The dream of labor discipline and control represented by such spectacles is a durable one, reappearing in IH exhibits in the early 1960s in the form of "Tracto" the talking robot. In its promotional materials the company often photographed white children and women posed next these mechanical Mexican farm workers. (Similarly, young white women were often photographed riding IH technology, perhaps suggesting the extent to which for agribusiness, such "labor saving" machinery served as literal and symbolic replacements for farm workers.) Remarkably these images appeared at moments of heightened farm worker militancy and in historical contexts where working-class men of color have often been constructed as sexual threats to white women. By contrast, the photos imagine workers of the near future that pose no danger to white women and children because they combine both labor and sexual discipline. Rather than challenging the norms of patriarchal white heterosexuality, the farm worker bots actually promise to serve them. 

Ernesto Galarza’s 1977 study Farm Workers and Agri-business in California, 1947–1960 anticipates Sleep Dealer’s near-future dystopia, telling the story of how agribusiness corporations mechanized production in order to discipline farm workers and destroy their unions, including the local of the National Farm Workers Union (NFWU) that Galarza helped organize in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After World War II, he argues, automatic machines began ”taking over” in the orchards and fields, using electronic “brains” and “eyes” to plant, tend, harvest, and sort produce. Particularly striking for Galarza were the mechanized cotton pickers that, along with their “mechanical partners” the cotton “planter-cultivator” and “the scrapper that salvaged un-harvested bolls,” moved “in formation sweeping through hundreds of acres of cotton fluff like a rumbling herd of trunkless elephants.” By 1950 there were over 1,400 mechanical cotton pickers in the Central Valley, which from Galarza’s perspective looked like ‘“an assembly out of science fiction.’” Indeed, mechanical cotton harvesters recall period representations of robots and space vehicles and vice-versa, suggesting that in its self-promotion agribusiness produced a futuristic visual culture of technological progress that overlapped with Cold War science fiction.