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From Papapap to Sleep Dealer: AlexRivera's undocumentary poeticsAmy Sara Carrollaa American Culture, Lat ina/ o Studies, and English Language and

Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

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From Papapapa to Sleep Dealer: Alex Riveras undocumentary poetics

Amy Sara Carroll*

American Culture, Latina/o Studies, and English Language and Literature, Universityof Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

This essay considers the oeuvre of Peruvian-American filmmaker Alex Rivera,focusing especially on Riveras representations of the MexicoUS continentalcorridor. It also offers preliminary notes toward a theory of undocumentarypoetics applicable beyond Riveras efforts.

Keywords: Alex Rivera; documentary film; fiction film; MexicoUS bordercultural production

Introduction

Rosa Alcalas volume of poetry Undocumentaries (2010) affixes the critical prefix

un- to the word and project of documentary. In Undocumentaries, clearly under

the influence of a host of work emerging from post-1968 performance, documentary

filmmaking, experimental poetry, and conceptual art, Alcala critiques the logics of

governmentality, the market, and a much earlier generation of poets and filmmakers

whose work appealed to such values as truth, moral certainty, and even genre.

But she also lyrically demonstrates a self-consciousness of her position as a writer

coming after the counter-cultural generation that she admires. Part assimilationist,

part visceral realist, Alcala negotiates words as the medium of conceptual practices

still subject to incorporation. Consequently, although Alcala seldom takes on the

issue of the MexicoUS border, Undocumentaries prefix un- recalls MexicoUS

border arts attention to the politics of language.

Jo-Anne Berelowitz (2003) divides border arts production into three periods that

correspond with, firstly, identity politics (19681980); secondly, multiculturalism

(19841992); and, thirdly, globalization (1992Present) (pp. 144145). Her temporal

schema is less interesting than her fleeting attempts to think continuity across division,

however. One such gesture toward an interpretative bridge apropos toUndocumentaries

prefix surfaces in Berelowitzs characterization of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de

Arte Fronterizos (BAW/TAF) praxis, which spans two of her proposed periods.1

Berelowitz reflects on BAW/TAFs focus on the phrases that the popular press from

the 1980s to date assigns to immigrant laborers without papers. She claims:

Prior to their interventions the media had referred to this group of people as illegal aliens,thereby producing a category of human being coterminous with subjection, domination,and exploitation and defined by a quintessential otherness. Subsequent to BAW/TAFsefforts, the terms undocumented worker and undocumented immigrant, with theirvastly different associations, became widespread. (Berelowitz, 2003, pp. 160161)

*Email: amysara@umich.edu

Social Identities, 2013

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The semantic difference that undocumented engenders in Berelowitzs example

nevertheless furthers how we might think about the labor of the prefix un- in Alcalas

formulations of Undocumentaries. For, arguably, in the final analysis, Undocumentaries

reads as a performative provocation: What would an undocumentary poetics look

and sound like?

Caught up in the perlocutionary force of that question, in this essay I concentrate

on the oeuvre of the Peruvian-American filmmaker Alex Rivera, a self-proclaimed

dot.comic and dot.commie. Rivera, whose films/works have been screened at the

Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center, on PBS, and at

various festivals and universities, has received support from Creative Capital, the

Jerome Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the United States/

Mexico Fund for Culture. In what follows, I briefly frame the formal and thematic

stakes of Riveras first short experimental film Papapapa (1995a) before turning to

the continuities and differences between that project and several of the filmmakers

other cinematic and digital endeavors, including his long-awaited science fiction

feature-length film Sleep Dealer (2008).

In particular, I analyze and cross the porous borders between documentary and

fiction in Riveras representations of convergences of maps and kinship diagrams and

his cinematic sense of humor. Additionally, hybridizing Alcalas and the BAW/TAFs

attentions to undocumentation, I follow Riveras focus on the MexicoUS to

consider the ways in which the filmmaker learns from previous and contempora-

neous efforts that disturb the MexicoUS border as a state-sponsored aesthetic

project (Brady, 2002, p. 83). Finally, building on my close readings of Riveras

practice, I offer preliminary notes toward a theory of undocumentary poetics,

specifically as the phrase could pertain to MexicoUS border cultural production

and documentary filmmaking at large.

Crossing the Porous Borders of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking with Rivera

Riveras efforts span a range of visual and new media practices from short video,

web design, documentary film, and feature length fiction film. Documenting

hegemonic investments in narratives of free trade, modernization, and progress in

the era of neoliberal globalization, the filmmakers work undocuments these

narratives naturalization. Paralleling neoliberal globalizations reification of greater

Mexico as a free trade zone, Rivera especially focuses on the MexicoUS borders

industrialization, commodification, and militarization during the period of the

North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA) complete implementation from

1994 to 2008. In this regard, although not usually catalogued as border art, Riveras

oeuvre clearly is held in the latters sway and contributes to its ongoing definition.Confronting preconceptions of the border in predominantly US-based scholar-

ship and public policy that locate it simply as the division between the United States

and Mexico, Riveras efforts present what performance artist Guillermo Gomez-

Pena (1996) once dubbed the New World Border as a moveable feast and famine,

as gradations of those two extremes. Simultaneously, Riveras corpus, in the spirit of

a contemporaneous wave of documentary filmmaking, critiques the documentary

genres cliched investments in fact-finding and political action (see Chanan, 2007;

Gaines & Renov, 1999; Juhasz & Lerner, 2006; Nichols, 1994).

