize in the very objects of this new consumer-society as they (the
objects) reinforce national differences (US exports vs. shitty imports). Through this
juxtaposition, Lavn is able to comment on the paradoxical coexistence of free-trade
border porosity and the rigid maintenance of national boundaries within the
borderlands communities themselves.
6
Reaching the Shore clearly offers a timely critique of present-day capitalist
hegemony in the era of free trade.
7
Yet although it cautiously peers into the future. it
is deeply invested in re-telling the colonial history of the borderlands region as well.
Early in the story, for instance, Lavn references Juan Cortina, the nineteenth-century
Mexican rebel from Tamaulipas who led two influential raids against the Texas
Rangers in 1859-61. An icon of the underclass along the Rio Grande, Cortina
symbolized the revolutionary spirit of indigenous fronterizos by defending the land
rights of the Mexican Texans (tejanas) after the annexation of Mexico in 1848. When
Fragoso and other workers enter a semi-deserted bar just outside of the factory
grounds,
The cashier pointed a remote control at the wall and the sounds of the big-
screen TV filled the air. The men turned toward it and protested with jeers,
shouts, and threats, until the cashier changed the channel; they told him
they were tired of watching Christmas movies so the racket continued
while the screen skipped from channel to channel. Judiths face and voice
flooded the place with the ballad of Juan Cortina. (226)
Within the borderlands, this particular ballad (corrido) has been, and to some extent
continues to be, the voice of indigenous strength and opposition. Conventionally a
genre in which community is valued over individuality, the corrido evolves around
what Amerco Paredes calls a Border man who heroically confronts Anglo dominance
(With His Pistol 34). Lavns reference to The Ballad of Juan Cortina is thus
historically significant: the earliest Border corrido hero known (Paredes, With His
Pistol 140), Juan Cortina haunts the site of the maquiladora, suggesting a temporal
collapse of the neocolonial present and the colonial past.
Merging nineteenth-century borderlands history with the twenty-first-century
maquiladora industry, the latter functioning as the heart of globalizations gulag
(Brennan 338), Lavn underscores the point that contemporary forms of dominance in
the borderlands are in reality logical extensions of colonial domination and
exploitation. In other words, although the narrative is set in the near future, its scope is
decidedly historical as it retells the history of the consumer-oriented economic order
that has dominated the political, cultural, and economic landscape of the borderlands
region since the late nineteenth century (McCrossen 24). New transportation and
information technologies, combined with a dramatic increase in foreign capitalist
investment, transformed what once had been a land of scarcity into a land of
necessity, where the manufacturing of dreams and new consumer needs precede
the actual surplus production of goods, turning the once arid terrain into a space ripe
for rabid consumption and cheap labor production. For Lavn, the narrative of
neoliberal hegemonic control of the borderlands natural and human environment is
not limited to developments in the late-twentieth century. It stands instead as part of a
deeper historical continuum and longstanding colonial relations between the north and
south that Lavns futuristic narrative both retells and contests by imagining new
forms of cyborg labor that seem ominously doomed to repeat history without
sustained political intervention (Gonzlez 176).
The conflation of history and the future is perhaps most readily apparent in Lavns
treatment of geography and landscape. The built and natural environments of Reynosa
belie a community that has been thoroughly devastated by rapid urbanization and the
encroachment of foreign investment. This is the condition of the borderlands
horizontal city, which Fernando Romero describes as a city that sprawls outward
and is engulfed by slums due to rapid rural-to-urban migration (271). Yet this
horizontal urban sprawl also comes with tremendous depthnamely, the lost and
buried histories of colonial rule and exploitation that perpetually haunt Lavns near
future, which is also the readers defamiliarized present. This future citys once
magnificent riverthe Rio Bravo that borders the US and Mexiconow looks more
like a dinosaur skeleton, barely alive with all of its flesh deserted (Lavn 228). The
built city, at one time a living, thriving organism, is now a scarred city, one
resembling, curiously, a zigzag of arteries (228). The built and natural borderlands
landscape demands to be read as both futuristic and historical. Though depicted in the
future, the landscape perpetually signifies a once magnificent past that, although
extinct like a dinosaur, remains present in the minds of the fronterizos. Recalling
Anzaldas description of the border as an open wound (una herida abierta), Lavn
returns readers to what Norma Klahn calls the scene of the crime, the seat of colonial
violence along the US/Mexico border, which in turn reinscribes the colonized territory
as the site of past, present, and potentially future conflicts (119).
