About

Alex Rivera: Trickster at the Border

By Gregg Mitman, Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies

"We are being sold a false bill of goods, that the more connected we become the more equal we will be," asserts digital media artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera. "Statistically speaking, that's not what's happening. The more connected we become, the more we are divided."i

Rivera on the set of SLEEP DEALER.

Questions of connectedness are at the heart of Rivera’s work. Born in 1973 to a Peruvian immigrant and a New Jersey native, Rivera is a master bricoleur. Drawing upon the stories being lived out each day in Latin America and the United States, Rivera creatively melds reality and fiction, past and future, low-tech and high-tech, and the personal and political into dramatic tales of immigration, labor, technology, and globalization. His artistic portfolio of mockumentaries, sci-fi features, political action shorts, and drone performance art asks us—with an irreverent, humorous twinkle in the eye—to look closely at the painful realities of a global economy in which information and goods travel freely across national borders, while the movements of people in the twenty-first century are ever more scrutinized and restricted. In Rivera’s “rasquache aesthetic,” irreverence is an act of politics and compassion.ii

A former student of political science and documentary at Hampshire College, Rivera has dedicated his life to telling moving stories of Latin@ immigrants living in the liminal spaces of transnational economies, finding creative ways to keep the bonds of family and community alive. In “Love on the Line,” part of Rivera’s The Borders Trilogy (2003), families gather on the beach of the Pacific Ocean on opposite sides of an intimidating wall of steel bars and corrugated metal at the border between the United States and Mexico. The wall separates fathers and mothers, parents and children, brothers and sisters. “But there are things that aren’t solid, and they can get through,” observes a middle-aged man, who has come for a decade to embrace family members through the small openings of a wall that keeps them physically apart.

Looking from the Global South to the “future as a space of possibility,” Rivera consciously resists a framework in which “first world is the future; third world is the past.”iii He offers us neither a nostalgic view of a traditional past, nor a techno-utopian embrace of a cyberworld future. In Sleep Dealer, Rivera's 2008 Sundance award–winning science fiction feature set in a dystopic future "just five minutes away," Memo tinkers in a makeshift workshop, assembling a hodgepodge of old radios, circuit boards, and makeshift satellite dishes (the bricoleur at work), longing to escape the traditional farming village of Santa Ana and connect to the outside world.  Soon Memo finds that Tijuana, the largest border town on earth, offers little meaning either. In this City of the Future, a megalopolis where he toils in a cyberfactory, Memo is also lost. Nodal implants in his nervous system connect him through the net to a robot in San Diego. Memo has become a cyborg, welding structural beams on a skyscraper thousands of feet above the air in a place he’ll never see. A militarized, corporate state has physically, but not virtually, closed the US border to Mexican migrant workers. He talks to his family in Santa Ana through the video feed of a virtual money wire transfer machine, but can’t touch them. The dry, dusty, disconnected world of Santa Ana is, it turns out, no less disconnected than the virtual world that he now inhabits. Ultimately, it is neither in the past nor in the future where Memo finds identity and meaning. It is in the present, in acts of resistance—both large and small—where human dignity and freedom are found. When Memo, his "coyotec" girlfriend, Luz, and their drone-flying soldier companion, Rudy, blow up the dam holding back the water that is the agricultural livelihood upon which Memo’s village and traditions were built, the flow of power is reversed, if only for a moment.  The milpa garden that Memo tills in the squatter settlement on the edge of Tijuana is also a political act, opening, like the hole in the dam, a new connection between his past and his future.iv

In his films, Rivera offers us a pragmatic vision, one that champions the voices of immigrant workers finding new ways to live and be in a world where capital flows freely, but bodies do not. In the real world of Newburgh, New York, for example, the setting for Rivera’s documentary The Sixth Section (2003), immigrant men organize to fund public works projects in their hometown of Boquerón, Mexico, using money transfer services, cheap phone networks, and home videos to, like Memo, redirect the flows of capital and power.

Rivera’s many talents include an ability to make visible on screen the unseen virtual and material relationships that both structure, and are a consequence of, economic and political power shaping different futures. His deep insights into the inequitable flows of people, commodities, resources, and money that sustain the illusion of a global village built on the free trade of information and capital is a reminder of a principle in both economics and ecology: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Development, as the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano reminds us in The Open Veins of Latin America, is always accompanied by underdevelopment somewhere else.v In Sleep Dealer, the privatized water supply in Santa Ana, controlled by a US corporation, propels the future of the North, while draining the lifeblood from the people and the land in the South. In The Borders Trilogy short, “Container City” (2003), Rivera utilizes animation; footage shot in a white middle-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey; and serious narration to offer a somewhat satirical take on the differential flows of the global economy. Fifty-foot long, empty, steel, shipping containers stacked seven stories high and miles long, now sit still, monuments in the graveyard of a defunct manufacturing economy. No longer circulating across the globe, they block the neighborhood’s view of the Pasaic River and depress real estate values. It is a small price to pay compared to the displacement and alienation of the millions of uprooted workers who eke out a living in this global economy in motion.

In Rivera’s rich cinematic renderings of border towns and borderlands, a mythic figure lurks in the shadow. In the legends of southwestern peoples, Coyote is a culture hero. Coyote is a trickster, a shape shifter, a mover between worlds. Sly and cunning, he is a mythic survivor. When Rivera builds drones to resemble Low Rider cars, straps on cameras, and flies them across the Mexico-US border to confront US Border Patrol surveillance cameras or intertwines the immigrant stories of the Peruvian potato and Rivera's own couch-potato, potato-chip-eating father in Papapapá (1995), there is something of the trickster at play. Mischievous, but with a heart.

REFERENCES

i Jason Silverman, “Sleep Dealer Injects Sci-Fi into Immigration Debate,” Wired (January 24, 2008).

ii Celine Ulises Decena and Margaret Gray, “Putting Transnationalism to Work: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Rivera,” Social Text, vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 131-138.

iii Ibid., p. 134.

iv Sharada Balachandran Oriheula & Andrew Carl Hageman, “The Virtual Realities of US/Mexico Border Ecologies in Maquilapolis and Sleep Dealer, Environmental Communication 5 (2011): 166-186.

v Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 25th Ann. Ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).  On Galeano’s influence on Rivera, see “Science Fiction From Below,” Interview with Mark Engler, Foreign Policy in Focus (May 13, 2009).