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For instance, as early as his acclaimed senior project at Hampshire College

Papapapa (1995a), Rivera treats the interior and exterior landscapes evoked when the

Border as a construct is deployed. Papapapa idiosyncratically chronicles the

experience of the filmmakers fathers immigration from Peru to the United States

via Miami, the peregrinations of the potato in the New World, and Riveras

engagement with his own bicultural and biracial heritage. Part science fiction, part

ode to television, part critique of US and Peruvian racial politics, Papapapa includessuch seemingly displaced scenes as a televisual game on the fictive Inca Vision talk

show The Border Bunch, which offers commentary on US immigration policy after

NAFTAs trilateral passage.

Papapapas aesthetics, hardly the fiction of a sharp documentary/fiction-film

binary, is comprehensible vis-a`-vis several recent labels affixed to documentary

filmmaking practices that criss-cross the borders among cinema, performance and

conceptualism. For example, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (2006) resist

surgical strike descriptions of this growing archive, favoring the blanket character-

ization of documentary that eschews categorization but challenges new iterations of

the genre as fake documentary. Bill Nichols (1994) also chooses an expansive

nomenclature to describe this boom in experimental documentary with the phrase

performative documentary. Along the lines of Nichols definition of the latter, we

might interpret Papapapa as privileging dialectical relationships between the local/

concrete and exploring overarching conceptual categories such as exile, racism,

sexism, or homophobia (1994, p. 104). Or, searching for a potentially more exacting

label for the film, we might apprehend Papapapa as a mutant docudrama a term

usually reserved for genres in which real events are depicted via documentary and

dramatic techniques insofar as Papapapas code-switches between a presumed real

timespace and science fiction.

There is something missing in these vocabulary-building categorizations,

however. Humor places Papapapa in a class apart, expanding how we understand

the adjectives fake and performative in Juhasz and Lerners and Nichols

respective formulations; amplifying how we disinter the substantive root drama

in docudrama. Like Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendis (1998) A Day Without a

Mexican, which imagines what would happen if all Mexicans (metonymic of all

Latina/os and Latin Americans) suddenly disappeared from California, Papapapa

approximates a mockumentary.

That portmanteau, whose origin is unknown, but usually dated to the 1950s, or in

the instance of the Oxford English Dictionary to 1965, references a film that presents

fictitious events in a spoof of the documentary genre.2 Mockumentaries, predomi-

nantly comedic, sometimes dramatic, often forward a political or social agenda,

while implicitly or explicitly critiquing the documentary as a form. The mock-

umentary fits the bill of Riveras modus operandi on many counts. Indeed, even

in an interview with Kathy High about Papapapa the filmmakers precociously

humorous hubris carries the day (after all he was only twenty-four at the time): Im

well aware that there are people who dont like documentaries*I might have been

one of those people*and so when I was making this film, I tried to develop a set of

strategies that deviate from the documentary norm, and in my opinion make it more

exciting (High, 1997).

Produced at the cusp of an alter-globalization movement spawned in the

twinned wake of NAFTA and Zapatismo, Papapapas deviations situate it, like

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contemporaneous waves of documentary and border cultural production, as

promoting a combined aesthetic, political, and ethical project to re-order or disturb

what Jacques Rancie`re has termed the distribution of the sensible (2004/2000).

Espousing a translucent point of view in the face of an absolutist, top-down

management of populations, commodity and information flows, and natural resources,

the films deviations endow it with a particularly contagious critical consciousness of

neoliberal globalizations multifarious theaters of the absurd.

Riveras work since Papapapa does not deviate from such heady representational

ambitions and allegiances. Riveras projects to date hybridize documentary and

fictional filmmaking practices in the service of a layered reading of undocumenta-

tion. Time and again, spotlighting the everyday experiences of the undocumented

in the United States, Riveras work denaturalizes in poignant and playful ways the

MexicanUS borderlands NAFTA-fication. But, resisting delimitations of the term

undocumentation, the filmmakers oeuvre post-Papapapa also collapses maps and

kinship diagrams into one another to attend to shifting configurations of citizenship

and built environment.

Consider The Borders Trilogy (2002), where Rivera juxtaposes the proximity and

separation of families in the San Diego/Tijuana twinned metropolitan area, the

amassing of transport containers in New Jersey, and new surveillance technologies

along the MexicoGuatemala border. Originally produced for PBSs Point of View

(POV), The Borders Trilogy incorporates division into its formal structure, but

refuses to pigeonhole that division as binary. Aesthetically discrete, the projects

sequence of documentary shorts speak to one another like three poems or

photographs in a series, effectively converting a video triptych into a triptik that

remaps commonsensical understandings of the borderlands.