Three short years after the passage of NAFTA, US filmmaker Alex Rivera would
continue to interrogate the dehumanizing effects of cyborg labor by recasting the
issue in yet another science-fictionalized scenario. In his short film Why Cybraceros?
(1997), Rivera splices archival footage from a 1940s promotional video produced by the
California Growers Association to endorse the guest-worker Bracero Program (1942-
64), into a short science-fiction film called Why Cybraceros? Like the original (Why
Braceros?), this fictional and speculative promotional video extols the value and
convenience of cheap, disembodied Mexican labor. The term cybraceros refers to a
bracero whose manual labor takes place in cyberspace, providing the US employer
with efficientand, more importantly, invisibleMexican labor. As the eerily
cheerful female voice narrating the video explains:
Under the Cybracero program, American farm labor will be accomplished
on American soil, but no Mexican workers will need to leave Mexico. Only
the labor of Mexicans will cross the border; Mexican workers will no longer
have to. Sound impossible? Using high speed internet connections,
American farms and Mexican laborers will be directly connected. These
workers will then be able to remotely control robotic farm workers, known
as Cybraceros, from their village in Mexico. To the worker its as simple
as point and click to pick. For the American farmer, its all the labor
without the worker. In Spanish, Cybracero means a worker who operates
a computer with his arms and hands. But in American lingo, Cybracero
means a worker who poses no threat of becoming a citizen. And that means
quality products at low financial and social costs to you, the American
consumer.
Rivera uses the cyborg metaphor to riff on the historical figure of the bracero,
described by Ernesto Galarza in the 1960s as the prototype of the production man of
the future, an indentured alien who represents an almost perfect model of the
economic man, an input factor stripped of the political and social attributes that
liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally (16). In other words,
drawing from science-fictional metaphors and images of cyborgs and cyberspace,
Rivera is able to comment on the ways in which real labor practices in the
US/Mexico borderlands region are quite literally exercises in dehumanization and
exploitation. The word cybraceros alone signals the future of borderlands labor as a
type of cyborg labor (dehumanized and invisible), as well as the history of migrant
labor along the border, specifically the midcentury practices, that initiated the rapid
industrialization of the borderlands.
Rivera elaborated his cybracero metaphor in his debut feature-length film, Sleep
Dealer (2008), a cyberpunk dystopia that projects life in the urban US/Mexico
borderlands into a nightmarish near future where most of Mexicos indigenous
population, once in control of over 80% of the nations natural resources, lives in
abject poverty. Like Lavin, Rivera privileges a Northern Mexican site of production.
More specifically, it is set in the sprawlingborder metropolis of Tijuana, which the
film posits as the City of the Future but which is also a defamiliarized version of
contemporary conditions plaguing this and other hyper-industrialized urban zones in
Northern Mexico. Sleep Dealer centers on Memo, a young Mexican from the rural
interior (Santa Ana, a small town) who harbors dreams of migrating to the city in the
north (Tijuana), where he believes an egalitarian global society awaits. Unlike his
brother and father, who are rooted to their familys land, Memo thinks of Santa Ana as
a trap, from which he must (and eventually will) escape. He spends most of the first
fifteen minutes of the film alone in his room tinkering with old radios and receivers in
an attempt to make contact with those living in Tijuana, the city to the North that
seems initially to promise freedom, progress, and prosperity. The portion of the film
set in Santa Ana ends with the murder of Memos father, who is accidentally mistaken
for an aqua-terroristan eco-activist of the future, so to speak.
After his fathers murder, Memo migrates north in search of work to support his
struggling family, whose milpa (small, locally-owned farm) is no longer able to
compete with the large agribusinesses that now run the Mexican trade economy.
Memo quickly finds employment with Cybertek, one of the many virtual reality
sweatshops that populate Tijuana (and, presumably, all of the Northern metropolises
in Mexico). Cybertek is owned and operated by an anonymous (and ominous)
multinational corporation that absorbs thousands of expendable Mexican laborers
from the nations rural interior. These virtual maquiladoras are nicknamed sleep
factories by the workers because the physical work is so taxing that it eventually
leads to blindness and, in some cases, death. To become a cybracero, Memo has several
nodes surgically implanted into his body, an act that Rivera humorously refers to as
node jobs early in the film, thus drawing a haunting metaphorical parallel between
the laboring body and the body exploited for sexual pleasure (sex trafficking comes to
mind). These nodes enable Memo to reroute his physical movements to robots on the
other side of the border. With his nodes, Memo can connect [his] nervous system to
the other system, the global economy, a direct reference to the films larger political
context: multinational capitalisms presence in the everyday lives of fronterizo workers
whose very livelihood is problematically reliant uponyet alienated bythe new
global (multinational) economy.
