In literature, Alejandro Morales’s Rag Doll Plagues (1991) and Ernest Hogan’s High-Aztech (1992)-both uncannily similar to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)-depart from their Anglo counterparts by relocating the familiar cyberpunk cityscape to south of the border.Ĭhicana feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval have turned to science fiction as well to theorize Chicano/a subjectivity in the postmodern era. Whereas Gomez-Pena’s “ethno-cyborgs” dramatized the ways in which mass-media technologies simultaneously criminalize and police brown bodies (see Dangerous 45-57, 246-60), Ortiz Torres’s 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 US national borders” (Chavoya 157). Visual and performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Rubén Ortiz Torres, for instance, militated against anti-immigration racism in the Southland area by creating sf narratives of resistance and parody. The post- movimiento 1990s saw a far more pronounced interest in science fiction-more specifically, the subgenre cyberpunk-in Chicano art and literature. In Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 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. 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). Lysa Rivera Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction after NAFTAįor 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.
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