Love on the Line which Rivera refers to as the depiction of transnational

picnics (Rivera, 2003b) begins with an inter-title that locates the piece thematically:

In the 1990s, a US law was enacted that punished some legal immigrants for visiting

their countries of origin. It then focuses on the iconic fence between San Diego and

Tijuana at the Playas de Tijuana, which extends like a jetty into the Pacific. Love on

the Line depends upon the brief interview clips with families divided by the wall. A

couple kiss through the borders bars before one of them rhetorically quips: The INS

doesnt stop you for that, right love? A young male worker on the US side muses:

There are things that are not solid that can cross this line. After Berelowitzs

periodization of border cultural production, the shot that this chapter establishes

feels not only familial, but familiar. The Borders Trilogys second short is not as

immediately recognizable, however.

Two representations of the border as the signature of blockage contain

Container City. The second poem of The Borders Trilogy also ostensiblyconcentrates on cartography, presenting the borders fluid status in relation to the

commodity; but, it locates the borderlands in a space not usually associated with

international borders. Container City begins with the inter-title: In the late 20th

century as the US closed its borders to increased immigration, it opened its borders

to Free Trade. From there it proceeds to define the container invasion, informing

viewers that shipping containers have accumulated in a New Jersey subdivision.

Tonally, Container City wields a mockumentary logic to rival Papapapas.

Rivera interviews a Councilman and residents of Newark, New Jersey, who live in a

middle class housing complex. One of these native informants laments: We would

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have a beautiful view of the Passaic River and the surrounding area instead of

looking at a wall of containers that actually walls us in. Transnationally campy,

Container City sports tongue-in-cheek commentary such as [t]he abandoned

containers are slowly taking over; subtitles, which repeat the observation that the US

is a consuming region; and suspenseful background music characteristic of a

B-movie thriller. But, after the fact of the US subprime mortgage and foreclosure

crises, other narratives glimmer beneath the surface tension of this sections humor.

The borders alluded to in Container City stand in stark contrast to the containers

transience, the latters map of the world that choreographs multifarious trade routes.

A disjunctive, yet connected, migrant melancholia (Schmidt Camacho, 2008)

and an attendant US middle class melancholia in the face of obstructed vistas

grounds The Borders Trilogys middle passage, prepping its publics for A Visible

Border, which rounds out the series undocumentary poetics. In AVisible Border,

Rivera presents imaging technologies on the MexicoGuatemala border, again

choreographed in relation to blockages and flows. Jim Hurley, a market analyst for

the Aberdeen Group, whose voice becomes part of the videos soundtrack, explains

this technology, developed and utilized by American Science & Engineering, Inc. in

the mid-to-late 1990s.

AVisible Border presents a close-up of an x-ray image, slowly panning back to

reveal a banana truck with human contraband, the turn-of-the-millenniums

equivalent of a middle passage. Hurley matter-of-factly clarifies that, unlike

medical x-rays, this imaging technology picks up on reflective waves, the chemical/

electronic signatures of objects that allow its users to identify illegal substances

marijuana, cocaine, plastic explosives, human beings. But, as he concludes, the

subtitles of A Visible Border obscure his sales pitch, indicating that the

undocumented entrants were on their way to the US, but never made it into Mexico.

AVisible Border highlights border control as a panoptical documentary effect;

it stresses the prominent role that surveillance culture plays in the social dramas of

border wars and their labor politics. A Visible Border, as prescient as Container

City, animates narrativity, rending a hole in the stasis of surveillance-oriented

vision. It clocks performative-meets-pedagogical nationalisms investments in the

Borders construction and maintenance (Bhabha, 1994).3 Indeed, a slightly longer

pan on this chapters various scapes (Appadurai, 1996) would suggest that AVisible

Border corroborates The Borders Trilogys more general thesis, namely, the migrant

not only learns to labor but also to behave like a product because products cross

borders where people cannot (Rivera, 2003b). Deceptively simple, while each

chapter of The Borders Trilogy functions autonomously, taken together these poems

mark the arbitrariness of borders as arbitrators of planetary subdivision (Figure 1).

So, too, Riveras The Sixth Section (2003a), produced for POV, and perhaps the

closest approximation of a documentary proper in the filmmakers oeuvre, troubles

the concept of both the Border and the exact location of the MexicoUS border

proper. The Sixth Section chronicles the activities of a group of Mexican men, Grupo

Union from Boqueron, Puebla, who work in Newburgh, New York. On the one

hand, The Sixth Section paints a portrait of migratory labor. On the other hand, The

Sixth Section complicates facile understandings of displacement because members of

Grupo Union resist assimilation, using their very precarity as political leverage in a

rapidly evolving global Mexican public sphere.

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Conceding that Newburgh is our Mexico, one cofounder of Grupo Union

explains that the group organically emerged out of the building-block of a wish: We

wanted to do more than help our families. We wanted to help the whole town.

Grupo Unions origin myth begins with a desire to build a baseball stadium; the men

raised $50,282 to build a 2000-seat stadium in Boqueron (population 3154). Rivera

speaks of first seeing the stadium in the small Mexican desert town, inserting humor

into this film, too: I felt like one of the apes in the movie 2001 when they see that

huge black obelisk standing in the desert. What is it? Why is it here? What does it

mean? (2003a).

