Why Cybraceros?

"Why Cybraceros?" Alex Rivera, dir., script. Mock promotional film, 4 minutes, 44 seconds. 29 April 2010. Available on Vimeo[1] and, with a note, on Alex Rivera's webpage.[2]

Rivera comments on his webpage: "WHY CYBRACEROS? sarcastically uses the form of a promotional film. It is based on a real promotional film produced in the late 1950’s by the California Grower’s Council, titled ‘Why Braceros?’ This film was used by the Grower’s Council to defend the use of Braceros, or temporary Mexican farmhands. I use footage from this old industrial to briefly lay out the history of the Bracero Program in the United States. At the half way point the piece takes a sharp turn as the narrator advocates a futuristic Bracero Program in which only the labor is imported to the United States. The workers themselves (Cybraceros) are left at home in Mexico, as they tele-commute to American farms over the high-speed internet. The narrator explains that in this imagined future there is no difference between rich and poor on the internet, this is a future in which truly everyone can work from home, even braceros."

See for telepresence[3] and an SF motif as satiric commentary, in this case literalizing the idea of imported labor without the inconvenience of dealing with the laborers.

Rivera expanded this idea in SLEEP DEALER; q.v. Both films discussed by Lysa Rivera in "Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction After NAFTA," q.v., in Latham, Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, pp. 538-41.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 5July17