It is not long before Memo realizes that the so-called city of the future is really
nothing more than a throwback to the colonial past. It is, in other words, less a space
of opportunity and innovation than it is an abject contact zone replete with vastly
disparate racial and economic hierarchies, tensions, and unrest. Memos dreams of
progress and futuritysymbolized by his love of technology earlier in the filmcome
to a startling halt as he realizes that the future he imagines is not only economically
and geographically inaccessible (the physical border is a highly militarized zone in the
film), but problematically made possible by a dying indigenous working classby
people like his father. Motivated by the murder of his father, and by the social
injustices that confront him daily, Memo decides to remain in the city and join forces
with Luz, a politically progressive cyber-writer who also uses nodes to connect to
virtual space, but does so solely for the purposes of exposing the injustices visited
upon the vanishing indigenous Mexican communities. Essentially using cyberspace for
political activism, Luz and Memo appropriate the very information technologies of the
maquiladoras by rerouting their purpose, in order to militate against neoliberal
economic hegemony and labor exploitation in the borderlands. They fight for the land
rights of the indigenous campesinos who suffer most under globalization. The two
activists confront the future by honoring those who came before them, represented by
Memos late father, those whose egalitarian land practices they desire to recover. As
Memo puts it in the closing scene of the film, they choose to fight for a future with a
past. Here, once again, borderlands science fiction works to collapse the colonial past
with the neoliberal present and, in Riveras case, explicitly calls for a future modeled
upon a history that has all but vanished under the demands of late capitalism.

Figure 1 (Courtesy Alex Rivera)
The laborer who functions as nothing more than a cog in a machine, and whose
laboring body remains invisible to those who benefit most from it, is a cyborg laborer
who helps to ensure the order of things in the imaginary new world economy. So says
the excellent film Sleep Dealer. One particular screen-shot from the film speaks to this
reading of the cyborg in Sleep Dealer. Captured from a scene in which viewers are
finally taken inside one of Cyberteks factories, the image depicts a dark-skinned
female cybracero fully equipped with the high-tech nodes that connect her labor to
the global economic system (see Figure 1).
Recalling Fragosos cyborg body, the image conveys an equally scathing critique of US
consumerisms demand for invisibleand therefore easily disposableforms of
intense physical labor. Moreover, Memos voice-over narration injects a healthy dose
of irony and cynicism by referring to cyborg labor as the American Dream,
prompting us to acknowledge the invisible (because disembodied) labor that makes
consumerism affordable for the American middle class: physical and embodied, but all
the while invisible, indigenous labor. This is what cyborg labor looks like, and Rivera
does not shy away from implicating US consumerism in helping to create and sustain
it.
As we saw in Lavns future history, Riveras Sleep Dealer invites spectators to
apprehend and understand the future through their own colonial past: they are
encouraged to decode this near-future dystopian scenario through the framework of a
longstanding history of power struggles between northern capital and indigenous
resistance to that power from within the US/Mexico borderlands region. Just as the
nineteenth-century revolutionary spirit of Juan Cortina haunted Lavns future
dystopia, so too does Rivera weave suppressed colonial histories into his own
dystopian borderlands narrative. This temporal interplay is especially pronounced in
the films depiction of the Mayan Army of Water Liberation, a paramilitary band of
eco-activists who represent the films counter-narrative to capitalist hegemony in the
borderlands. In one telling moment, Rivera establishes an allusion to the 1994 EZLN
uprisings that occurred in direct response to NAFTA (see Figure 2).