The significance of Grupo Unions activities haunts The Sixth Section as its

skeleton in the closet. Rivera intersperses maps throughout the film in an effort to

establish a relationship between Boqueron and Newburgh. But, what exactly is

Rivera mapping? In one moment, maps morph into money. A hundred dollar bill

becomes a one-hundred peso note where Benjamin Franklin gets a facelift,

reemerging as Nezahualcoyotl (Figure 2).4 Grupo Union realizes that Boqueron

was forgotten by the government. The groups members seek to implement another

geography of kinship and citizenship by way of such technologies as electronic

money transfer, email, and long distance cell phone calls. One member speculates:

Boqueron is divided into five sections. Now I see Newburgh as the sixth section. In

this forum and formulation, Newburgh becomes Boquerons phantom limb, its

virtual Lima not lost, but annexed as an informal neighborhood.

Newburgh as contrast in the film allows Rivera to reverse-shoot the terms of

Boqueron as lack (of jobs, education, health care) to present a ghostly excess of

locale. An open join, Grupo Unions inter-American location extends beyond

Newburgh and Boquerons connection. The Sixth Sections intertitles inform:

Mexicans in the USA send 10.5 billion dollars to Mexico each year. For Mexico,

this income is second only to the export of oil . . .There are at least 1000 groups like

Grupo Union. Mexican politicians are confronting this reality. These workers

represent a transnational Mexican shadow economy and shadow body-politic that

reinvent the local, the national, and the global. The Sixth Sections para-geographies

Figure 1. Imaging human contraband at the GuatemalaMexico border (film capture from

The Borders Trilogy, 2002, courtesy of Alex Rivera).

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include the immanent transcendence to power of a transnational counterpublic

(Warner 2002). Do the math. Grupo Union insists that the politicians had ignored

small villages like Boqueron, using them to further governmental corruption: If the

government says it will spend one million dollars on a project, only twenty-five

thousand dollars arrive. Confronted with this reality, Robert Smith, a political

scientist featured in the film, concedes that collectives such as Grupo Union are

taking over the significant function of the state to raise money for local projects.

In the final analysis, The Sixth Section is not mired in the triumphalism of

documentary representations of ideal community and cooperation, though. The film

muddies its own flows, thus muddying the documentary forms presumed aesthetics,

too. For instance, The Sixth Section details the heartbreaking limitations of Grupo

Unions activities: the stadium exists but everyone of baseball-playing age in

Boqueron is gone, so the collective must hire players (understood as male, of

course). One member of Grupo Union wistfully comments: The idea is that maybe

one day well go back and play there. Maybe. In the interim, keeping the village on

baseballs map amounts to a debt with a variable interest rate. Grupo Unions plans

to equip Boquerons health clinic with an ambulance backfire, too. After a young

pregnant woman from the village is transported to the clinic in a wheelbarrow

when she goes into labor, Grupo Union buys a used ambulance. The groups only

green-carded member drives their purchase from Newburgh to Boqueron.

In The Sixth Section, Rivera uses dissolve, fade in and fade out editing techniques

and time acceleration, to work the films form toward the undoing of a documentary

aesthetics lodged among the discourses of sobriety (Nichols, 1991, pp. 34). These

techniques suggest a relationship between Newburgh and Boqueron in terms that

cast Grupo Unions members as Boquerons sometimes thwarted living ghosts qua

avatars. The particular scene of the transport of the ambulance to Boqueron relies

upon such artful manipulations of the reality-effect, defining the projects tragicomic

undocumentary poetics. The drivers testimony about the trip, his admission of being

Figure 2. Currency exchange (film capture from The Sixth Section, 2003, courtesy of Alex

Rivera).

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afraid to sleep in the ambulances cab during his journey (he fears the ghosts of those

who have died there), lends the vehicles transport a gravitas, recalling, but updating,

the national allegorical vision-quest of Juan Rulfos novel Pedro Paramo. In turn, the

real effects of the ambulance remain disappointingly negligible, if not bleakly ironic.

Members of Grupo Union concede that after all the expense and effort the

ambulance gathers dust in Boqueron without a driver. In this regard, if with the film

Rivera follows the effects of organizations such as Grupo Union on Mexican public

policy, he likewise elaborates on the long-standing codependent bipolarities of US

immigration policy and Mexicos modernizing agenda a topic of interest for the

filmmaker foreshadowed in and by his website Cybracero (1997). In Cybracero and

its accompanying promotional mockumentary video Why Cybraceros? (1997),

Rivera once again crosses the border between documentary and fictional representa-

tion. Influenced by multifarious satiric traditions emerging since the late 1960s, but

notably by artivist practices (meme-hacking, culture-jamming) developed in tandem

with the alter-globalization movement, Riveras press-release for the combined

website and short film grounds his fiction historically in the propaganda itself so

many fictions of the now defunct Bracero Program.5 The filmmakers description

assures that while braceros in the US contributed to a climate of racial and

economic suspicion . . . such concerns will no longer be an issue under the Cybracero

Program.

