gonzalez latino sci-fi

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 CH AP TER 13 Latino Sci- Fi: Cogn ition and Nar rative Design in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer   Christopher Gonzá  lez Sleep Dealer is my first film. It’s not anything like a Star Wars or a Blade Runner. In many ways it’s a humble f ilm. But it’s also an hon- est attempt to use science-fiction to say something new, and something true, about our world today. —Alex Rivera, press kit for Sleep Dealer  What is science f iction (sci-fi), and why a re there s o few such work s cre- ated by Latinos in the United States? While the first part of my ques- tion has already been explored in excellent detail by pioneering scholars such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, and Brooks Landon, the second part both taunts and tantalizes. The most direct answer suggests the mystery surrounding the relative absence of sci-fi in Latino/a fiction. Eric Ga rcia’s The Repossession Mambo  (2009) and Junot Díaz’s tentatively titled Monstro  indicate that despite the signif icant forays into sci-fi worlds by Latinos, their numbers remain remarkably low. This state of Latino/a sci-fi is made all the more curious because, as Philippe Mather has argued, “the genre’s distinctive traits are not tied to formal , aesthetic, or stylist ic criteria but rather to thematic and cont extua l factors” (186). While Mather specifically explores the sci-fi film genre, he situat es his claim withi n the larger assert ion that narrative devices and formal aspects that authors use to construct sci-fi story worl ds are in gen- eral not inherently un ique to the genre. As th is observat ion applies to my own exploration of Latino/ a sci-fi, t he implication is that the nar ratology 9781137366450_15_ch13 indd 211 9781137366450_15_ch13.indd 211 8/29/2013 5:19:32 PM 8/29/2013 5:19:32 PM

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C H A P T E R 1 3

Latino Sci-Fi: Cognition and NarrativeDesign in Alex Rivera’sSleep Dealer

Christopher Gonzá lez

Sleep Dealer is my first film. It’s not anything like a Star Wars or aBlade Runner. In many ways it’s a humble f ilm. But it’s also an hon- est attempt to use science-fiction to say something new, and somethingtrue, about our world today.

—Alex Rivera, press kit for Sleep Dealer

What is science fiction (sci-fi), and why are there so few such works cre-ated by Latinos in the United States? While the first part of my ques-tion has already been explored in excellent detail by pioneering scholarssuch as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, and Brooks Landon, the secondpart both taunts and tantalizes. The most direct answer suggests themystery surrounding the relative absence of sci-fi in Latino/a fiction.Eric Garcia’s The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Junot D íaz’s tentativelytitled Monstro indicate that despite the signif icant forays into sci-fi worlds

by Latinos, their numbers remain remarkably low.This state of Latino/a sci-fi is made all the more curious because, asPhilippe Mather has argued, “the genre’s distinctive traits are not tied toformal, aesthetic, or stylistic criteria but rather to thematic and contextualfactors” (186). While Mather specifically explores the sci-fi film genre,he situates his claim within the larger assertion that narrative devices andformal aspects that authors use to construct sci-fi storyworlds are in gen-eral not inherently unique to the genre. As this observation applies to myown exploration of Latino/a sci-fi, the implication is that the narratology

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212 CHRISTOPHER GONZÁLEZ

behind the design of sci-fi storyworlds (either in literature or on f ilm)—the blueprinting techniques that orient audience reconstruction of thenarrative discourse—can be found in other forms of storytelling. Thus,the lack of a Latino/a sci-fi tradition is not a matter of narrative tech-nique or design; it is a matter of thematics.

