Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) illuminates the potential significance of farm workers in Star Wars. It focuses on the character of Memo, a young peasant farmer living in the interior of a near-future Mexico where water has been privatized and a large pipeline has been built to transport it to the United States. When a group of rebels emerges to fight water privatization, the United States launches a war on terror in Mexico, including attacks on suspected rebel strongholds by automated drones like those currently used in Pakistan. 

Near the beginning of the film, a military drone, remote-controlled from the U.S. by a Chicano soldier named Rudy, destroys Memo’s home and kills his father.  This tragedy turns Memo into a migrant who travels from his rural home to the border city of Tijuana. There he meets Luz, a sort of futuristic media maker who downloads other people’s memories and sells them on the equivalent of the Internet; she introduces Memo to a brave new world of work, helping him implant electronic nodes all over his body so that he can perform remote labor. Soon he has a job working for a company called Cybraceros, where is hooked up to cables and a sort of virtual reality mask, enabling him to operate, from Tijuana, construction bots in the United States. Meanwhile, Luz has been selling Memo’s memories on the Internet, where they come to the attention of Rudy the drone pilot, who, consumed with guilt, migrates to Mexico to find Memo and make amends. Together, the three characters break into Cybracero facilities and commandeer the technology in order to fly a drone to Memo’s village and destroy a massive, heavily guarded dam. 

As Rivera has explained, Sleep Dealers is partly a reworking of Star Wars, with the destruction of the dam standing in for the destruction of the Death Star.  Moreover, Memo’s character arc, in which an imperial army destroys his family’s farm and initiates his migration toward the center of the empire, recalls Luke’s odyssey.  Rivera’s reappropriation of Star Wars thus in turn suggests that the Skywalker story appropriates the structure of a migrant worker narrative for the story of the white farm boy, but rather than being based in the fields of Mexico, the imaginary world of Star Wars begins in the farm lands of California. According to Wired writer Steve Silberman, though filmed in Tunisia, the scenes of Luke’s home planet of Tatooine, where he initially lives on a small family farm with his aunt and uncle, were modeled on “the dusty Central Valley flatlands.”  However, in the film’s fantastic, revisionary reversal, the figure of the white farm boy occupies a position that more closely resembles that of a migrant farm worker. Landless and dispossessed, vulnerable to extreme forms of militarized police power, and forced by material conditions to leave home in order to survive, Luke’s story sounds like that of many farm workers. And yet in Star Wars, the noble white farm boy appropriates for agrarian populism the pathos of exploitation and marginalization that was previously attached to the farm worker movement. Or more precisely, Luke’s fate at the start of the film is made more tragic, and his ultimate rise more heroic, in part because he is a white farm boy who has fallen to the level of a migrant farm worker. This reading is supported by the analysis of THX 1138, which suggests a similar kind of racialized reversal, whereby the film’s white male hero experiences extreme forms of police violence that recall iconic period images of black and brown civil rights protesters being beaten by the police. And substituting an oppressed white farm boy for oppressed people of color recalls the contemporaneous emergence of discourses of reverse discrimination that rearticulated civil rights rhetoric in order to argue that state efforts to redress prior histories of inequality violated the rights of white men.  The early films of Lucas thus help make visible an influential historical shift from the social movements for radical transformation of the 1960s to an emergent neoconservative reaction of tactical reversals.