A dystopian transnational allegory of outsourcing that throws into question the

post- in contemporary elaborations of post-Fordist labor, Riveras modest proposal

recycles the language of global capital and managerial nationalisms. The filmmaker

insists that the Cybracero Program permits only the labor of Mexicans to cross the

border, stopping the actual flow of bodies insofar as Mexican laborers are given

access to high speed internet connections to remotely control robotic farm workers.

Quite literally parodying an early promotional film Why Braceros? (1959) that was

presented as a public service by the Council of California Growers, Rivera

continues in Why Cybraceros?:

These robotic workers are especially designed by the U.S. department of labor to beoptimized for farm tasks. Using a series of simple commands a Mexican worker can,from Mexico, watch their live internet feed, decide what fruit is ripe, what branch needspruning, and what bush needs watering. To the worker its as simple as point and click topick. For the American farmer its all the labor without the worker . . . In Spanishcybracero means a worker who operates a computer with his arms and hands. But inAmerican lingo, cybracero means a worker who poses no threat of becoming a citizen.6

The absurdity of the proposition resonates once again with that of A Day Without a

Mexican (1998). In fact, if Papapapa and A Day Without a Mexican were not perfect

matches, Why Cybraceros? and A Day Without a Mexican appear to be deep in

conversation on both a formal and thematic level. Moreover, there is the coincidence

that each short video functions as the kernel of a larger feature length commercial

film.7 Eleven years after their initial production, Cybracero and Why Cybraceros?

return like the repressed in Riveras speculative fiction Sleep Dealer.

Sleep Dealer deftly responds to the industrialization and militarization of the

MexicoUS continental corridor. In the arc of Riveras endeavors, Sleep Dealer

capitalizes on the logic of slippage between documentary and fictional cinema in

Latin America that Michael Chanan reads as characteristic of el nuevo cine

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latinoamericano since the 1950s. Compiling notes toward a genealogy of that

slippage, Chanan makes clear that the deliberate confusion of what are normally

two distinct modes of representational space must be understood as a kind of new

normal in Latin/o American cultural production (Chanan, 2009). Chanans thesis

and Riveras oeuvre corroborate one anothers critical alibis.

Set in both Santa Ana del Ro (Oaxaca) and the join of Tijuana/San Diego, SleepDealer chronicles a future five minutes from now, wherein the so-called American

Dream divorces the workers body from her or his labor. In Sleep Dealers near

immediate flashback, we background-check the films protagonist, Memo Cruz (Luis

Fernando Pena). In Santa Ana del Ro, Memos family, living off the land, a small

milpa, must contend with the disquieting question: Is our future a thing of the past?

The films scenario is one of water and dam(n) politics.8 Its plot proceeds as

follows: prior to Memos birth, water, like air, was available, free of charge, to the

areas inhabitants. But, the multinational corporation, Del Rio Water (without

an accent), constructed a dam and fences to siphon off and redirect the natural

resource away from the region. Locals must purchase at exorbitant rates the water

they drink and use to sustain their crops. In this context, another story of fatherson

relations, eerily consonant with, yet distinct from, the one articulated in Papapapa

frames exchanges among smart technology, borders, and generations.

Again underscoring the ill effects of neoliberal globalization vis-a`-vis what might

be understood as an amplification of a greater Mexican undocumentary poetics

under construction by Rivera and others, Sleep Dealer re-scripts the supposed LatinAmerican divide between the traditional and the (post-)modern. Memo, who longs

to escape the provincialism of Santa Ana, cannot comprehend the faith his father

places in the intimacies of work and place. Surreptitiously he seeks to intercept the

Otherworldly, which in this instance translates as the post-contemporary, as not only

a blast from the present, but as a blast from a future of collective organizing. Unlike

his brother, who is addicted to transnational televisual flows (a` la the father figure of

Papapapa, duly reprimanded by Jorge Ramos of Univision: Augusto [Rivera], stop

watching so much television),9 Memo, armed with the manual Hackear para

pricipiantes [sic]/Hacking for Beginners by R. Dominguez, gerry-rigs a device and

satellite dish for hacking various transmissions, local and international telephone

calls and restricted paramilitary communications (Figure 3).

The full significance of Memos alter-patrilineal ambitions is worth considering at

greater length. For now, suffice it to summarize: in Gonzalez, Fox & Noriegas (2008)

Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, Jim Mendiola and Ruben

Ortiz-Torres describe self-taught computer visionary Ricardo Dominguez [who]

hacks into Mexican government servers from his New York apartment and shuts

them down (p. 230). In other words, this early D.I.Y. moment in Riveras film

continues to privilege genealogy over cartography; it occasions a phantom citing of

Dominguezs praxis, doubling as homage and reference to Memos attempts at an

outsider new media practice.

In the more immediate, living vicariously, Memo listens until one evening

Rodolfo Ramirez, also known as Rudy (Jacob Vargas), a rookie pilot at the private

military contractor Del Rios Security Headquarters, along with the host of the

reality TV show DRONES, counter-intercept Memos intercept, bumping Memos

house up to the top of the DRONES hit list. The next day, Memo and his brother set

off for a party at their uncles. Bored by the old-time techno-meets-Nortec house

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music, the young men beat a retreat to the television in a scene that preserves Riveras

dot.comic sense and sensibility (replete with a gravitas to eclipse The Sixth Sections).

