Subverting the Wasteocene Logic through Counternarratives: Decolonial and Affective Solidarity in Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148

Introduction

A new space race—a “lunar gold rush,” this time including the colonization of the satellite—is pitting the Eastern and Western blocs against each other once again. This scenario may sound like a science fiction plot, and indeed it was in 2009, when Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Marxist professors of Chicano and Latin American Literature at the University of California, San Diego, published their novella Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148. Currently, the separate projects led by the United Stated and China to set human colonies on the Moon and extract lunar resources (Northey) prove that the questions raised by the novella, of neocolonialism, extractivism and wasting, and socio-environmental justice, are up to date and still yet to be properly addressed.

Sánchez and Pita have written an epistolary future of space travel that depicts a world overwhelmed by waste, as well as it is characterized by wasting relations that produce expendable communities. The novella is a clear example of Chicanafuturism, which:

explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival. (Ramírez 187; italics in original, emphasis in bold added by author)

In this “fictitious setting that echoes historical trauma” (Gómez 500; see also Perreira 88) and current lunar colonizing plans, the world is ravaged not only by waste accumulation but also by resource scarcity and the Moon is colonized and mined while it also becomes an extraterrestrial dumping ground. The novella narrates mostly the life experiences of a self-defined Latina, Lydia, as she recounts them to her son, Pedro, focusing on her—as well as her family and friends—active resistance to a neocolonial totalitarian regime ruled by capital, that wastes human lives on Earth and on the Moon.

Sánchez and Pita’s novella belongs to a narrative tradition of wasted workers in Chicanx and Latinx borderlands science fiction, together with other works such as Alejandro Morales’ novel The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) or Alex Rivera’s movie Sleep Dealer (2008). It draws from the cyberpunk subgenre and its aesthetics, which are also present in these works as well as in the art of Chicanx artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña.¹ As Lysa Rivera argues, “Chicano cyberpunk texts from the 1990s […] turn to the rich metaphors of this SF subgenre because doing so enables them to speculate on the impacts of globalization from marginalized and muted perspectives” (“Chicana/o,” 199). Through its futuristic, technological approach, Lunar Braceros questions the growing power of multinational corporations to waste certain peoples and environments.

This essay examines the troubling and unequal socio-environmental realities caused by the normalization of wasting as both a material and a relational problem through the specific narrative example of Lunar Braceros, while claiming that such narratives—and their narrative strategies—are key tools in both the perpetuation and the dismantling of a wasting logic. The wasting (or Wasteocene) logic is based on the presumed—as well as unquestioned and unjustified—privilege of the few, which necessarily requires the wasting of other-than-human-nature and mostly racialized, low-income human “others,” primarily in the Global South, through neoliberal and neocolonial capitalist practices that are by default exploitative and devastating. Sánchez and Pita’s lunar novella speaks directly to present concerns and tensions because it dives into the global scenario of waste production and accumulation, as well as of wasting practices that Marco Armiero and Massimo De Angelis have called the Wasteocene. Such context inevitably invites questions of vulnerability, violence, and injustice, and how the narrative addresses related temporal and spatial dimensions. It moreover prompts an examination of the way in which Lunar Braceros adds a level of speculation and reflection only achievable through fiction. This examination in turn leads to an exploration of the use of extended metaphors and polyvocality to fictionalize and expose socio-environmental injustices. Ultimately, Sánchez and Pita’s novella provides a specific counternarrative example from Chicanx literature that directly addresses the problem of waste, exposing and defying the Wasteocene logic, and highlighting alternative socio-environmental practices based on solidarity and uncommoning.

The Problem of Waste: Global Spread, Unequal Distribution

The world is full of waste, and questions of inequality, responsibility, and proper management are constantly on the table. Max Liboiron claims that most waste should be considered industrial waste, given the forceful and effective way in which the industry has introduced the disposable mindset in the market (9–10). Liboiron argues that most current waste results from a carefully designed strategic regime influencing cultural and social values and habits, meaning that consumers have no real choice. Certainly, not all responsibility for the generation and accumulation (much less the mismanagement) of waste should lie with the consumers, which would imply falling into what Micah McKay calls “neoliberal environmentalism” (117). Still, a risk exists in blaming only the industry, for it could lead to feelings of helplessness and in turn to apathy and inaction.² Sánchez and Pita address this tension by appealing to corporate responsibility and a coordinated social response in their novella as a call to political action in the readership.

