The American Southwest and Biotechnology: The Future of Chicana/o Culture in Mexican American Cyberpunk

Logan, an installment of the X-Men franchise released in 2017, tells a border-crossing narrative of mutant children who escaped from Alkali-Transigen, an American biomedical research center in Mexico City. Scientists at the center, under the guise of a pediatric cancer study, are experimenting with weaponizing cloned mutants through clinical tests, which is illegal in the United States and Canada. They use Mexican women as surrogate mothers to raise “semilas geneticas, special seeds in bottles.” The film’s metaphoric representation of the social standings of ethnic minorities is nothing especially new, as previous works from the X-Men franchise interrogated issues of race in the United States through human-mutant war narratives. The gene cloning and manipulation of mutants in Logan, however, is worth noting in the sense that the film locates the mutant narrative in a historically and geographically specific context, the American Southwest.

Placing Logan in the political context of the American Southwest makes it possible to see Alkali-Transigen, an institution set up to support the biopolitical militarism of the United States in the film, as an allusion to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Designed to solve the national security challenges of the United States, Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary science institutions in the world that runs a nuclear power and weapons research center. The laboratory has made the area the U.S.’s biggest dumping ground since the Manhattan Project’s first atomic experiment in 1945, causing chemical contamination, spreading infectious diseases, and, in general, contributing to energy insecurity.¹ Logan’s depiction of the area mirrors the historically specific backdrop of the Southwest in notable ways. In the opening scene, a radio broadcaster mentions “poisoned water” as one of the relevant causes regarding the mutant issue; later in the film, when the protagonist first meets a fugitive mutant child from Alkali-Transigen, he sees a newspaper article titled “Lack of Mutant Births Stump[s] Researchers: Is Something in the Water?” Such descriptions of the borderlands as a biomedically contaminated place in Logan can be understood as manifestations of anxiety and mistrust over the current political situation of the border area.

The biotechnology and political conflicts depicted in Logan illuminate a recent trend in American popular culture wherein science fiction tropes are employed to capture the border experience.² Such depictions invite us to see the cultural productions in this area as important windows onto cultural encounters and racial otherness in the twenty-first-century United States more broadly. This article explores different cultural texts representing the shifting political and cultural milieu of U.S. nationalism, militant biopolitics, and neoliberal hegemony that have influenced the borderlands area. It focuses on what Catherine S. Ramírez terms as “Chicanafuturism” (2004a, 57; 2004b), an aesthetic movement that investigates the intersection between technological changes and Chicana/o culture in the artistic idioms inspired by future-imagination.³ This article pays particular attention to the rhetorical power of cyberpunk, a science fiction subgenre that depicts social dynamics in a post-capitalist world. In various ways, the Chicana/o artists addressed in this article take the conventions of classic cyberpunk to depict racialized experiences of modern technoculture. Science fiction works by Ernest Hogan, Sesshu Foster, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita are considered important texts in this emergent literary canon. Likewise, Marion C. Martinez’s computer-religion hybrid, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s multimedia performances, and Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer are drawn into the discussion of Chicana/o-futurity. Reading these cyberpunk variants in the contemporary political milieu sheds light on how Chicana/o culture has presented its struggle in an aesthetic creation of future. This imagination not only decenters the Eurocentric historiography of U.S. culture, but it also reveals the forces that have advanced the culture’s survival and evolution to a higher state.

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