ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the figure of the economic migrant in three Latinxfuturist works: Alex Rivera’s Why Cybraceros? (1997), Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1991), and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water (2019). It shows how Rivera’s film and Morales’s novel present a dystopia of differential inclusion, one in which Mexican bodies serve as a necessary, putatively temporary, and exploitable resource for imperial Spain, the United States, and/or the Global North. In contrast, Maravilla’s performance enacts futurity by honoring migrant workers and offering healing from the violence and trauma inflicted by migration and xenophobia.
