Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  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 (Saldívar 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 fiction—the 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” (Anzaldúa 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 Lavín’s 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 búsqueda de un espejo fiel” [The Search for a Faithful Mirror], the editors—Don Webb of the US and Mauricio-José Schwarz of Mexico—frame 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 Juárez, 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 nation’s interior (see Romero 223). The story centers on eleven-year-old José 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 José Paul’s 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 (Lavín 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 story’s 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 Américo Paredes’s “The Hammon and the Beans” (wr. 1939, pub. 1963) and Rudolfo Anaya’s Heart of Aztlán (1976).5 Both narratives were written during times of Chicano/a political dissent, Paredes’s 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 Anaya’s—whose protagonist Clémente 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 Aztlán 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, Lavín’s 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 led—and continue to lead—to this grim future.

  Published in 1994, immediately following the ratification of NAFTA, the story’s 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 NAFTA’s signing, Mexican journalist Carlos Monsiváis criticized the utopian stance of the PRI (Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party), exemplified by Octavio Paz’s reference to NAFTA as “a chance finally for [Mexico] to be modern” (Fox 19). In his critique, Monsiváis 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). Monsiváis’s articles spoke in fact for an overwhelming number of Mexicans—including 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 José, free trade is, in Mexico, “the cause of all problems” (Lavín 227).

  Lavín’s laboring body is a cyborg body, the quintessential posthuman hybrid produced at the interse
ction of technology and humanity. His cyborg, however, functions metaphorically to symbolize not only the dehumanization involved in turning a man into a stoop laborer—a 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 Lavín 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). Lavín 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 Fragoso’s 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 Fragoso’s fatal addiction to a US consumer commodity, Lavín 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, Lavín recasts the futuristic cyborg as a colonized subject, one whose labor is extracted by US capitalism at the expense of Fragoso’s very humanity. Lavín’s colonized cyborg clearly departs from Donna Haraway’s 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 Haraway’s 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 becomes—in the borderlands narrative—nothing more than a politically-charged symbol for real-life labor practices under late capitalism.

  Lavín’s 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 Fragoso’s 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 Lavín’s border narrative. In their place is an image of the borderlands as a site of proliferated borders and rigid socioeconomic hierarchies. Lavín’s 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, Lavín 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, Lavín 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. Judith’s 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 Ameríco Paredes calls “a Border man” who heroically confronts Anglo dominance (With His Pistol 34). Lavín’s 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 globalization’s gulag” (Brennan 338), Lavín 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” precedes the actual surplus production of goods, turning the once arid terrain into a space ripe for rabid consumption and cheap labor production. For Lavín, 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 Lavín’s futuristic narrative both retells and contests by imagining new forms of “cyborg labor” that seem ominously doomed to repeat history without sustained political intervention (González 176).

  The conflation of history and the future is perhaps most readily apparent in Lavín’s 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 b
y slums due to rapid rural-to-urban migration” (271). Yet this horizontal urban sprawl also comes with tremendous depth—namely, the lost and buried histories of colonial rule and exploitation that perpetually haunt Lavín’s near future, which is also the reader’s defamiliarized present. This future city’s “once magnificent” river—the Rio Bravo that borders the US and Mexico—now looks more “like a dinosaur skeleton,” barely alive with all of its flesh “deserted” (Lavín 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 Anzaldúa’s description of the border as an “open wound” [una herida abierta], Lavín 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).