ABSTRACT
In her study “Born in East L.A. and the ‘Politics of Representation,’” Linda Fregoso highlights that Cheech Marin’s Born in East L.A. (1987) gains its political punch not from being a “serious” film, as most other Chicano/a films had, but through its comedy. The parody, for example, indicated by the title’s reference to Bruce Springsteen’s popular song “Born in the USA,” which had come to have connotations of hyper-patriotism, not only gives the film the wordplay that encapsulates the critique, it also opens the film up to a wider audience. A new language and a new audience are the benefits offered by each genre of film. Rivera’s A Robot Walks into a Bar, and his previous feature length film Sleep Dealer (2008), chart new territory into the realm of science fiction film, and like Born in East L.A., the film makes copious use of pop culture references. Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories I, Robot, and its three laws of robotics, plays a central role in the plot. Hal’s Cocktail Lounge is a nod to the artificially intelligent robot Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The light-saber-switch-blade of an attacker is a reference to Star Wars, and even the form of the
M1 robot approximates C3PO. What is striking about A Robot Walks into a Bar is that as it looks to the past to reference a variety of iconic robots from the science fiction tradition, it expresses the future impact of technology on Latina/o communities. Using a predominantly Latina/o cast, the film extrapolates labor into the future, showing how it may be Latina/o workers who will be replaced by robots. Given that A Robot Walks into a Bar is Latina/o science fiction, this chapter puts the film in dialogue with not only the tradition of science fiction in general, but with specifically two other works of Latina/os science fiction in which robots appear: Luis Senarens’s dime novel series The Frank Reade Library (1882 to 1898), and Luis Valdez’s one act play Los Vendidos (1967). These works help to illuminate how the film develops new forms of Latina/o labor, migration, and protest.
