Catherine Ramírez explores race, immigration, automation, and visions of labor in Latinxfuturist works.

Right-wing populists have long accused migrants of stealing native workers’ jobs, particularly blue-collar or “unskilled” jobs. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, anxiety about the obsolescence of white-collar labor has erupted in the United States. However, long before ChatGPT, certain groups of workers in the United States were expected to be temporary and replaced by machines. Among those workers were enslaved Africans and African Americans, impressed Chinese laborers, and Mexican nationals who worked under the auspices of the bracero program.

Examining the intersection of racial capitalism and the history of the future in the United States, Ramírez explores visions of labor in Latinxfuturist works, such as Alex Rivera’s short film Why Cybraceros? (1997) and Miguel Angel Caballero’s short film The Ballad of Tita and the Machines (2023). As she considers the bracero program’s legacy, particularly its 21st-century successor, the H-2A visa program for “nonimmigrant” and putatively temporary workers, she confronts visions of a future without workers, immigrants, and undocumentedness in the United States.

Sponsored by the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program and co-sponsored by the American and Native American Studies Program and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.

This event is free and open to the public.