Agribusiness and farm worker futurisms are illuminated by science-fiction literature and film that extrapolates future worlds from histories of California corporate agriculture. As a genre partly defined by curiosity about technology, futuristic social orders, and emigration to new worlds, science fiction has often found inspiration in high-tech agribusiness, with its massive machinery of authoritarian social control and vast army of migrant workers, strangers in a strange land.

Mexican migrant workers are the protagonists of three recent works, the films Sleep Dealer by Alex Rivera and The Gate Keeper (2002) by John Carlos Frey, as well as the 2009 novella Lunar Braceros by Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sanchez.

By displacing farm workers and agribusiness in time and space, these science fictions generate forms of “cognitive estrangement,” or a dialectic between historical social realities and another, imaginary world that suggests a critical interpretation of the limits of the actual world.

All three works represent future scenarios where capitalists control new high-tech production facilities that reproduce older forms of migrant labor exploitation familiar from the history of California agriculture even as they suggest comparison to contemporary prisons and immigration detention centers. They foreground migrant workers who are subject to extreme forms of violence and control at the hands of state and corporate forces, thereby offering visions of the future that estrange common-sense representations of farming as pastoral and the source of democratic freedoms. Instead, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the “farm fascism” that McWilliams diagnosed in the late 1930s. Such works of speculative fiction retrospectively sound the death knell for prior moments of agribusiness futurism by representing near and distant futures where technology has not replaced workers but expanded their exploitation.