Gregory E. Rutledge has explored a similar issue in the African American literary tradition. As he remarks, “[d]espite the growing num-ber of Black FFF [futurist fiction and fantasy] writers, the proportion ofBlack FFF authors to White FFF authors is dismal. This disproportionmeans that Black FFF authors have a limited presence in the industry”(236). Though my essay does not seek to excavate a complete accounting

for the lack of a Latino/a tradition of sci-fi in the United States the wayRutledge’s essay does, the matter nevertheless provides significant impe-tus for my study of how Latino/a sci-fi—and specifically through themedium of film—can invite audiences to reframe current sociopoliticalissues that have traditionally been articulated in ways that seek to docu-ment the experiences of Latinos. Indeed, the dominant commonalityshared by the majority of Latino/a literature and f ilm is a cultural didac-ticism that strives to represent Latino/a experience in both fiction andnonfiction. The Latino imagination is now poised to take up the sci-figenre in earnest as never before.

Accordingly, as Latinos continue to venture into varied forms of mul-timedia, as this collection of essays demonstrates, one thing that strikesme as fascinating is how much time has passed before Latinos began cre-ating storyworlds rooted in sci-fi. Af ter all, the elements of worldmaking,in the form of narrative devices, all are generated in the imagination ofthe human mind. This assertion helps keep in sight a crucial aspect of myessay: namely, that the narratological components of sci-fi (or any basicingredient of storytelling, for that matter) can be used by any writer ordirector, regardless of their racial, ethnic, or cultural background.

Moreover, a storytelling genre such as science fiction can be used as ameans of emphasizing those unsalable characteristics of a society, as writ-

ers such as George Orwell demonstrated so well in his classic dystopiannovel Nineteen Eighty-Four and his enduring portrayal of totalitarianpower in the ubiquitous Big Brother. In my essay, I argue that the sci-fimode of storytelling has particular relevance to many issues faced byLatinos today, such as immigration, employment, and both political andeconomic clout. These issues rest on a foundation of human designation.That is to say, once it becomes perfectly acceptable to speak of humans (inthis case, Latinos) as if they were not human, the easier it is to deny themof basic civil and human rights. Alex Rivera’s (2007) film Sleep Dealer isan excellent case study that reminds its audience that Latinos must resist

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LATINO SCI FI 213

adopting a mechanized consciousness that makes it all too easy to seeoneself as exploitable and expendable as a machine ( Figure 13.1 ).

S - W RCreators of sci-fi are often touted for their ability to somehow predictsocietal or technological trends. For instance, the Science Channel’sProphets of Science Fiction , hosted by director Ridley Scott, examines the

visionary qualities of such sci-fi luminaries such as H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and others, and how their imagined storyworldssomehow presaged many of the technologies enjoyed today. But sci-fifills another important role in society, one that highlights either actualor potential ethical concerns that manifest in society. Asimov, as but oneexample, is often credited with implicitly stating certain ethical rules with

which all of the robots in his storyworlds must comply. These so-calledthree laws of robotics outline robot behavior—what they can and cannotdo—reflect ethical concerns in our actual society. The robot laws remindus of the myriad difficult situations humans must negotiate, and often

violate, every day. Dominic Idier, bringing together Asimov’s work with William Gibson’s, reminds us of the unique relationship between tech-nology and society, “[t]echnology and society cannot be easily separated,especially when the consequences of technology are studied. Too manypeople confuse ‘technical feasibility’ with actual technology. Technologyitself results from socio-political choices and usually reflects faithfully a

Figure 13.1 Luis Fernando Pe ña as Memo Cruz working as virtua l laborer inSleep Dealer.

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214 CHRISTOPHER GONZÁLEZ

society and its culture” (256). Advances and developments in technol-ogy invariably affect society at large in signif icant ways, as the advent ofthe Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and so-called smartphones has revealed.Idier continues:

Scenario technique is a tool for helping one to think about the consequencesof present decisions and to prepare for a changing environment. But doesn’ta serious science fiction (SF) story have the same purpose? In fact, the SFstory can go further, not only because of its environment or breadth of plotbut because an SF author is not afraid to break norms and established para-digms or cultures in order to explore human motivations and creations. Inaddition, characters are used in SF stories so that readers can project them-

selves into the stories. Such emotional involvement is absent from scenarios.It is certainly more difficult to control but probably more rewarding withrespect to the future of actual human organisations and societies. (259)

Idier aims to demonstrate how sci-fi stories can yield insights into futuresequences that the technique of positing certain scenarios cannot. Thoughthe scenario technique is used “to think about how a particular situation andits consequences may occur and how they can be handled” (258), Idier seesthe value in creating a fully realized storyworld where technology advancesplay out in a far richer environment than the rather sterile scenario.