The novella presents a recognizable world but with a different geopolitical setup, focusing on “the new nation-state of ‘Cali-Texas’—defined as a “police state” (7; 21)—referring to the formation of a new political entity in 2070 that included several of the northern Mexican states […] and the former U.S. Southwest states.” Parallel to the reconfiguration of political borders, an economic power is formed, the New Imperial Order (NIO)—made up of the ten dominant multinational consortia, the one truly “calling the shots” (9; 11). The political realignment ultimately comes “from the transnational agri-business corporations and the […] big bio-techs” (7). Lydia and those with whom she collaborates, spend their lives trying to dismantle such consortia. They assume it is the citizens’ responsibility to react against corrupt corporate and political interests that exercise population control mechanisms, which go against just socio-environmental dynamics (the novella does not clearly define these dynamics but generally implies notions of social justice and environmental equilibrium). Sánchez and Pita’s future scenario is quite undoubtably inspired by “the toxic nature of late modernity” (Pellow 4), itself part of “the darker side of Western modernity” (Mignolo). Although in the present waste is ubiquitous—as the presence of micro- and nanoplastics in any body of water anywhere in the world proves (Kye et al.)—it is not equally distributed. Sánchez and Pita illustrate this inequality in their novella through a historical revision from a future perspective, parting from real waste disposal problems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and projecting them into their imagined future, a future overwhelmed by waste—“on Earth they’d long since exceeded the capacity to store waste” (6)—and toxicity—“the planet is one enormous haz-mat zone” (14).

Iconic examples that precede and most likely have inspired the wasting of people and places in Lunar Braceros can be found in both the Global North and Global South,³ although the scale becomes much worse in the latter. This inequity results from the legacy of colonial practices, which based their socio-economic systems on the plundering of natural resources and the subjugation and exploitation of human others and other life forms. Contemporary economic models have continued such systems through practices such as the offshoring of waste, which are exacerbated by countries lacking environmental governance or failing to enforce environmental laws. Such examples can be found in the United States, Italy, Lebanon, Ghana, Kenya, and Chile. In the US Southwest, uranium-rich lands inhabited by Navajos have been subject to nuclear colonialism involving the disposal of large amounts of nuclear waste (Voyles; Gómez). The Italian region of Campania, now known as the Land of Fires, and Lebanon, former recipient of Italy’s waste, are places where corruption and the mafia have taken control of waste “management,” with disastrous consequences for both the environment and the people (see Greyl et al.; and The Public Source). The now demolished Agbogbloshie e-waste dump in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, provides another paradigmatic example (Yeung). The site was ranked among the world’s top ten most toxic threats (Njoku at al.). Accra (like Nairobi, in Kenia, or the Atacama Desert, in Chile), also happens to be a victim of the fast-fashion industry, receiving massive amounts of secondhand clothing from the Global North, with catastrophic socio-environmental consequences (Bessner; Changing Markets Foundation; Bartlett). These examples are only a few of a pattern found all over the Global South (and in some condemned, low-income places of the Global North). Most current human practices pollute the world, particularly those areas where materials are produced and/or dumped. This pollution also has consequences for other forms of life. Chris Jordan’s documentary film Albatross (2017) is a painfully poetic account of the impact of the plastic consumer frenzy on a remote colony of the bird species that gives the film its title.

What, and who, becomes waste are open, context-dependent questions, subjected to much scrutiny and thought. As Greg Kennedy claims in his exploration of the concept, “[a]nything and everything can become waste” (1), but the existing neocolonial pattern of wasting practices cannot be overlooked. Ultimately waste, albeit ubiquitous, is tied to certain social groups and geographical regions mainly in the Global South. Its offshoring equals the offshoring of violence (Davies 410; see also Pellow)—either to the Global South, as in the examples here portrayed, or to the Moon, as in Sánchez and Pita’s cautionary tale, which exposes past and present wasting patterns to interrogate the future.

“Strange weather bears strange fruit”: Geographies of Racial Vulnerability

The global scenario of waste production and accumulation has led Armiero and De Angelis to label the current epoch as the Wasteocene or the age of waste. The Wasteocene contrasts with the injustice-and-inequality-blurring concept of the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. Armiero, who frames his theory within the broader notion of the Capitalocene, has further developed the Wasteocene concept. He acknowledges that this is not only a time when waste is ubiquitous, but also, and more concerningly, a time of wasting relations that deem certain forms of life and certain locations disposable. As Armiero puts it: “[a]s the Capitalocene speaks of the origins, or better, the causes, of the socio-ecological crisis, the Wasteocene uncovers the effects of capitalism on life” (10). His conceptualization moves beyond the sedimentation of waste as a geological marker. He focuses instead on the socio-political repercussions of wasting as a dynamic and a practice, shaped by the current economic system of production and consumption, which is based on the illusion of endless growth and well-being. This system results in the production of expendable socio-environmental communities (wasting both human lives and natural environments). He builds upon Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of wasted humans, “the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant’, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay” (Bauman 5; see also Armiero 2, 15). Similarly, Gisela Heffes talks about “residual humans” or “human ruins” in her study about biopolitics, waste, and the urban environment in Latin American cultural production. Heffes refers to the condition of “individuals [who] oscillate between the position of consuming subjects and discarded objects, and epitomize […] one of the most degraded stages of modernity” (60). Wasted, residual humans are at the center of Sánchez and Pita’s novella.