8
Figure 2 (Courtesy Alex Rivera)
Viewers of this image would be unable to interpret its iconic power without mentally
referencing the 1994 EZLN anti-NAFTA uprisings. In an instant, then, Rivera is able to
signify a futuristic image and a historical referent, commenting once again on the ways
in which post-NAFTA borderlands dystopias are a type of future history that forces
readers/spectators to read the future through the historical presence of the colonial
past. Moreover, Riveras reference to the EZLN gestures towards the possibility for
counter-discourse and indigenous resistance. Just as Riveras film itself repurposes
cinematic technologies to voice concerns over imperial power, so too did the EZLN
and the EMLA for that matterappropriate new technologies (the internet
communiqus) to do what so many classic dystopian characters have done. From
Offreds secret cassette recordings in Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985) to
Lauren Olaminas subversive Earthseed diaries in Octavia E. Butlers Parable of the
Sower (1993), dystopian protagonists appropriate the oppressors language (a veritable
technology) to recover the ability to draw on alternative truths of the past and
speak back to hegemonic power (Moylan 149).
Shortly after the release of Sleep Dealer, and perhaps influenced by the film, Chicana
scholars Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita, along with visual artist Mario A. Chacon,
published Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148, also set in the future (not necessarily near, but
certainly not far) and centered on information technologies and fears of hegemonic
global capitalism. Lunar Braceroslike Lavns and Riveras work before itis also
undeniably a border narrative. It too contains stories of migration, labor, and survival
in the US/Mexico borderlands region. It too wrestles with issues related to indigenous
labor and the white (or, more appropriately, Anglo) hegemonic power that extracts it.
And it too insists on the importance of remembering colonial history in imagining the
future. Put simply, Lunar Braceros imagines the future of labor exploitation along the
borderlands while it simultaneously re-tells a deeper colonial history of the
borderlands.
Narrated through a series of letters and emails, primarily between a mother (Lydia)
and her son (Pedro), the novel centers on a small group of seven manual laborersall
people of color and primarily Chicano/awho have been assigned grunt work on the
moon. By the end of the twenty-first century, the moon has become an off-world
landfill of sorts to store the Earths surplus toxic waste, what Lydia tersely calls the
new spatial fix for capital (59). Multinational corporations in high-tech, energy, and
pharmaceutical industries developed these lunar sites to stimulate capital
investment, which in turn generated an ongoing need for techno-grunts, low skill
contract workers, including the lowly lunar braceros and tecos upon which the
novel centers (15). Initially, the moon represents opportunity, a welcome respite from
the drudgeries of twenty-first-century barrio life. Working under the assumption that
their salaries would be wired back to Earth to help the struggling families they left
behind, the crew of seven agree to a four-year lunar contract doing little more beyond
manual (stoop) labor. As Lydia reasons to Pedro: We could either be fucked up on
Earth or fucked up on the Moon, and by that time, it didnt matter much. Same shit,
different place (19). Soon, the seven discover that the mining teams who arrived
before themwhom, in fact, they were supposed to replacewere all summarily
executed and their salaries never actually sent back to Earth. What ensues is a carefully
planned escape back to Earth, where the seven tecos hope to work with the World
Human Rights Commission to make the massacre of miners and braceros known
to the world (111). In ways similar to the borderlands labor narratives spotlighted
above, the narrative trajectory of Lunar Braceros moves from acknowledgment (of
labor exploitation) to resistance. It is a narrative of movement in both senses of the
word: the movement of labor migration and the movement behind political activism.
As in so many cyberpunk near-future novels, traditional nation-states have given way
to corporate hegemonic control. In fact, despite the novels title, the majority of Lunar
Braceros takes place on Earth and in Cali-Texas, a new nation state that emerged
in 2070 after the end of the United States as it had been known till then (11).
Encompassing the US, Canada and Mexico, all autonomous regions but
economically linked to and dependent on the hegemonic power (12), it includes
several of the northern Mexican states and the former US Southwest statesthe
borderlands projected into the future (6). Modern forms of state power have been
replaced by transnational corporate power. The world is run by what Lydia calls the
New Imperial Order, a new form of global dominance that operates solely through
multinational corporate and economic hegemony.
9
Made up of ten dominant
multinational consortia, the NIO, which was pretty much calling all the shots,
controlled anything and everything that had to do with technology transfer,
informatics and any kind of power generation, bio-fuel, nuclear or otherwise (7,
23).