I agree with Idier’s argument that sci-fi stories can help us think aboutand anticipate trends and trajectories of technological development asthey relate to sociopolitical environments. However, I would add thatone of the strengths of science fiction is to not only reflect how imag-ined societies have developed certain technologies but also how thesetechnologies have impacted the fictional societies in which they reside.Moreover, audiences must necessarily draw comparisons between thesociety of the sci-fi story and the social environment that serves as a basisfor comparison. Such comparisons are continuous when reading sci-filiterature or viewing sci-fi films, thanks in large part to what Marie-Laure Ryan identif ies as the principle of minimal departure , which states

that audiences will assume the fictional world in question is the same asthe actual world until they have reason to believe otherwise. Because asci-fi world is a possible world where certain aspects generally taken forgranted must now be monitored by the audience, one of the outcomes ofreconstructing the sci-fi storyworld is its heightened level of comparisonto the actual world. This assertion is relevant to my examination of SleepDealer , a film that compels its audience to go back and forth between thesci-fi storyworld and early twenty-first-century United States.

This interaction among audience, the f ictional world, and the actual world is of particular interest, especially when we think of the immersive

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quality of narrative fiction and film. In Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993), Richard Gerrig theorizes how narrative has the ability to trans-port readers and how this function of reading narrative impacts readers’own conception of the world. The so-called real-world effect of experienc-ing narrative worlds, for Gerrig, “emerges as an experiential category notthrough a passive wholesale suspension of disbelief but, rather, throughactive scrutiny of the particular information proffered in fictions” (207).

As sci-fi worlds emanate from an understanding of the actual world,audiences often are led to consider some aspects of the real world in anew light. In fact, Darko Suvin, building on Viktor Shklovsky’s conceptof ostranenie (translated as the neologism, enstrangement), has argued

that science fiction’s most potent property is its ability to make familiarconcepts new once more to audiences (Fitting, paraphrase 135–136).If fictional worlds enable audiences to see their own realities in new

ways, with sci-fi world being part icularly vested with the potential tomake strange habituated experiences and worldviews among the audi-ences, what can we make of the union of Latino/a literature and sci-fihold in twenty-first-century US fiction? Specifically, what can Rivera’sSleep Dealer tell us about sci-fi and current political debates surroundingissues of Latinidad?

L / E S -First of all, it is a misconception to think that Latinos are uninterested ingenre fiction. Just as Latino/a authors and filmmakers are influenced bytheir counterparts in United States and Latin American narrative tradi-tions, the same might be said of those working in the sci-fi genre of story-telling. The sci-fi tradition in the United States is well documented, andthe Latin American sci-fi tradition is in the process of being recovered,thanks in large measure to Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavil án’santhology of Latin American sci-fi, Cosmos Latinos (2003). What allowsthis falsity, that is, that Latinos don’t engage with science fiction, to per-

sist is the relatively miniscule corpus of works. Yet as I mentioned earlier,the powers-that-be in the publishing industry play a large role in this as well. Even rarer is the Latino sci-fi film. In this case, just as in the produc-tion of Latino/a sci-fi literature, US sci-fi cinema dominates other nationsin the sheer size and scope of the industry. But there has also been a flour-ishing Latin American sci-fi industry, as Mariano Paz explains:

Sf cinema is undeniably dominated by the American film industry, at leastin Western countries and since the end of World War II. Not only are themajority of sf films released each year produced in the US, but many of

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them are Hollywood blockbusters made with the biggest of budgets, whilenations with very rich cinematic histories, such as France and Italy, havemade comparatively few contributions to the genre. There is, however, anot-insignificant corpus of sf cinema produced in Latin America. Thesefilms have mostly been ignored by critics and academics, both nationallyand internationally, and only in the past few years have they begun to showsigns of being rediscovered. (81)

Like Latin American sci-fi writings, Latin American sci-fi cinema is alsoundergoing the process of recovery and reconsideration.