Lunar Braceros depicts this imposed “human obsolescence” (Heffes 80) by projecting the current concerns that make up the Wasteocene into the future. In the novella, a global capitalist system places the “surplus” population in Reservations⁴ as indentured servants. This way, they become “a controlled laboratory labor force, like lab rats, a disciplinary society that was useful to the state” (Sánchez 16).⁵ This neoliberal reinterpretation transforms the Reservation system into “a population control camp mechanism […] to keep the homeless and the unemployed off the streets and off welfare” (15). The Reservations—compared in the novella with Spanish Missions and their treatment of Native Americans (62–63)—are thus described as “internal colonial sites” (16) and “prison labor camps” (21), while Reservation inhabitants are depicted as “a wage-less labor pool,” (17) as well as “guaranteed consumers” and “guinea pigs,” thus serving “many needs” (16).

The novella’s capitalist power structure is moreover involved in the harvesting of organs from Indigenous peoples (25). But the ultimate example of population management in the shape of human wasting takes place on the Moon. Whereas people such as Lydia become lunar braceros—low skill contract workers sent to the Moon—to escape the Reservations and political repression, this supposed opportunity ends up being a one-way ticket. As Lydia and the rest of the Moon crew discover, murdering these workers happens to be much more profitable than sending them back to Earth once their contract is over. The plot thus bears numerous similarities with the examples previously provided: places and peoples doomed to bear the brunt of the Wasteocene. These sacrifice zones point at the clear geographical demarcations of this era—primarily the Global South, as well as the US Southwest and the Moon in the novella—and their heterotopic nature.

The Wasteocene logic is a producer of heterotopias: alternative, disturbing, othered spaces necessary to maintain an illusion of order and perfection (Foucault). The Reservation system in Lunar Braceros provides a clear example: hiding from view in wasted environments what the Wasteocene logic perceives as waste (including the homeless and unemployed—and their exploitation). It forcefully sends certain people to peripheral areas. It is not a coincidence that Reservations in the novella are “located throughout the Southwest” (17), an area that in this futuristic novella is suffering from severe desertification (32) and where most radioactive waste dumps are located (6; 14)—two conditions that have exacerbated living conditions and health in the Southwest of the United States for a long time now, disproportionately affecting Chicanx and Native American communities.⁶ These heterotopias are futuristic reinstantiations of Native American reservations, which were likewise located in barren sites deemed worthless, tracing the roots of the Wasteocene in North America back to colonial times. Traci Brynne Voyles has coined the term “wastelanding” to refer to “the discursive process of rendering a space marginal, worthless, and pollutable,” in order both to extract natural resources and to dump any waste resulting from the industrial process (9). The Moon is also “wastelanded” and transformed into a heterotopia, an extraterrestrial territory considered to be devoid of life, explicitly colonized to be plundered—through the extraction of resources—and wasted—through the dumping of toxic waste and “disposable” people. As Ana María Manzanas and Jesús Benito write, “outer colonialism on the moon parallels internal colonialism on Earth. Both end up creating similar sites for the containment of the undesired or the excrescence of society” (94). Thus, the novella exposes how not only certain human beings but also certain spaces are deemed as disposable and available to be wasted by the politico-economic system.

These geographical demarcations moreover entail a social reality: the inhabitants are low-income and destitute peoples and mostly racialized. This socio-geographical reality is in line with the inherent environmental racism of wastelanding as argued by Voyles and of the “geography of racial vulnerability” proposed by Laura Pulido (117). Pulido argues that racism is at the core of the Anthropocene and sustains her claim with data about “the uneven geographies of death from global warming,” affecting both the Global South and racialized peoples in the Global North (117–8). The key point made by Pulido is not that socio-environmental inequalities exist, but that they are shaped (122). As Leon Sealey-Huggins writes, “strange weather bears strange fruit” (102). Just as Billie Holiday memorably started singing Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” lyrics in 1939 about those African Americans lynched and hung from tree branches in the South of the United States, Sealey-Huggins now traces, through his rewording of the well-known metaphor, the environmental, geographical, and racial patterns of the present climatic epoch, the ones shared by the Wasteocene. Partly as a consequence of the Wasteocene logic, climate change particularly affects racialized peoples, who are paying the price of the derived socio-environmental problems with their wellbeing and even their lives.

Sánchez and Pita present class, not race, as the factor determining the active wasting of people in their novella, claiming that “[u]ltimately capital can undo any ties […] on the basis of race, ethnicity, language or color” (36)—a claim they develop even further in their sequel Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow (2020). Nevertheless, the novella also claims that “Latinos […] along with blacks, Asians, Native Americans and poor whites, made up the majority of those put away in these Reservation camps […] since most of us had no capital, no jobs, and no connections” (34). Whereas in the novella the advancement of neoliberal capitalism does not stop certain racialized people from rising to power—Cali-Texas government is “mostly Latino-led” (34)—the reality is that the majority of those who are poor and unemployed, and confined in Reservations, also happen to be racialized. The politico-economic structures in the novella thus perpetuate colonial legacies that deem racialized peoples as less valuable and therefore expendable, and those who get to power within that system, regardless of their own ethnicity, tacitly accept and naturalize such discriminatory practices.

