ABSTRACT
Latino participation in the science fiction genre is far ranging. Lysa Rivera reminds us that Latino writers have experimented with science fiction since the Chicano movement of the late 1960s. There were: Luis Valdez’s employment of the “‘drone’ in his Actos, to examine and mock Chicano/a stereotypes” (415); Oscar Z. Acosta mentions his passion for becoming a science fiction writer in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1971); Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1991), where an entire chapter takes place in a futuristic California island known as the LAMEX territory; the Puertoriqueño James Stevens-Arce’s Soulsaver (1998), which won the Spanish UPC award the year prior to its publication (Molina-Gavilán et al. 371); and Rosaura Sánchez’s and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros (2009), which parodies today’s migrant workers’ woes in a story about neo-braceros from Cali-Texas on the Moon. Scholars such as Christopher González and Matt Goodwin have also discussed how Junot Díaz’s story “Monstro” and his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) work within and against the sci-fi genre. And, in the “Confessions from a Latino Sojourner in SciFilandia,” Frederick Luis Aldama remarks of Latino sci-fi writers such as Ernest Hogan, Sabrina Vourvoulias, and comic book authors such as Frank Espinosa and Los Bros Hernandez, that they reference “the universe, its laws, and its furnishings, but within this they also imagine new technologies, objects, and ontologies. That is, within the indexical constraints that allow readers to recognize inanimate things and living entities, anything can and does go”.