To their surprise and horror, Memo and his brother witness a live DRONES surgical

strike targeting their home.

Rewritten as a defensive measure against aqua terrorists, the Mayan Army of

Water Liberation, this scene of preemptive military action, familiar to all historians

of the vanishing present as it pertains to Iraqi, Afghan, Pakistani, and MexicanUS

theaters of operation, could almost veer into valences of the comic, if one of the end

products were not the death of Memos father. The situation, an eventual double

awakening for Memo and Rudy, plumbs Sleep Dealers diegesis, lending the plot an

alternate migrant melancholia that remediates Raymond Williams opposition of the

country and the city vis-a-vis the third allegorical figuration of the border (1973).10

On the road to Tijuana, Memo meets Luz Martnez (Leonor Varela), an aspiring

writer, a woman with nodes. Memo, intent upon procuring nodes as a means to

secure employment in Tijuana to feed his family now bereft of a male head-of-

household, strikes up a conversation with Luz, soliciting advice on how and where to

get a node job. Luz eventually gifts Memo his nodes and facilitates Memo and

Rudys fated coalition. As such, she represents a different repeat performance,

operating in a manner familiar as the films scenes of fatherson conflict and

contrition. A bridge between men, Luz both doubles as monumental Woman in

Sleep Dealers iteration of Malinche (Hernan Cortezs controversial indigenous

translator, lover, and colonial bridge) and culture-jams to mutate the dominant gene

of a documentary aesthetic.

Signaling her own and Memos allegorical potentialities the literality of

eachs name, light and memo, an abbreviation of the word memorandum, or

meme Luz represents an enabling violation (Spivak, 1999, p. 371).11 She sells her

Figure 3. Cognitive kinship diagramming meets cognitive mapping (film capture from Sleep

Dealer, 2008, courtesy of Alex Rivera).

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memories Memos stories on TruNode to none other than Rudy, who, incapable

of shaking the spectral image of Memos fathers facial expression in the face of

assassination, enlists Luz to help him re-create the circumstances surrounding his

first ethically dubious mission. Rudy has a hunch, intuits connection between Memo

and himself as readily as we might intuit connection between Riveras documentary

and fictional filmmaking.

Meanwhile, Memo goes about business as usual, seeking employment in the sleep

dealers. Having achieved a pseudo-higher plane of nodal consciousness, he muses,

finally, I could connect my nervous system to another system. The global economy.

This is the American Dream. All the work without the workers. Memo secures a job

at Cybracero (Cybracero deja` vu), from which he virtually builds skyscrapers in San

Diego. The pay is semi-decent by Santa Ana del Ro standards if one turns a blind

eye to the working conditions, which include routine break downs in the system and

power surges that electrocute the workers. To counter the paradoxical drudgery of

this hybridized Fordist and post-Fordist work place an obvious stand-in for the

ubiquitous maquila of the MexicoUS border, too often portrayed as epitomizing the

socioeconomic shifts of the NAFTA era in Mexico Memo frequents the market on

Sundays in search of vague reminders of Santa Ana Del Ro.12

The latter detail becomes the vital clue for Rudy to locate Memo, but also

represents the lynchpin of transnational extended kinship for the San Diego-based

pilot. However, before Rudy and Memos face-to-face, politically arousing exchange

can happen, other events must transpire. Memo and Luz become lovers, affording

Sleep Dealers viewers the chance to consider the merits of node sex. Memo discovers

that Luzs writing practice is bound to the cyber-circuits of betrayal, an arena in

which creativity is evacuated from process. TruNode corrects text on the basis of

affect, demanding transparent truths, a facsimile of documentary, versus the

vagrancies of an undocumentary poetics what Luz in the most generous reading

of her character embodies.

Armed with the final installment of Luzs versions or memos of Memos

experiences, Rudy has all the evidence he needs to feel as neoliberally guilt-stricken as

Memo, to break code, to leave the provincialism of the global North. Feeling

backwards (Love, 2007), Rudy flies South to his own nostalgias nebulous sense of

another future five minutes from now, to the market which his father took him to as

a child. Crossing over into Tijuana, heedless of travel advisories, ID checks, and the

tunnel-envisioned signage Warning: Enter Mexico at your own risk, Rudy, literally

and metaphorically, code-switches, rewriting various circuits, including the historical

imperatives of both Mexican and Chicano national/ist allegory.13 After all, with a

name that resists easy allegorical assimilation, Rudy hints at a coalitional politics

that binds Latino to Latin American in a critical war of maneuvers (again with its

ostensible comic interludes a child window-washes Rudys immediate passage into

Tijuanas ultrabaroque).

Memo is sipping soup in the open market, just as Luz via TruNode advertised,

when Rudy sits down across from him with the pick-up lines: I know you,

confessing to qualify, Ive been following your story . . .And I thought maybe I could

help. That I could do something for you. Anything. The scheme the pair hatches

remains beholden to the lubricant of Luz as if she persisted in functioning as the

allegorical alternative to a strict documentary aesthetics of social realism, however.