Sánchez and Pita’s novella, as well as the theories of Voyles, Pulido, and Sealey-Huggins, expose that neither the struggle against racism and classism nor against environmental injustices is simply a matter of finding specific individuals who can be held responsible; it is rather a critique of the structure that allows such inequities to happen or even is built upon them. These examples reflect what Johan Galtung has termed “structural violence,” a system that implies a denial of basic rights and needs of certain people in certain locations. These geographies, moreover, lead to slow violence (Nixon; see also Armiero), happening out of sight—to some (Davies). As Thom Davies argues, slow violence might go unnoticed by those who cause it but certainly not by those who suffer from it: “Both [structural and slow violence] framings expand violence beyond the personal, the direct, and the immediate. They […] interrogate instances of suffering that have no obvious author [… and] locate sources of brutality within the routinized workings of society itself, through a systemic normalization of that suffering” (413). Davies’s reconceptualization of slow violence depicts it not only as a temporal but also as a geographical category, happening in certain regions, to certain peoples. Such structural problems are commonly constructed and perpetuated through narratives that serve to justify, naturalize, and keep these wasting patterns in place. Alternatively, narratives such as Lunar Braceros can challenge and subvert toxic relations, exposing their constructedness.

Toxic Narratives and Speculative Fiction Counternarratives in the Wasteocene

In his development of the concept of the Wasteocene, Armiero argues that some stories invisibilize the slow and structural violence imposed upon the people and the environment, for example, the Cali-Texas discourse on the vital necessity of mineral resources from the Moon and its false promises of fair working conditions and economic compensation to lunar workers and their families. Armiero labels these stories “toxic stories,” not to be confused with Lawrence Buell’s “toxic discourse;” the former understood as narratives that serve to domesticate memory and “[i]nvisibilize violence, normalize injustice, [and] erase any alternative narrative” (Armiero 19), while the latter refers to the discursive practices and coping narratives produced by those fearing and/or suffering from toxicity (Buell 27, 30-54). Similarly, Stefania Barca claims that the Anthropocene is a “master’s narrative” that “hide[s] the killings and the killed from view, and convince[s] us that they are not part of the story of modernity” (1). To counter such hegemonic discourse, Barca calls instead for narrative justice (2): acknowledging counternarratives telling alternative stories of oppression, struggle, and survival, and of alternative ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world. To neglect these alternative stories implies dismissing the situated, embodied knowledge they convey, thus resulting in “epistemic violence” (Spivak; see also Davies 421).

Precisely the narrative power of socio-environmental injustices fuels the role of speculative, environmental justice fiction as imaginative, communicative, and affective counternarratives. Speculative fiction often invites readers to reconsider present conditions, including conditions of avoidable socio-environmental danger or of injustice that have been normalized or invisibilized. Lunar Braceros, with its clear political message and affective appeal, makes use of multi-temporality, presenting manifold time layers narrated through analepses and prolepses, and multi-locality, taking place “in a local, global, and intergalactic—or glocalactic—space” (Olguín 141), in order to expose current and past transnational colonial or neocolonial patterns. Such patterns perpetuate social inequalities, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation over time in specific regions—geographies of slow violence. The multiple temporalities and localities of the novella add a layer of meaning to its epigraph which, quoting Albert Einstein, reads “Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind union of the two will preserve an independent reality” (3). The temporal fluctuation gives a feeling of circularity, of history being repeated in a loop—a toxic loop Lydia and her friends want to break once and for all; what Manzanas and Benito describe as “a perpetual now, or just another stage in the hypermap of incarceration” (95). Forms of slow violence that might be imperceptible in linear and briefer temporal accounts are thus easier to grasp thanks to the novella’s ambitious and broad timeline, starting with imagined historical accounts from 2060 onwards—“a future history” (Rivera “Future,” 429)—with references to twentieth- and twenty-first century social movements such as the maquis and the Zapatistas. Combined with a focus on labor, such temporal fluctuation serves to imagine, as Rivera puts it,

[T]he future of labor exploitation along the borderlands while it simultaneously re-tells a deeper colonial history of the borderlands. […] Sanchez and Pita […] refer simultaneously to the colonial past (Native American conquest) while peering into and constructing what is essentially a neo-colonial future (“the Res”).

