“Why are we still here?”
Protagonist Memo Cruz makes heard, within the first few minutes of the film, the overarching question of Latinx dispossession that haunts the entirety of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008). In a high-tech, dystopian future where bodies of water around the world are aggressively monitored by military power and private corporations, what becomes of the agrarian communities whose cultures, lifestyles, and ties to the land hinge upon access to potable water?
The continued existence of communities like Memo’s Oaxaca hometown, it seems, lies neither in the traditional milpa farming system nor the billion-dollar remittance industry, to which Mexican workers abroad pay the second-largest contribution. Sleep Dealer speculates instead the liquidity of Mexican futures within high-tech, first-world economies sustained by forced water scarcity. As we follow Memo’s displacement from Oaxaca, to Tijuana, to the cyber-fringes of remote-controlled unskilled labor in major U.S. cities like San Diego, the “here” of Memo’s question expands beyond the geographic space of Oaxaca and into the precarious future temporality of Oaxaca.
The ambient presence of water in Sleep Dealer makes audible, visceral, and therefore traceable global economies of thirst in which brown labor, both skilled and unskilled, as much now as in speculative futures, works to make itself heard. Rivera’s commitment to Spanish as the primary language of the film, with smatterings of American English evidencing U.S. capitalist presence and interests, further drive the precarity of Mexican futures in an Anglo-centric global economy.
Invisibility narratives of Latinx labor permeate our techno-future realities in the U.S.; hispanic workers, for example, make up less than 10% of the U.S. high tech workforce in a recent U.S. Department of Labor report despite being a fifth of the total labor force, while the latest slew of executive orders, such as Executive Order 14105/America First Trade Policy, increases scrutiny for visas that most impact Canadian and Mexican workers while asserting, in plain sight, an assimilationist, technocratic vision of “America first”. Sleep Dealer offers a critique of this invisibility through water-centric soundscapes of Latinx futurity that, however tenuous, privilege the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The film’s opening scene ties Memo’s past, present, and future survival to water; although geographically situated in a “sleep dealer” factory in Tijuana and digitally connected to robotic labor in San Diego, Memo conjures memories of Oaxaca in ways that disrupt the hum of factory technologies with the soundscapes of his hometown river.
The local river, privatized and militarily regulated by the Del Rio company via dam, is at once a site of corporate slow violence that lasts generations (“they cut off our future… you weren’t even born yet,” remarks Memo’s father, shortly before he is killed in a drone strike), a marker of global economic liquidity for Mexican farm labor (“That’s $85,” the automated sentry charges for 35 liters of water, which is roughly half the equivalent of a 5-minute shower in U.S. households), and the impetus for hope, change, and ecological renewal, as seen in tritagonist Rudy Romero’s use of military drones to destroy the dam and eliminate the region’s water scarcity, however temporarily.
Luz, the third main character, develops her burgeoning romance with Memo on the shores of the U.S.-Mexico border, wherein the materiality of the border wall is dwarfed by the visual and auditory expanse of the Pacific ocean, suggesting an undeniable porosity between water, land, and culture despite the efforts of future tech to transform them into labor-based commodities. Thus, ambient water humanizes Memo within the vast, exploitative network of capitalist systems that force his and other Latino workers’ spatio-temporal dispossession.
The destruction of the Del Rio dam at the end of the film, deemed “aqua terrorism” by U.S. news media but “un milagro” by the residents of Oaxaca, suggests temporary respite from the exploitative and unsustainable economy of thirst that affects agricultural communities outside of the U.S. The “terrorism” in “aqua terrorism," at least according to U.S. news media, is less a description for violent acts on U.S. soil and more a first world outrage against revolution, against the idea that Mexican workers might have access to advanced technologies and to the bodies of water that sustain their communities.
Nearly 17 years since its debut at Sundance Film Festival, Sleep Dealer continues to prove prophetic; water insecurity remains a crucial site to examine the embodied effects of turbulent U.S.-Mexico border politics, corporate interests, militarization, techno-industrialization, and climate catastrophe.
“This might not look like much, but it’s ours” Memo’s father replies to his question at the beginning of the film. “And you want to let it dry up and disappear?”
By the end of Sleep Dealer, Memo has found his answer. Similarly to Rudy, Memo can never return to his family in Oaxaca while the Del Rio company and military surveillance exist. However, rooted in a vision of futurity that both resists Latinx dispossession and dismantles economies of thirst that propagate it, Memo starts his own milpa in Tijuana with the following commitment to land and technology:
“Maybe there's a future for me here. On the edge of everything. A future with a past, if I connect and fight.”
Fittingly, a sparse rain falls over the city in the closing scene, more audible than visible.
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