Luz, Rudy, and Memos bridged tech savviness allow the trio to hack into Del Rio

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Security Headquarters by way of Cybracero industries. Rudy, gone rogue (or maybe,

gone Chicano, after the Chicano movement, aka another phantom sighting)

realizes Im a node worker, too to outfly the Fly Eye# flying cameras that are

dispatched to take him down. In a scene campily reminiscent of Star Wars

culminating fight against the Death Star, Jedi-knight Rudy navigates the Santa Ana

del Ros landscapes narrow passageways like birth canals on the way to water

liberation, with a little help from his friend (Memos third eye, the remembrance of

his fathers David-like sling shot at the Goliath of the dam).

Still, as my precis suggests, Sleep Dealers happy ending of water breaking is as

overdetermined as the film in its entirety. If Sleep Dealer offers a postscriptual

glimpse of Rudy, heading further south, and Memo, settling in and for Tijuana,

where neither character can go home again, it also leaves several threads

unfinished, offering a portrait of collective action as open to reproach as that of

The Sixth Section. Sleep Dealer extends and retracts the possibility of a global

nodal consciousness via the insistence on a reinscription of the allegorical

figuration of traitorous Woman, notwithstanding that motifs productive complica-

tions. That Luz cannot be trusted remains Sleep Dealers a priori what enlivens

both its undocumentary para-aesthetic and its contradictory ambivalence toward

the latter.

Sleep Dealers unease with commodified memory paradoxically makes possible

the films closing scene of collective action against the unnatural disaster of the

militarized and multi-mediated commodification of water. Yet if Luz might be read

as facilitating the homo-social bonding of a Mexican and a Chicano, she also might

be understood as providing the occasion for reflection on how Sleep Dealer falls

short in its imaginings of the politics and erotics of interconnectivity. Luzs initiation

of Memo and the films viewers into the world wide web of node sex leaves up to the

imagination the specter of a more multitudinous electronic civil disobedience,

something that the misspelled citation of R. Dominguez fleetingly cross-references.

Rudy flies solo, plugging in alone. But what if . . . ? What if Memo and Luz and

Rudy (and countless others) had made the connection node to node? What kind of

translucent nodal consciousness, shimmering on the horizon of speculative fictions,

could such a hook-up afford? Sleep Dealer doesnt answer that question because it

never fully formulates it aloud. Bound to the model of the hetero-dyad, Memo loves

Luz, La Vendida, because she cant help whats hardwired into her very form. Still, if

Luz betrays, like Malinche, she also facilitates communication and retribution, an

equitable redistribution of water via the conduit of Rudy, another sellout, who

betrays his employer rather than his conscience (may the Force be with all of us to

claim such a distinction!).

In contrast, Rudy, caught in the throes of a politics of reparation offers a

modicum of allegorical distanciation (however rudimentary), the sign of Latina/o,

gone global. His attempts to split the atom of male citizenship-subjectivity suggest

the re-lease of the transformative energies of the solitary, a para-aesthetics or

undocumentary poetics to rival the paranormal. Rudys presence in Sleep Dealer

begins to index the films implicit and explicit portraits of connection not unlike

those tracked by Rivera elsewhere from cross-border coalition-building to

migratory circuit hyperlayering in the spirit of the films own code-switching title.

In a 2009 interview, Rivera comments:

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Well the phrase Sleep Dealer, I actually found it in a book written by John Berger, aBritish theorist of art and politics, and he wrote this book called A Seventh Man and ittells the story of migration in Europe in the earlier part of the 20th century. It talksabout the past when people used to walk from the south of Europe to the north to getjobs and they would just walk until they couldnt walk anymore, until they were aboutto collapse and they would rent a bed along these trails from sleep dealers, people whowould rent the beds by the hour, and this phrase stuck with me . . . it sounded like sciencefiction to me and so I started to use it in my science fiction script in different ways. Inthe film, sleep dealer refers to these factories where workers work these long shifts tothe point of collapse. (Pena & Rivera, 2009, p. 67)

In search of Riveras reference, I turned to Bergers volume, but had to laugh at the

filmmakers memory lapse, itself an enabling violation. A Seventh Man (1975), a text-

image collaboration between Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, charts early 1970s

European migratory circuits as they pertain to shifts in the structural tenets of

capitalism. A Seventh Man bears witness to the literal and allegorical multitude.

Berger explains:

Those who let out the most miserable rooms to migrant workers are called sleep-dealers(marchands de sommeil). In a small room for one person (a maids room a century ago)three beds have been arranged. Nine men sleep in these three beds by the arrangement ofworking different shifts: three per twenty-four hours. (1975, p. 90)

Untenable life/work conditions: Riveras mis/memory belies the waking dream of a

documentary-fictive crossover between continental migrations, the fate of the Latin

American immigrant (literal or virtual), like and unlike the fate of her or his Turkish

contemporary here and elsewhere.

Conclusion

Alcalas Undocumentaries, with which I opened this essay, cleaves into five parts,

anticipated in the collections first definitive fragment, the section Undocumentary.

