Critical Dystopias and Future-Histories
In science fiction narratives, a break with one world may imply the destruction of the world of others (such as those living on the margins), and as a result, dystopias and critical dystopias emerge[1]. Past desires for utopian spaces are often crushed by dystopian conditions. However, as José Esteban Muñoz states in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (1). Thus, I have chosen to bring three specific texts together to trace how immigration and labor practices have served as the basis for cognitive estrangement since the early 20th century novel as revealed in Venegas’s novel. The unraveling of this immigrant dream shapes the science fictional future-worlds envisioned by Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, and Alex Rivera. My aim is to demonstrate how two Latina/o science fiction texts operate as a critical dystopia through narratives that seek to critique the horrors of the present and the absence of a better world for minorities.
[1] My definition of dystopia and critical dystopia emerges from Tom Moylan’s Scraps of Untainted Sky. Moylan explains how capitalism’s reproduction of “utopia” has left tropes of dystopia “to represent and inform what critique and opposition remain” (187). Therefore, a critical dystopia serves as a tool to critique and offer alternatives to change the present system so that marginalized people can survive, but also create a social reality that is not determined by “enhancing competition in order to gain more profit for a select few” (189).