My point here is to emphasize, or rather dispel the notion that Latino

authors and filmmakers do not see sci-fi as an interesting and useful modeof storytelling. As Latinos continue to grow as a subset of the US popula-tion, and as more and more Latinos signal a more divergent appetite forpopular culture, there can only be an increased production of Latino sci-fi

works of fiction and films in the United States. Filmmakers such as Riveraand Robert Rodriguez, and even Mexican director Guillermo del Toro,have helped carve out a space for Latinos in the cinematic sci-fi landscape.

To be sure, Latino literature and film, by and large, also concentrateon societal concerns as they impact and relate to the Latino commu-nity. Indeed, Latino literature seeks to document or represent the Latinoexperience in the United States by telling barrio bildungsroman, so much

so that such narratives have become heavy-handed tropes. That is why Ifind the dearth of storytelling that unites issues of Latinidad and sci-fi sostriking; the two are overwhelmingly complementary. This lack of Latinosci-fi narratives is steadily being addressed, as Samuel Saldivar’s essay onthe short-lived television show The Event and also Caprica in this vol-ume indicates. As a welcomed addition to the corpus of Latino/a sci-fi,Rivera’s Sleep Dealer effectively brings together the often-technologicallydeprived environs of the barrio with the high-tech world of drone war-fare and virtual experience.

Rivera, a New York-based director, received positive recognition forSleep Dealer ’s premiere at the Sundance Festival in 2008. His short butimpressive body of films shows that Rivera has often sought to unitecutting-edge and near-future technology with issues of concern to theLatino community. Papapap á (1995) and Why Cyberbraceros? (1997) areshort works that both graft virtual technologies onto matters of immi-gration and labor. Ostensibly, these works led to the fruition of SleepDealer. As an independent filmmaker with limited resources with whichto build the mega-dollar special effects that most audiences have come toexpect from Hollywood blockbusters, Rivera must rely on the ingenuityof his creativity to design a rich, immersive storyworld for his audience.

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In short, Sleep Dealer rises above its budgetary constraints, in large mea-sure because of Rivera’s design and what Frederick Luis Aldama terms“will to style”—a commitment to willfully designing narrative worldsthat seek to move audiences while eschewing simplistic conventions ofstorytelling (138–40).

N D S LEEP D EALER As with many sci-fi narratives, Sleep Dealer is ultimately concerned withunderscoring the precious nature of our humanity by urging its idealaudience to recognize how memories, virtual experience, and proxy

experience are very much tethered to a Latino’s position in society—notonly in Rivera’s storyworld but in our own actual world. Sleep Dealer opens with a shot of Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Pe ña) at work as a“sleep dealer”—a unskilled laborer who performs the work of a machineboth remotely and virtually for so many hours on end that he or she fallsasleep from exhaustion. As Memo begins his voice-over narration, theaudience sees him with a mask over half of his face and fluorescent-bluetubes connected directly onto several sites on his body. As Memo strug-gles to stay awake, snatches of his memories flash quickly on the screen.The juxtaposition of those images of him as a sleep dealer with thosethat show him outside of this context is a powerful thesis that the rest ofthe f ilm articulates. As a sleep dealer, Memo becomes a virtual machine,complete with a dehumanizing mask, clouded eyes, and connected to the

worker–computer interface. He is free of volition while he performs theunskilled work of a machine in another country. Yet his memories showhim in his most human contexts: as son and as brother. The balancebetween machine and human is at the heart of Memo’s story.