With its interest in information technologies and its critical assessment of
multinational capitalism, Lunar Braceros adheres closely to the conventions of
cyberpunk, but with one critical difference: the attention it places on racialized power
and on labor practices in the near (dystopian) future. The vast majority of non-white
US citizens live in what the novel refers to as Reservations, public spaces created by
the NIO to keep the homeless and the unemployed off the streets (13). As Lydia
explains to Pedro, the state created internal colonial sites to contain and control a
rapidly increasing expendable, surplus population (14). Once on the Res, the
multitude becomes little more than a controlled laboratory labor force, like lab rats, a
disciplinary society that was useful to the state and that could be used in a variety of
areas as needed and determined by corporate interests managing the Reservations
(14-15). Sanchez and Pita here refer simultaneously to the colonial past (Native
American conquest) while peering into and constructing what is essentially a neo-
colonial future (the Res).
In fact, as futuristic as the novel appears, it simply cannot be understood if extracted
from its social and political contexts, specifically the historical practices of indigenous
labor exploitation in the US/Mexico borderlands. As Lydia puts it, the lunar excavation
sites were turning out to be a recapitulation of Earth history (59). They are even
described as being modeled after the ones they had carved out in the Arizona and
Sonora desert (6). To fully appreciate and understand the political critique at work in
the novel, readers must thus be familiar with the history of US uranium extraction in
the Arizona and Sonora deserts. Historical knowledge enables futuristic speculation as
Lunar Braceroslike Sleep Dealer and Reaching the Shorepresents a future with
a past. Indeed, the very idea of a lunar bracero speaks simultaneously to the future
of labor exploitation (lunar space travel) and the real histories of migrant labor under
capitalism, specifically the Bracero Program initiated as part of the larger Border
Industrialization Project in the mid-twentieth century.
Lunar Braceros is an enterprise in excavation on two different levels. First, the texts
premise centers on mining and excavation expeditions on the moon. Second, and
perhaps more interestingly, the text itself is a project in historical and cultural recovery
as Lydias letters and emails (and, by extension, Pitas and Sanchezs project) excavate
borderlands histories, rendering the invisible hands of capitalism visible and available
for criticism and scrutiny. Lydia is committed to cultural memory as she works against
the governments project of revising historical accounts not favorable to the Cali-
Texas government (38). By retelling her personal history to her son, a structure that
constitutes the narrative trajectory of Lunar Braceros, Lydia provides hope that one
day what was being purged could be accessed and restored (39). It is important to take
into account, however, that this is a future that must remember the pastfor the novel
not only projects the timespan specified in the title (2125-2148), but, more crucially, the
years leading up to that period (beginning with the year 2000). In other words, the
majority of the novel is about its imaginary past: it is a future history. With topics
ranging from developments in astronomy, physics, and, of course, transnational
capitalism, Lydias history lessons trace for her son Pedro not only the rise of global
capitalist hegemony but also stories of resistance from the novels past (our future).
Lunar Braceros, although ostensibly set in the future, thus narrates centuries of
colonial history (a future history, but a historical narrative nonetheless) while also
commenting, quite explicitly, on the importance of historicizing more generally. As
Lydia underscores in one of her diary entries about the importance of telling her story
to her son (her history, that is): Perhaps in the telling, in the writing, in the
recollection of people, through memory, dialogues and scenes, itll all make some
sense to [Pedro], fragmented though it may be (58).
With its trenchant critique of multinational capitalism and its attendant forms of labor
and indigenous exploitation, borderlands science fiction produced after NAFTA
represents, as I have suggested above, a critical incursion into classic cyberpunk, itself
a politically charged sf subgenre that emerged in the 1980s, most notably with the
publication of William Gibsons novel Neuromancer (1984), in direct response to
multinational corporate capitalism and the computer technologies that facilitated it.
The subgenre was immediately recognized as a quintessential literary reflection of the
two historic originalities of late capitalism itself: cybernetic technology and
globalizing dynamics (Jameson, Archaeologies 215). For Fredric Jameson, the primary
conditions of postmodern life centered on issues of placelessnessmore specifically,
the postmodern subjects inability to locate, situate, and organize herself and her
relations to others within the intricate webs of the new, highly networked world order.
Anchorless, adrift, and disoriented, the First World postmodern subject is incapable of
mapping her relative position inside multinational capitalism. For this reason, the
postmodern subject needs a type of cartographic proficiency, an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping, which Jameson argues would endow it with a new heightened sense of
its place in the global system (Postmodernism 54). Moreover, he cites cyberpunk as
one possible aesthetic, going so far as to call it the supreme literary expression, if not
of postmodernism, then of late-capitalism itself (Postmodernism 419n). While it is
definitely worth noting that cyberpunk has also come under fire for privileging a
white, masculinist, and imperialist cultural dominant, its predominant impulse was
productive in questioning the ecological, economic, and existential implications of
global multinational capitalism and its attendant information technologies.
