The politics of cyborgs in Mexico and Latin America

Abstract

This article focuses on the cyborg body in contemporary Mexican science fiction, contrasting it with its depiction in other countries of Latin America. Beginning in the 1990s, Mexican science fiction authors write stories about implants and neo-cyborgs, anticipating Alex Rivera’s portrait of “cybraceros” in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer by nearly a decade. The defiant cyborgs of Mexico are distinct from those of the Southern Cone, where they relate most often to torture and unresolved political issues from the period of re-democratization, and from those of Brazil, where they are related to issues of race and urbanization.  While in Mexico and Brazil the cyborg is often used as a critique of neoliberal policies and the privatization of public industries, the insistence on the embodiment of cyborgs in Mexico is often tied to labor and border issues, problematizing the idea of cyborg-mestizaje or hybridity.  Heriberto Yepez questions concepts of hybridity that diminish the inherent sense of difference and struggle through a discourse of conciliation. The Mexican cyborg figure that insists on the importance of its body time and again demonstrates its resistance to facile notions of political and cybernetic hybridity