One of the key choices in Rivera’s narrative blueprint for Sleep Dealer ,other than the important decision to locate the majority of his film’s set-ting in Mexican spaces, is his avoidance of showing virtual technologyas a means of escapist entertainment. Memo, Luz, and Ramirez all use

virtual technology for economic and materialistic outcomes. In other words, though it is implied that American consumers have an appetite forso-identified Third World experiences (as demonstrated via Luz’s sale ofher experiences with Memo, unbeknownst to him), the Latinos in SleepDealer use such technology as just another means of profiting from theirown labor. Unlike both versions of Total Recall (1990, 2012) based onPhilip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”

where virtual technology enables an escape from the tedium of reality,Sleep Dealer has much more in common with William Gibson’s 1983novel Neuromancer.

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on people’s conversations regarding “n ódos,” the nodes or ports on thebody where humans can connect to vir tual worlds. Like most youths hisage, Memo wishes to leave home and enter into the world more thananything else.

As the name of his hometown indicates, there is a life-sustaining rivernear Memo’s home. But the river has been dammed by the United States,and is protected by weaponized drones and remote firearms. Water canonly be purchased at an ever-escalating price. The one source of enter-tainment, besides Memo’s homemade radio that intercepts voice trans-missions, is an outrageous reality show titled Drones! that puts militaryoperations featuring drones and their remote pilots at the front and cen-

ter. The show’s premise is to deliver audiences the dehumanizing murderof “terrorists” as ratings-driven entertainment. This show literally merges with Memo’s world, as his radio interceptions, due to their proximity tothe heavily fortified dam, is interpreted by the US military as a terroristthreat. Memo and his brother watch live on television the drone strikethat culminates in the destruction of their home and the cold-bloodedmurder of their father.

This scene launches the two main character arcs in Sleep Dealer :Memo’s pursuit of wage-earning work in the aftermath of the droneattack that killed his father, and Rudy Ramirez, the US pilot of the verydrone strike that murdered Memo’s father. Both Memo and Ramirezmust deal with the dehumanizing technology that enables vir tual controlof machines. Memo begins as a human character that is forced to take up

work as a machine (and, in essence, struggles to maintain his humanity), while Ramirez is introduced as a pilot in a darkened room with a pilot’smask and helmet that completely obscures his face. At the culminationof the incursion that leads to Memo’s father’s death, Ramirez immedi-ately senses the wrongness of his act, and as the f ilm later reveals, worksto atone for his inhuman act. Memo, as a sleep dealer, and Ramirez,as a drone pilot, are both robbed of volition and free will. Both mustresist their emotion systems (Ramirez especially) and “act” in the same

cold manner as the machines they essentially become. But, ironically, themachines actually control (or suppress) the emotions of these two men.

D B BOf course, the issue of labor practices is evident in the characters of Memoand Ramirez. One of the most salient problems in the immigrationdebate has to do with the difficult work undocumented workers oftenperform in the United States. Make no mistake, undocumented workersand immigrants are often led to such labor-intensive work because it is so

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strenuous and pays so little. The migrant workers who perform such dif-ficult labor in the United States do not have benefits or health insurance,nor do they enjoy the otherwise-standard hiring and f iring practices. As

Angela C. Stuesse explains:

For migrants seeking employment, the passage of IRCA made it illegal tobe hired without “papers,” bolstering ever-growing black markets in therealms of document falsif ication, identity theft, and under-the-table thirdparty labor contracting. Undocumented migrants in the United Statesare more vulnerable today than ever before: paying hundreds of dollarsfor jobs, promotions, and sick leave so that management will continuechoosing to look the other way; enduring low wages and poor workingconditions due to the uncertainty of being hired elsewhere; and sufferingcrippling workplace injuries without adequate medical care or compensa-tion because employers refuse to report the injuries to appropriate agenciesand their insurance carriers, just to name a few. (27)