     In fact, as futuristic as the novel appears, it simply cannot be understood if extracted from its social and political contexts, specifically the historical practices of indigenous labor exploitation in the US/Mexico borderlands. (“Future,” 427-8)

This cautionary tale invokes what Rebecca Solnit has termed the “Angel of Alternate History,” the one that sees what could have happened if things had been different (75)—a reconceptualization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history.” Benjamin’s angel is unwillingly propelled into the future while bearing witness to the devastation caused by “what we call progress” (Benjamin 392), depicting time as linear and events as fixed in the past. Alternatively, Solnit’s angel acknowledges the devastation and tragedies that did or did not occur (maybe averted, thanks to conscientious action in the past and the present), it “tells that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does,” providing “grounds to act” (Solnit 75-6). The novella’s defamiliarization and extrapolation to the future of current concerns, such as waste accumulation and wasting relations, invites readers to ponder the possible future consequences of the perpetuation of past and current wasting practices (c.f. Donohue 138). The novella attempts “to shift the political and ethical calculus between present and future, indicating the necessity for immediate action,” and traces “the failure of politics to craft an effective response” to the Wasteocene logic (Trexler 120). It ultimately serves to ask who has the power and the responsibility to avoid such a dystopian future, providing the example of Lydia and her friends to hint at the potential of activism and insurrection.

The use of speculative fiction to question real life socio-environmental injustices moreover has affective appeal. Alexa Weik von Mossner claims that “there is no qualitative difference between fiction and nonfiction when it comes to processes of narrative transportation and reader’s affective engagement with the storyworld that is evoked by a literary text” (14). The historical dimension of the novella—with references to well-known population control mechanisms—is crucial in the potential engagement of the readership. Weik von Mossner states that fictional stories “based on ‘a true story’ or allud[ing] to actual occurrences [impact] readers who are aware of that connection,” this connection, in turn, can “encourage readers to feel moral allegiance with the victims of environmental injustice” (79, emphasis added). Furthermore, in this dystopian future of pervasive inequality and injustice, hope is a frail feeling. The novella’s open ending—with the threatened Commons and no news from Lydia or any other Cali-Texas insurgents in years—questions whether by that future time it was still possible to change things, while Pedro’s determination to go North and join the struggle offers some hope in return. As Ben Olguín maintains, the ending “refuses to deliver an easy nostalgic or romantic resolution to the fight against capitalism’s incessant, exploitative onslaught” (141) and its wasteocene logic. The narrative potential of such an ending rests on its appeal to the readership with the encouragement to start confronting, immediately, the legacy and perpetuation of coloniality, and the resulting socio-environmental degradation and wasting.

Decolonizing Solidarity through Uncommoning

Examples of decolonial solidarity further enhance the novella’s affective appeal, as they offer a hopeful alternative to the Wasteocene logic, following Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s and Katie Boudreau Morris’s invitations to decolonize solidarity. In their conceptualizations of solidarity, Gaztambide-Fernández acknowledges the interdependency and transitivity of relations, while Morris emphasizes land reclamation as a central tenet. The main example of decolonial solidarity in the novella happens at the Commons of Chinganaza. Chinganaza is “populated mostly by displaced indigenous tribes who had managed to claim the area as an ancestral homeland and establish a commune [t]here, returning to their communal agricultural practices” (135–6), in line with Morris’s emphasis on land reclamation as a prerequisite for decolonial solidarity. Chinganaza, a “Marxist XicanIndi@ paradigm that resists naïve agrarian utopias” (Olguín 141), is a haven in the Americas, a place relatively free from pollution, where an ecological equilibrium still exists thanks to a relation with the land based on Indigenous knowledges and practices. Such balanced relation parallels the “queer horizontality” practiced by those inhabiting the region, who “envision relations and connections through a rich sense of the indebtedness that emerges from acknowledging shared vulnerability and forms of interdependence [or indebted responsibility]” (Brady 29-30). This combination of socio-environmental factors defines the commons, which “represents a rejection of everything that is hegemonic and dominated by capital relations” (29)—directly opposing the Wasteocene logic. The commons is created at a time of global environmental devastation and social rupture, when solidarity is particularly generative and needed. The commons is the product of a decolonial way of inhabiting a specific piece of land at a time when such a practice is not only revolutionary but also extremely necessary—calling to mind, once again, the novella’s epigraph.

Lydia and her friends are invited to the commons by an elder in an act of solidarity shortly after escaping from the Moon. Despite the mistrust that their Cali-Texas origin produces in the commons, they are offered refuge. The solidarity performed at the commons is altruistic rather than opportunistic, while it offers the prospect of creating strong, long-lasting bonds (28–29) and “dense” relations (Brady). This practice shows an alternative to (neo)colonial land theft—in which external agents gain access to a territory by forcefully displacing its original inhabitants and imposing their own practices. The inhabitants of Chinganaza communally share the space and find practices suitable to the whole socio-environmental community, and the integration of Lydia’s group is gradual and based on actions, gained trust, inter- and eco-dependency, and communal collaboration. Even having and raising a baby becomes a communal practice of solidarity, prompted by the sterilization derived from nuclear colonialism (Gómez 508-9). Whereas “the oppressive regimes of corporate governmentality […] produce situations where the family falls apart and must be reimagined” (Ulibarri 87), the commons offers the ideal space for such reimagination. Lydia tells Pedro: “Pedrín, you are as much my son as Frank’s, Leticia’s, Maggie’s, Tom’s and Betty’s” (141)—the other surviving members of the moon crew. Leticia, Maggie’s partner, is the one that gestates Pedro—conceived from the frozen embryos of Lydia, who is unable to conceive a baby due to nuclear radiation, and her former partner, Gabriel, who had been murdered years ago. Frank, who is Lydia’s current partner and is also sterile, raises him as his son, and, when Lydia, Leticia, Maggie, and Frank head back North to be part of the direct action against Cali-Texas and the Reservation system, they leave Pedro, who is ten years old at the time, in the care of their friends Tom and Betty, whose adopted son, Guamán, is like a brother to him (142). Thus, in the novella, as Elsa del Campo Ramírez argues, “frontiers between bodies and parental responsibilities are constantly overcome and challenged, up to the point of removing any sense of physical or moral possession over the child” (394). As Kristy Ulibarri writes, “This collective and transmigratory parenthood,” (93) understood in terms of communal support and bonds of solidarity, subverts notions of belonging, possession, individuality, and ultimately, family. The commons, thus, facilitates the enactment of decolonial solidarity and queer horizontality at multiple levels.

