Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  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 Grower’s 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 efficient—and, more importantly, invisible—Mexican 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 it’s as simple as point and click to pick. For the American farmer, it’s 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 Mexico’s indigenous population, once in control of over 80% of the nation’s natural resources, lives in abject poverty. Like Lavin, Rivera privileges a Northern Mexican site of production. More specifically, it is set in the sprawling border 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 family’s 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 Memo’s father, who is accidentally mistaken for an “aqua-terrorist”—an eco-activist of the future, so to speak.

  After his father’s 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 nation’s 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 film’s larger political context: multinational capitalism’s presence in the everyday lives of fronterizo workers whose very livelihood is problematically reliant upon—yet alienated by—the 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. Memo’s dreams of progress and futurity—symbolized by his love of technology earlier in the film—come 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 class—by 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 Memo’s 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 Rivera’s case, explicitly calls for a future modeled upon a history that has all but vanished under the demands of late capitalism.

  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 screenshot 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 Cybertek’s 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 36.1).

  Recalling Fragoso’s cyborg body, the image conveys an equally scathing critique of US consumerism’s demand for invisible—and therefore easily disposable—forms of intense physical labor. Moreover, Memo’s 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.

  Figure 36.1 “Cybracero” from Sleep Dealer (Copyright permission courtesy of Alex Rivera)

  As we saw in Lavín’s future history, Rivera’s 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 Lavín’s future dystopia, so too does Rivera weave suppressed colonial histories into his own dystopian borderlands narrative. This temporal interplay is especially pronounced in the film’s depiction of the “Mayan Army of Water Liberation,” a paramilitary band of eco-activists who represent the film’s 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 36.2).8

  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, Rivera’s reference to the EZLN gestures towards the possibility for counter-discourse and indigenous resistance. Just as Rivera’s film itself repurposes cinematic technologies to voice concerns over imperial power, so too did the EZLN—and the EMLA for that matter—appropriate new technologies (the internet communiqués) to do what so many classic dystopian characters have done. From Offred’s secret cassette recordings in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) to Lauren Olamina’s subversive Earthseed diaries in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), dystopian protagonists appropriate the oppressor’s language (a veritable technology) to “recover the ability to draw on . . . alternative truths of the past and ‘speak back’ to hegemonic power” (Moylan 149).

  Figure 36.2 The EMLA as signifier for EZLN in Sleep Dealer (Copyright permission courtesy of Alex Rivera)

  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 Braceros—like Lavín’s and Rivera’s work before it—is 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 laborers—all people of color and primarily Chicano/a—who 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 Earth’s 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 didn’t matter much. Same shit, different place” (19). Soon, the seven discover that the mining teams who arrived before them—whom, in fact, they were supposed to replace—were 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 novel’s 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 states”—the 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 Braceros—like Sleep Dealer an
d “Reaching the Shore”—presents 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 text’s 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 Lydia’s letters and emails (and, by extension, Pita’s and Sanchez’s 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 government’s 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 past—for 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, Lydia’s history lessons trace for her son Pedro not only the rise of global capitalist hegemony but also stories of resistance from the novel’s 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, it’ll all make some sense to [Pedro], fragmented though it may be” (58).