Such workers do not have paid time off or vacation days. They are oftenpaid in cash while they move from state to state as the crops dictate. TheUnited States, as a result, is in the untenable position of decrying theinf lux of undocumented workers while exploiting them strictly for theirability to perform hard labor. Rivera pounces on this fact in order to cre-ate a storyworld in which technology has enabled the United States tomake full use of a Mexican’s capacity to do work while using the sametechnology to keep those workers’ bodies off of US soil. As all goodsci-fi demonstrates, the advanced technology depicted is not of centralconcern to the story; it is the consequences of such technology on ourhumanity that should make audiences sit up and take notice.

As I have argued elsewhere, one of the dangers of exploitative laborpractices—particularly as they affect undocumented workers—is that theymay inculcate the acceptance of the dehumanization of unskilled laborers(“Resisting”). Of course, labor unions have helped ameliorate this deplor-able situation in the United States, and C ésar Chavez is celebrated for

his efforts in unionizing the farm workers of the United States in the1960s and 1970s. But, in the ever-escalating debate on illegal immigra-tion, increased deportations under the Obama Administration, and pas-sage of anti-illegal immigration laws in states such as Alabama’s HB 56and Arizona’s SB 1070, undocumented workers shrink into unobtrusivesilence as a result. There is a tacit agreement that is ongoing in the UnitedStates regarding its undocumented workers that suggests the UnitedStates wants, and arguably needs the labor of these workers but does not

wish to acknowledge the workers’ humanity. Many in the United Statesdesire machines that do not require legal status, living wages, or human

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dignity. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for undocumented workers toadopt a mechanized consciousness where they see themselves as machine-like without human rights and dignity.

Rivera highlights the fault line where human consciousness and mech-anized consciousness meet in two key scenes. I have already mentioned inone of these scenes—the scene in which Rivera is compelled to disregardhis human instinct to preserve human life and fire upon Memo’s father.In this scene, Ramirez’s personal narrative (his human story) takes cen-tral position in the reality show of which he is the focus. The show’sfictional audience, as well as the film’s audience, comes to understandRamirez at a personal level. As the pilot of a drone, the show casts him

in the role of the hero who purpose is to “kill the hell out of the badguys.” Ramirez’s brief backstory, while functioning as nationalist propa-ganda intended to justify murder and imperialism for the f ictional show’screators, works as a humanizing device for Rivera’s audience that com-plicates his mission as a drone pilot. Ramirez, depicted as a patriot andgood son, is given a justification for the hesitation he experiences whenhe completes his mission. His emotions are just barely held in check bythe urging of the faceless voice of a commanding officer that convincesRamirez that the target is a terrorist. Ramirez, in having to disregard thehumanity of his target, must himself undergo a dehumanizing deforma-tion, if only temporarily. Further, because Rivera has already introducedMemo’s father as a man whose livelihood as a farmer has been destroyedby US imperialist policies and a fight against terrorism, Sleep Dealer ’sideal audience is primed to see him as a human whose right to existhave been violated. And for a moment, we see Memo’s father throughRamirez’s eyes just before he fires. We empathize, then, when Ramirezmakes his sincere attempt to seek out Memo in an effort to make amends.Despite the orders of his superiors, Ramirez resists completely crossingover into mechanized consciousness by attempting to atone for his errorin ethical judgment.