The principles of collaboration rule the commons, establishing “equality and tolerance for difference” (23), calling to mind Mignolo’s notion of pluriversality in relation to the communal and of diversality, or the right to be different, as universal project (320; 234-5), as well as Chela Sandoval’s “radical mestizaje” (170) and de la Cadena’s “uncommoning,” both concepts addressing what Sandoval terms “affinity through difference” (170). In Lunar Braceros, in line with Sandoval and de la Cadena’s theories, the commons represents the power to form productive “coalitions of resistance” (Sandoval 63) and social relations that spring from difference and divergence. Moreover, as an instance of decolonial solidarity, the commons is relational and transitive for, as Lydia acknowledges, their presence both altered the commons as well as it changed them (23). This reciprocity is not only practiced in a purely anthropocentric way, at the level of human relations and interdependency, but also at the level of eco-dependency. Lydia acknowledges the benefits of living in close contact with nature, mainly by sustainably working the land, while she and her friends introduce their expertise in the shape of technological and medical advancements to the commons, without altering its natural or social balance. Lydia moreover claims that: “place makes us what we are, the source from which you gain particular insights and perspectives. Space is formative, […] space is a product of social relations” (29). She thus acknowledges an interconnection with space that goes beyond a mere physical dimension, one that is both product and producer of social dynamics and individual subjectivities in an agential fashion. Lydia’s reasoning sustains that a devastated Earth ruled by the Wasteocene logic only serves to perpetuate toxic social relations of endless wasting and exploitation. Alternative socio-environmental dynamics—here depicted in the decolonial solidarity, queer horizontality, and radical mestizaje of the uncommons—are essential to break such wasting patterns. Moreover, while Chinganaza becomes a home and a refuge for them, they are well aware of the fact that their struggle for socio-environmental justice must continue (139). “At the heart of Chinganza’s transformative ethos is the belief,” as Rivera puts it, “that only collective action across differences leads to real (material, tangible) change” (“Rosaura” 280). The uncommoning character of Chinganaza, “a tiny bubble in a turbulent world” (140), inspires them and gives them the strength to go back north and rejoin direct action in Cali-Texas in their attempt “to bring about change” (141), contributing to a new social upheaval (142)—events that the novella’s sequel further develops.

Subversive Diaries: Extended Metaphors and Epistolary Style for Affective Solidarity

The choice to depict the narrative as a diary employing extended metaphors and a fragmented epistolary style, combining multiperspectivity and interpolated narration, further contributes to convey the socio-environmental critique of Lunar Braceros and its appeal to solidarity, adding to the novella’s multi-temporal and multi-local dimensions. The combination of these choices in the shape of speculative fiction presents a historical decolonial critique, “unveiling the rhetoric and promises of modernity,” as Walter Mignolo writes, while “advocating and building global futures that aspire to the fullness of life” (122). The extended metaphors dismantle the Wasteocene master’s narrative that tries to render the wasting of people and places invisible, which the polyvocality and subversive character of the diary further contest.

This dismantling and its derived appeal to solidarity in the readership prompted by affect and care are not necessarily inspired by feelings of empathy and identification. As Clare Hemmings argues in her feminist revision of solidarity theory, other affects can inspire what she terms “affective solidarity.” Hemmings’ affective solidarity derives from “affective dissonance”—the dissonance one might feel when reading about the unjust wasting of living beings and environments, and the realization that this happens thanks to the naturalization of the Wasteocene logic (and people’s connivance). The narrative’s use of extended metaphors, especially of the wasteland and of the wasted human, appeals to the dissonance between these ontological and epistemological realities. The novella thus illustrates the Wasteocene logic: repeatedly equating certain humans, as well as certain locations, with waste. In a world overwhelmed by material waste, certain humans (all of them poor, and most of them racialized) are described as “expendable, a surplus population” (16), that is, useful but disposable and easily replaceable, being wasted once their usefulness as laborers (to the neoliberal capitalist multinational governance) is over. As Ulibarri also acknowledges, the subalternity of these subjects “means that they ‘cannot fit into the new logic or world order.’ As such, the characters become synonymous with ‘human waste’: they are like all the material trash- non-recyclables, carcinogenics and nuclear waste- removed from Earth to the moon” (91; see also Manzanas and Benito 92-3). “Waste management, population management, it was all part of the same thing in the end for the state,” claims Lydia (18). Reservations become warehouses where “spare” humans are stored (18)—just those areas have been previously used to store nuclear waste. In fact, the wasting of the land and other-than-human nature precedes, and sets the basis for, the wasting of (certain) humans. Frank’s family is an example of this process: they lost their lands because these “were taken over for the installation of lab facilities and waste disposal sites” and such loss nearly meant their relocation to a Reservation (56). The cannibalistic mentality of neoliberal capitalism—continuously devouring natural resources, devastating certain environments deemed as wastelands, and producing enormous amounts of waste as a result—causes displacement, the loss of food sovereignty, unemployment and, ultimately, the wasting of certain lives.

