Xerox Men: Technological Tropes In U.S. Latino/A Displacement Literature

As technology becomes ever more central to the migration process in both its movement-enabling (planes, trains, automobiles) and gatekeeping aspects (biometric passports, X-ray scanners at the border), its ubiquity has complicated our notion of the geographic boundary. What we traditionally conceived of as a liminal site has been relocated within—as in airports, "internalizing the frontier between domestic and foreign spaces" (Hart 2015, 175)—and without, as in the multiplication of maquiladoras¹ in northern Mexico. Along with the opportunities for virtual movement afforded by our increasingly networked existence, this new landscape has served as a deep well of inspiration for first—and second—generation Latin American transplant artists who are updating exilic literary tropes through their intersection with technology, hoping to conceptualize the feeling of being not-at-home—that is, of a traumatic external (geographic or physical) dislocation that ostensibly brings about an internal (mental process) disruption. It is at the cusp of this technological moment that Ilan Stavans' short story "Xerox Man" (2000) and Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer (2008) are situated, both emblematic examples of such a renewal. The former narrates the networking of an individual through copier machines; the latter through a dystopian form of telecommuting near the U.S.-Mexico border. Technology as means of both communication (connection) and isolation (destruction) stages an ageold dialectic that characterizes most exile writing, but this time with a twist: What is it about technology that, in the era of ever-constant mediation, can succesfully convey the alienation or distance of an exiled character? And what can the experience of dislocation tell us about our own relationship to technology?

My treatment of exilic representation will be limited to exploring how transplants who have been severed from what they perceive to be their point of origin—including émigrés, expatriates, seasonal laborers, etc.—engage with the technological, which in turn alleviates or intensifies their sense of fragmentation. More specifically, I am interested in how the literary depiction of this interaction serves as a trope, typically conveying a painful detachment from the new society and the now-imagined old one, but often carrying more complex symbolic significance upon closer examination. It is not my intention to disregard or downplay the very real political stakes of exile studies and its activist discourse, nor to claim that all migratory experiences can be understood to be equally disruptive. I am interested in what literary depictions of exile, broadly understood, can tell us about our contemporary understanding of dislocation: how it is experienced, how it is communicated, and how it is ultimately resolved, or not. Rather than watering down the exilic metaphor, I hope to uncover some of the ways in which it is reaching new audiences, in many cases more powerfully than ever before. Further, I do not wish to downplay the double-edged potential in representing an imagined, disempowered subject, as well as the contradictory tensions inherent in exilic literature: "separation as desire, perspective as witness, alienation as new being," as Michael Seidel puts it (1986, x). Understood as a system, dislocation commands both gain and loss, neither ever fully fixed, reversing course at every turn.

In fact, many of the foundational figures of exile studies have exalted the intellectual possibilities of geographic disruption. Homi Bhabha situates his personal project in the margins of cultural displacement (1994, 21), where the Third Space can question hegemonic representation. Edward Said has declared that intellectual liberation depends upon the "unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies whose incarnation today is the migrant" (1994, 332). In Latin American theorizations, Fernando Ortíz's seminal concept of transculturación introduces the notion of blending, where cultural elements from the outside are adopted after running them through a local filter (in such a scenario, the exiled intellectual's contributions would be incorporated under the receiving culture's terms). Claudio Guillén (1995), on the other hand, chooses to approach exile literature by differentiating between texts that mourn, emphasizing loss, and those that propose an overcoming. Perhaps most useful for the purposes of this analysis is Sophia McClennen's understanding of...