10
As Tom
Foster has argued, cyberpunk of the late-1980s and early 1990s affords a distinct set of
critical resources, an archive that postmodern technoculture still very much requires
(xviii).
In theorizing this marriage of borderlands literature and cyberpunk, it helps to turn to
the critical work of Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval, who has convincingly argued for
close affinities between the motifs of cyberpunk and the actual lived experiences of
indigenous cultures of the Americas. Essentially revising Jamesons concept of
postmodernism as a schizophrenic response to globalization and emergent information
technologies, Sandoval argues that these apparently new First World anxieties over
place and subjectivity actually find their prototypes in the experiences of colonized
peoples. For Sandoval, the schizophrenic postmodern condition is not new; it is
anchored in the history of conquered and colonized Westerners (33). The first-world
subject, that is, inhabits a psychic terrain that is historically-decentered: colonized
subjects have learned to survive and negotiate for centuries (27). Mere arms detached
from intellect or political will, migrant laborers from the Bracero Program to the
maquiladora phenomenon are little more than tractable bodies that, forced to
migrate far from home, must constantly negotiate a sense of self and place in a rapidly
changing urbanized society (Schmidt Camacho 63). Adapting to these neocolonial
conditions, indigenous subjects have learned to develop what Sandoval refers to as
cyborg skills, oppositional and appropriative strategies that enable the colonized to
contest, survive, and transform the experiences of cultural dislocation, labor
exploitation, and diaspora (174-75). In the same way that Sandoval re-contextualizes
the postmodern experience by locating it within the histories of Third World
colonialism, so too do these borderlands sf texts embed the cognitive maps of
cyberpunk within the lived experiences of millennial capitalism as they are endured
by those most subject to its oppressive tendencies.
In retooling cyberpunk to write both within and against multinational capitalism and
its ideological underpinnings, borderlands science fiction is a type of postcolonial
literature that transforms dominant culture through appropriation. It exemplifies Nalo
Hopkinsons definition of postcolonial sf as that which uses the familiar memes of
science fiction to create defended spaces where marginalized groups of people can
discuss their own marginalization (7-8). In similar fashion, these texts recast the
dystopian cyberpunk gaze so that it focuses on the oppressive impacts of globalization
from the perspective of indigenous communities along the borderlands. In doing this,
they critically intervene in an sf sub-genre that has not always reflected the lived
experiences of writers whose cultural histories have been intimately inscribed by the
legacies of US imperialism and expansion. Borderlands sf practitioners such as Lavn,
Rivera, and Sanchez and Pita demonstrate that cyberpunk need not be limited to
serving as a mouthpiece for young white males with biochips in their heads and
chips on their shoulders (Ross 138). As I have shown, these texts not only cast a
critical light on the current and potential impacts of multinational capitalism, they also
read these conditions as part of a history of indigenous exploitation, suggesting that
what exists now and what looms ahead are to be viewed through the lens of deep
colonial and racial memory. The persistence of the revolutionary past in Lavns near-
future Reynosa; the insistence on a future with a past in Riveras Sleep Dealer; and,
of course, the simultaneous reference to the history and potential future of US/Mexico
labor practices in the terms cybraceros and lunar braceros attest equally to the
ways in which borderlands science fiction embeds tales of futurity in deep-seated
narratives of colonial history, labor exploitation, and racial violence, all of which
continue to inform contemporary economic policy and labor practices within the
region.
The presence and importance of historical recovery notwithstanding, these narratives
invite their readers to speculate about the future as well. Borderlands sf writers refuse
to foreclose on the possibility of change: the desire for new oppositional tactics that
are simultaneously grounded in a revolutionary pastthe desire, that is, for a future
with a pastmotivates these texts, which value cultural recovery but also underscore
the vitality of speculation. In this way they mirror the cultural work of contemporary
Afrofuturism, or African diasporic science fiction, which aims to extend the tradition
[of countermemory] by reorienting readers towards the proleptic as much as the
retrospective (Eshun 289).