To further extend the metaphor of low-income and of mostly racialized people as waste, the novella juxtaposes the pre-Reservation situation, when “the unemployed and homeless […] had been essentially squatting by taking over streets in several sectors of metropolitan areas” (17) with the post-Reservation conditions, when “the streets in the metropolitan areas were […] clean, devoid of street people or trash” (38). The equation of homeless people with trash and dirt contrasts with the narrator’s comment about the artificial sterility it conveyed (38), an artificiality imposed by the unjust political system that, far from having solved any social problems, has transferred them to the heterotopic space of the Reservations. The notion of poor, racialized people as trash in the novella also applies specifically to the lunar braceros—known as “trash-technicians” or “trash-techs”—in charge of handling and burying toxic waste in the Moon. This system is a futuristic, galactic reenactment of the Bracero Program of the mid-twentieth century, once again appealing to the history of population control and labor exploitation of the borderlands (Rivera “Future,” 429; Manzanas & Benito 93).

In this highly technological future, the novella depicts these workers as cheap, expendable commodities that, after being murdered, are disposed of in waste containers. The character behind the murders justifies his actions by arguing that “[c]learly it was necessary for the few to die for the good of the many” and describes the murdered workers as “a nuisance” (107–8), displaying a radically different understanding of the notion of the “common good” from the one practiced at Chinganaza. Disposability is “the mode of being unique to the technological era,” (20) according to Kennedy’s ontology of trash, and the Wasteocene logic of the politico-commercial power of Cali-Texas regards the disposability of certain humans as not only undeniable but necessary. As a message sent to the lunar control center read: “These metals are more valuable than a thousand disposal techs. Excellent cost/benefit analysis” (124). In this neoliberal scenario ruled only by capital, certain lives are simply less valuable than material resources, and the extended metaphor of certain (mostly racialized) people as waste conveys this ideology. The use of metaphors and the explicit verbalization of the value assigned to the lives of racialized others exposes the prevailing Wasteocene logic characteristic of neoliberal capitalist systems. Furthermore, this unambiguous socio-environmental critique appeals to feelings of indignation and outrage that might arise as a response to the injustices depicted, in an attempt to foster affective solidarity toward wasted beings and places, further conveyed with the help of the narrative voice(s) and the epistolary style.

A futuristic diary composed of “nanotexts” (brief digital diary entries) “with lunar posts, lessons, bits and pieces of conversations, and notations with friends” (5), presents the narrative’s fragmented epistolary style. Although Lydia produces most of these entries and addresses them to her son, Pedro, a few have different narrative voices and most are dialogic. Thus, the narrative form combines multiperspectivity and interpolated narration—combining subsequent and simultaneous narration. The fragmented epistolary style plays in the temporal and geographical dimensions, which accounts for the narrative’s “postmodern aura […] in which time, place, and space are continually presented and navigated out of sequence” (Olguín 129), points at “forms of kinship grounded in interdependence across time and space” (Perreira 94). It moreover serves a didactic function: the reader learns about all these problems and the global geopolitical reorganization at the same time that Pedro, the recipient of the diary, does. And he provides the readership with “some semblance of order,” taking on “an authorial role in the text” (Ulibarri 86). The novella is moreover told by autodiegetic narrators, which allows readers to share the characters’ subjective experiences and to see the world with their eyes, a key literary strategy to foster narrative empathy. Furthermore, the multiplicity of voices turns the novella into a “collective dialogic enterprise, in which the idea of the protagonist is also collectivized through the cybernetic polyphony enabled by nanochips” (Olguín 140). The nanotexts, personal accounts of historical and familial events “against the grain of dominant narratives” (Perreira 89) counter the Wasteocene master’s narrative and the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo). They convey “the science of revolutionary resistance to capitalism and its multiple forms of alienation” (Olguín 130), instilling in Pedro the importance of struggling in coalition for what one thinks is right. His “access to […] collective memory […] makes possible a sense of what is under threat, as well as what is being fought for” (Perreira 94). Thus, “the nanotext provides a memory about kinship,” a “layered sense of collective memory” (94). Lunar Braceros is a collective and a communal narrative.