The second scene is a brief but stunning set piece in Sleep Dealer . In

it, Memo works as a sleep dealer performing high-rise construction workas a welding robot. Throughout the scene, Rivera allows the audienceto see what Memo sees as he does his work via remote. He is able touse his body, via his nodal connections, to manipulate the constructionmachine as if he were the machine. As a mirrored window is set intoplace, Memo is able to see himself as the machine. Rivera cuts back andforth between the shot of Memo and the shot of the machine. In thismoment, the human-as-machine metonym becomes literal. Memo works23-hour shifts, often to the point of exhaustion. And in a later scene,another sleep dealer is seriously injured on the job. Memo’s first reaction

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is to try to help his co-worker, but the shift supervisor quickly whisksthe fallen worker out of the area and out of sight. Rivera reinforces inhis audience the idea that the sleep dealers are expendable. That is to say,their bodies are expendable. Once a worker’s body can no longer expendthe energy to power and control the remote machines, they are promptlydispatched. Memo comes to understand that, like the river that once pro-

vided life and sustenance to Santa Ana Del Rio before it was harnessed bythe United States, his own body is being sapped of its energy in order tofeed the appetites of the nation to his north. In short, his corporeal selfand its kinetic potential is just another national export.

Rivera poses an interesting proposition in his film that comes in the

form of a sci-fi technology: the nodal interface. The promise of eco-nomic gain is one benefit to having the nodes, but the nodes are noteasily attained. In Sleep Dealer , the nodes function similarly to the typicaltrope of border crossing that is often seen in narratives that depict theUS–Mexico border. In these traditional border narratives, as in the actual

world, those who wish to make the dangerous crossing often enlist theaid of the often-dubious coyotes —individuals who generally exploit and

violate the vulnerable border crossers. Similarly, those who are able toprovide people like Memo with nodes are labeled coyoteks . Once the nodesare attained, people may use them as a delivery system not only for drugsand alcohol, but also for monetary gain. Luz, Memo’s love interest in thefilm, not only performs the procedure that gives Memo his nodes but alsobetrays him by selling the memories of her experiences with him.

While Memo feels used by Luz’s sale of their shared experiences, theaudience sees this as yet another manifestation of the dehumanizingpotential inherent in the nodal technology. Memo’s very existence, likethe reality television show mentioned earlier, can be purchased as a formof entertainment by people nations away. Consistently throughout SleepDealer , Memo is exposed to situations that erode at the edifice of hishumanity. And, as Ramirez is the impetus that begins Memo’s steadyloss of humanity, and vice versa, Rivera inevitably has the two characters

join forces in the f inal third of the film. Indeed, Memo and Rivera arelike two sides of the same coin: They are both devoted Latino sons, theyare both dutiful and hardworking, yet they reside on opposite sides ofthe border. And while their small victory restores the flow of the river toSanta Ana Del Rio, Rivera resists a neat ending. The nodal technologythat enabled many of the problems introduced in the film still exist byits close, and there is no indication that Memo will do anything but con-tinue his work as a sleep dealer. Ramirez, traitor to the US fight againstaqua-terrorism, must continue south, moving ever farther away from thefamily he left behind.

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LATINO SCI FI 223

In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate how sci-fi can be usedto reframe issues of concern to the Latino/a community in the UnitedStates. Despite of the small number of examples of sci-fi films by andabout Latinos, the time is ripe for a burgeoning for storytelling of thiskind. Directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Alex Rivera are poised tocontinue the momentum they have already achieved by continuing todelve into all forms of filmic narrative. There is no type of storytellinggenre that cannot be taken up by Latinos, and the result of such ambi-tions and endeavors will yield an audience that is receptive to all man-ners of storytelling engaged by Latinos. Rivera’s Sleep Dealer , despite theseeming constraint of the independent filmmaker’s budget, takes virtual

technology and body-to-computer interfaces—now traditional tropes ofsci-fi—and recasts it to highlight ethical concerns of the undocumentedand immigrant labor force in the United States. The erasure of a willfulbody and the preeminence of a machine-like mentality—a mechanizedconsciousness that places the labor value of one’s self above all else—isnot simply a sci-fi device. Rather, Rivera’s narrative blueprint embossesthis often-unacknowledged worldview necessarily adopted by undocu-mented workers in the United States. In this instance, it is Sleep Dealer ,a creative work of sci-fi, which invites audiences to inhabit its storyworldand pay heed to the silent exploitation of actual brown bodies.