11
For power now operates predictively as much as
retrospectively ... through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable
futures (289). By participating directly in the construction and management of their
future, borderlands sf writers not only articulate resistance to neoliberal forms of
economic hegemony but also speak to the persistent validity of Darko Suvins early
observation that contemporary sf has moved into the sphere of anthropological and
cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and
action andmost importanta mapping of possible alternatives (12). Such potent
fusions are possible when the political punch of sf merges with the imperatives of
borderlands fiction.
The works I have discussed function similarly to what Tom Moylan calls the critical
dystopia, a cousin of dystopia that rejects the latters tendencies towards hopeless
resignation by offering a horizon of hope just beyond the page (181). Moylan
situates the emergence of critical dystopia in the hard times of the 1980s and 1990s
when betterment of humanity was sacrificed to the triumph of transnational capital
and right-wing ideology (184). Attuned to the difficulties of this time period, the
critical dystopia articulated nightmare societies beleaguered by oppressive corporate-
owned governments and harsh economic conditions, but it also exhibited a scrappy
utopian pessimism with strong protagonists who endured the nightmare and sought
alternatives to it (147). Octavia Butlers Parable books (1993, 1998), for instance,
imagine a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles decimated by a devastating war and rampant
corporate greed, but it also sows seeds of hope, speculation, and optimism through the
figure of Lauren Olamina, the strong black female protagonist whose dreams of space
travel and an alternative social structure also inform the novels vision of the future. In
other words, the critical dystopia does not entirely abandon the future, even if that
future appears bleak beyond imagining. The subgenre is apocalyptic, but it also
imagines alternative socio-political spaces that always already extrapolate from
existing ones and has the formal potential to re-vision the world in ways that
generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers
(Moylan 43). As it pertains to borderlands science fiction, the critical dystopia is
precisely the kind of skeptically hopeful work Subcomandante Marcos called for
from post-NAFTA activists following the EZLN coup (Hayden 312).
This subversive potential of these borderlands narratives is visible in their open
endings, which resist closure and invite a prolonged consideration of the shape of
things to come. The futures of their imaginary societies depend entirely on the
thoughts and actions of a new, younger generation of borderlands cultures, both
Chicano/a and fronterizo. At the end of Reaching the Shore, the young Jos Paul
remains uncertain about whether he will succumb to his fathers addiction to the
Dreamer. I really have to think it over, he says to himself at the storys conclusion,
Ill have to think it over (234). The reader cannot help but hear Lavn himself
demanding the same critical thinking of his post-NAFTA readers in 1994. In Sleep
Dealer, one can reasonably assume that Memo and Luzboth intimately familiar with
the cybernetic technologies that paradoxically oppress themespouse (and perhaps
eventually join) the anti-globalization EMLA, a not-so-subtle allusion to the Chiapas-
based EZLN. Finally, the last entry in Lunar Braceros is written not by Lydia but by her
eighteen-year-old son Pedro, for whom the entire narrative is in fact written. Pedro
concludes the novel by announcing his readiness to join his parents indigenous
resistance movement, which, inspired by the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas many
years before (85), represented a rejection of everything that is hegemonic and
dominated by capital relations (25). Now a new member of the Anarcho Maquis,
Pedro voices the novels oppositional discourse that, in the spirit of the critical
dystopia, conveys a sense of cautious optimism tempered by historical awareness. As
his mother puts it in one of her letters to him: Its time for a new strategy for
something else for a new version of the old urban guerrilla tactics of the twenty-
first century (116).
The past few years have witnessed an explosion of literary collections that have
expanded the global sf archive by documenting decades of contributions by writers of
color both within and beyond the so-called First World. Collections such as Nalo
Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehans So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science
Fiction (2004), Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilns Cosmos Latinos: An
Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2004), and Sheree Thomass
two-volume anthology Dark Matter (2001, 2004)have drawn much deserved attention to
the sf of Latin America and the African diaspora. In some cases, these collections
invite new ways of reading texts not originally conceived of as speculative or science
fiction, as evidenced by the inclusion of works by W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler,
and Amiri Baraka in Dark Matter. In other cases, they aim to spotlight a doubly
underrepresented literary corpuspeople of color and science fiction writersto
vocalize and legitimize culturally specific reactions to universal matters that are
unique to sf, including not only technological innovation but also new forms of social
relations that have emerged because of these innovationsincluding, in this case,
troubling relations of power under the so-called New World Order. In an attempt to
expand these new critical projects, I have examined the science fiction of the
borderlands, which puts the defamiliarizing narrative strategies of the genre in the
service of both revisiting colonial history and peering into the uncertain future of the
US/Mexico border region. Writing about the future from the bottom up or from the
margin to the center, is itself an act of agency and will, I believe, become increasingly
more appealing to and visible within the broader Chicano/a literary community of the
twenty-first century. After all, if the primary task of Chicano narrative is to deflect,
deform, and thus transform reality by opting for open over closed forms, for conflict
over resolution and synthesis (Saldvar 6), then it is clear why so many borderlands
writers have been drawn to science fiction, a genre that renders the familiar strange
and imagines alternatives to the political status quo.