Since Pedro and the readership, as recipients of the diary, hold parallel positions, the same intent is addressed to the readership, once again appealing to feelings of affect and care. The novella’s use of second person address emphasizes this approach. While most nanotexts directly address Pedro, the whole diary is meant for him. At first, readers might not easily identify with him, for, as Weik von Mossner puts it, “we tend to empathize most readily with those who are near and dear to us, or at least like us in the sense of belonging to the same social, ethnic, national, or religious group” (81, italics in original). Thus Pedro, a Latino child who is ten when his parents leave and eighteen at the present time of the narrative, is not necessarily the type of character with whom most readers, presumably adult, might empathize, given his age. The novella circumvents this fact by playing with the notion of the unintended, intrusive reader. At the very beginning, the novella specifies that Pedro is sending the diary to his uncle through a clandestine network and that it might be intercepted or lost (5). Therefore, it seems as if the reader had accidentally come across the diary. This strategy invites readers to imagine what they would do if they inhabited that future world and found the diary, making them wonder with which side of the story they would align, once again appealing to forms of affective solidarity.

Conclusion

Lunar Braceros is a speculative counternarrative of the Wasteocene: it depicts a dystopian but avoidable future that exposes current geographies of racial vulnerability and related injustices, while offering decolonial alternatives based on solidarity and uncommoning in an affective appeal to the readership to start acting for a better future. It conveys an environmental justice discourse that draws attention to the mechanisms that deem certain bodies, as well as certain places, expendable according to the Wasteocene logic. Furthermore, it employs an array of narrative techniques that facilitate a temporal disjuncture, a transnational critique, and a polyvocal account, with the potential to produce an affective response. The narrative style also fits a decolonial project: rejecting individuality and the image of the “lone hero” in favor of commonality (c.f. Rivera “Rosaura,” 281), and challenging hegemonic, master’s narratives and epistemic violence through personal accounts. Moreover, it is not merely an apocalyptic narrative that aims to warn current readers. The novella provides some coping mechanisms, depicting how socio-environmental injustices can be countered through bottom-up action. Ultimately, it tries to influence readers by raising awareness and prompting them to reconsider their present engagement—and possible complicity—in socio-environmental injustices, and to engage in social activism and decolonial, that is inter- and eco-dependent, transitive, inclusive, and affective forms of solidarity.

No matter how one might want to label the current epoch, the reality concealed by the Wasteocene logic should not be ignored: racialized people are being wasted, mostly in the Global South, and modernity’s master’s narrative, the one that allows those in the Global North to go on with life as usual, has to be challenged. Slow violence is persistent and insidious, but it is not invisible to those who suffer from it, and it should not be invisible to anyone else. Chicanx literature, with its long history of social activism, has a long tradition of socio-environmental counternarratives (Pérez-Ramos), and novellas such as Lunar Braceros speak directly to what has been theorized as the Wasteocence, providing a useful example of narrative strategies that work to inform and mobilize readers through diverse forms of solidarity. At a time of implicatory denial and apathy in the face of climate change, when emotional engagement is faltering and keeping people from taking real action (Norgaard), counternarratives appealing to affect and care must be brought to the fore. They might not be the panacea to socio-environmental problems, but they can contribute to challenging hegemonic toxic discourses while proposing alternative realities and appealing to solidarity.

Notes

1

For analyses of sci-fi borderlands narratives of wasted racialized laborers and of Chicanx cyberpunk, see Rivera “Future;” “Chicana/o.”

2

For a sociological study of apathy, inaction, and denial in well-informed and politically active social groups in the face of climate change see Norgaard.

3

“Global North” and “Global South”—as any umbrella terms—are problematic, fuzzy, and imperfect terms, but they help to convey and visualize the major socio-environmental tensions and patterns here addressed.

4

The novella capitalizes the word Reservation.

5

All parenthetical references to the novella will hereafter appear with the page number only.

6

See Pérez-Ramos, 23–29. For studies of nuclear colonialism and wastelanding in the US Southwest, see Gómez & Voyles.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR” (grant RYC2021-031353-I); and by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033/ and “ERDF A way of making Europe” (grant MCIU-22-PID2021-127052OB-I00, “SOLIDARITIES”). I wish to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh for hosting me as a Visiting Research Fellow during the fall of 2023. I am also thankful to the Speculative Play and Just Futurities (SPJF) program at the University of Indianapolis, which hosted and funded me as Visiting Scholar in the fall of 2024. Preliminary versions of this work have been presented at various academic conferences and events and at IASH & SPJF Work in Progress Seminars. I am grateful to the scholars I have shared panels with and to those participating from the audience, for their comments and informed opinions. I am particularly grateful to ISLE peer reviewers and ISLE Editor-in-Chief Christina Gerhardt, for their detailed and constructive feedback. Special thanks to Paola Prieto López, for her insights regarding solidarity theory.