Sleep Dealer inverts the aerial norms of agribusiness futurism in ways that condense longer histories in which Mexican migrant workers have appropriated technologies of time/space compression in general, and flying machines in particular. Recalling Star Wars and the destruction of the Death Star, in the climax of Sleep Dealer a Chicano soldier based in San Diego flies an automated drone into Mexico to destroy a heavily guarded private dam that is depriving local peasant farmers of water. Here two icons of agribusiness technological “progress,” the dam and the plane, are represented as weapons of the US empire enforcing the privatization of common resources. The film concludes, however, with a utopian fantasy of seizing technology from below, in opposition to state-supported corporate enclosures. A related fantasy animates Rivera’s Internet-based project “LowDrone,” which invites visitors to remotely control “the world’s first aerial lowrider armed with video surveillance capabilities” and fly it over the border fence from Tijuana to the United States.

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