NOTES
1. For the purposes of this essay, the term borderlands refers specifically to
the local communities and cultures, both rural and urban, that straddle, fuel, and shape
the US/Mexico border. In this sense, I use the term somewhat capaciously to refer to
both US citizens and Mexican nationals who, though linguistically, culturally, and
racially heterogeneous, occupy the same physical, natural, and geopolitical space, a
space unique to the most frequently crossed international border on the planet. To
differentiate between Mexican nationals living on the border and Mexican-Americans
in the US, I opt for the more eloquent fronterizo and Chicano/a, respectively. A
fronterizo is a person who lives in the borderlands regions, including the
southernmost regions of the US Southwest and the northern Mexican cities of Tijuana,
Cuidad Juarz, and Reynosa. Historically, the fronterizo regions were seen as
extremely isolated communities, cut off from the densely populated urban centers of
both Mexico and the United States.
2. One figure I have not included in this list is performer/writer Ricardo
Dominguez, who has collaborated with filmmaker Alex Rivera, and who co-founded
the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a band of performance activists who use computer
technologies to protest military dominance through non-violent acts of cyber
activism.
3. Two important speculative borderlands novelsLeslie Marmon Silkos
Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Alejandro Moraless Rag Doll Plagues (1992)
anticipate twenty-first century borderlands science fiction and, as such, warrant brief
discussion. Although not pure science fiction (if there even is such a thing), both
Almanac and Plagues combine history and speculation, narratives of the past and
future, to rewrite the alien invasion of Mexico from the perspective of the colonized
and to imagine oppositional tactics of resistance to neo-liberal economic hegemony
(Silko 577). Spanning over 500 years of Anglo-European colonialism and indigenous
resistance, both novels merge history with speculation; both articulate troubling
connections between the colonial past, the neocolonial present, and the possible future
awaiting both.
4. Lavns depiction of Christmas Eve recalls the vignette And All Through
The House in Toms Riveras classic borderlands novel, And the Earth Did Not
Devour Him (1971), which recounts a harrowing Christmas Eve story from the
perspective of a poor migrant family for whom the sounds and sights of rampant
consumerism bring nothing but dread, desire, and anxiety.
5. One also hears the whistle in the everyday life of Mazie, a young miner, in
Tillie Olsens Yonnondio, written in the 1930s but published in 1974, during el
movimiento.
6. For an extremely insightful reading of the persistence of nationalisms in
cyberpunk, a genre known for its transnational settings, see Fosters discussion of
franchise nationalisms (203-28).
7. For an overview of Marxist ideological impulses in Latin American sf more
generally, see Bell and Molina-Gaviln (13-15).
8. Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN (The Zapatista Army of
National Liberation) is a revolutionary leftist group based in Chiapas, the
southernmost state of Mexico. They are the non-violent voice of an anti-globalization
movement that seeks to equalize and defend the human rights and land privileges of
the indigenous populations of Mexicos interior.
9. Pitas and Sanchezs NIO recalls Guillermo Gmez-Peas Great
Transition in Friendly Cannibals, a 1997 cyberpunk novella that addresses, among
other things, the disappearance of national borders after NAFTA.
10. For trenchant and convincing critiques of racial tension and anxiety in
cyberpunk, see Ross (137-69) and Lowe (84-86).
11. As Catherine Ramirez has already pointed out, Chicanafuturism and
Afrofuturism are indeed fictive kin. This point is immediately brought to bear
toward the end of Lunar Braceros during one of Lydias many history lessons. In it,
she explains to Pedro the astronomical phenomenon known as dark matter, energy
that is not directly visible, but knowable because of its gravitational pull (110).
This reference is not insignificant or incidental: it is, I think, a very clear allusion to
Sheree Thomass Dark Matter, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction,
published in 2000.
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