There, Alcala (2010) builds the case for an opposition: Documentary: The lyric of

unrehearsed chemicals / acts out the tensions of progress / into a brighter but stiller

image / called fact or archive /Undocumentary: The man who joined / old world

industries of textile / to dirt trucked in from the Ramapos / is not a video / to behold

(p. 13). Alcalas defiant insistence that the subaltern cannot speak (Spivak, 1988)

via the conduit of documentary, its alliances with narratives of progress and

progression, belies the stakes of this essays contribution to rethinking the

documentary as a form vis-a`-vis the key phrase undocumentary poetics.

Generally speaking, from the 1970s onward, after various civil rights and

decolonization movements, in the midst of global economic restructuring tied to

globally designed but locally articulated, neoliberal doctrines, cultural producers and

activists have experimented with alternate forms of representation in response to the

socially dramatic sea changes underway. Documentary filmmakers have not been

immune to such representational heavy-lifting, sometimes conflated with a singular-

ized postmodernism. In the current moment, however, it seems tantamount to a

cultural imperative for critics to tease out similarities and differences among such

paradigm shifts in artmaking and activism since 1968.

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In the case of cultural production responding to the radical reorganization of the

USMexico border as a state-sponsored aesthetic project (Brady, 2002, p. 83), we

paradoxically could identify an overarching drive toward undocumentation, which

defies periodizations such as Berelowitzs. This trend, which spills over into the

present, strives to disturb what Sandra Soto identifies as an implicit binary

opposition of order and disorder [that] uncritically organize[s] representation[s] of

the USMexico border (2007, p. 420).

Riveras film and artwork operates within such a tactical orbit, but amplifies its

circumference, also recognizing cultural producers investments in understanding the

category of border as exceeding the particularized exception of the MexicanUS

borderlands. His cinematic and digital efforts motion-detect the border (MexicoUS

and otherwise) as an ambivalent representational object par excellence, as the flash

foundational fiction of pedagogical temporalities, revealed as equally performative.

Complicating facile theoretical before/after, either/or investments in the border as

a signifier of hybridity and too literal formulations of borders as bounding nations

and continents, from Papapapa to Sleep Dealer, Rivera tracks a circuitry of bordering

as conceptual practice flows as well as stoppages of goods and people that generate

new articulations of continental drift. Kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic,

bordering in Riveras oeuvre eliminates neither center-periphery matchmaking nor

other exclusionary cartographic impulses, which reinvent the worlds map as ripe for

division (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 16). But, against closure, his efforts also perform

vantage points from which to imagine narrative coherence in fragmentation, an

undocumentary poetics that rehearses alter-globalizations in a future five minutes

from now.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue Kristi Wilson and Antonio Traverso fortheir insightful and precise revisionary suggestions for this essay. Additionally, I would like toacknowledge audiences at the University of California, San Diego, and George WashingtonUniversity, who offered responses to earlier versions of this essay. I would be remiss not toexpress my gratitude to my colleagues at the University of Michigan who invited me to presentthe second half of this essay as a work-in-progress at the 2009 Latina/o Studies SilverAnniversary Symposium. I also must thank participants at the 2010 Tepoztlan Institute whogave me constructive criticism on a longer draft of this essay. Ill appreciate for a long whileOrquidea Morales generous engagement with my concept of undocumentation. My heart waswarmed by an anonymous reviewers request for more attention to the poetic in my argument.To that end, I am grateful to Rosa Alcala for granting me permission to reprint lines from herpoem Undocumentary. Finally, this essay would have been impossible to write without thefeedback, camaraderie, and inspiration of Alex Rivera and Ricardo Dominguez.

Notes

1. For more on the BAW/TAF (see Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 1988).2. See the Oxford English Dictionary, accessed 19 April 2011. http://dictionary.oed.com3. Homi Bhabha writes: In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between

the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursivestrategy of the performative (1994, p. 145). We might note that in the NAFTA era, in theproduction of the border as narration, performative and pedagogical temporalities arespliced into one another.

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4. Nezahaulcoyotl appears on the Mexican one hundred peso bill. He was a poet,philosopher, warrior and statesman. Today he is revered in Mexico as one of the greatestpoets of the Americas.

5. The Bracero Program (19421964) that literally translates from Spanish to English as theStrong-Arm Program was a guest worker program brokered by the Mexican and USgovernments, which permitted thousands of Mexicans to work legally as migrant laborersin the United States railroad and agricultural industries.

6. See Why Braceros? (1959), and Why Cybraceros? (Rivera, 1997).7. The feature fiction film A Day Without a Mexican (Arsenstein & Arau, 2004) follows the

mockumentary A Day Without a Mexican (Arau & Arizmendi, 1998).8. In this regard, the film conjures the specter of Arundhati Roys activism in relation to

Indias developmentalist foreign and domestic policies (Roy 1999) as well as BoliviasCochabamba Water Wars. For more on Bolivias water wars, see Oscar Olivera and TomLewiss Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia (2004).

9. See the full transcript of Papapapa (Rivera, 1995b).10. Note that this remediation is anticipated by Williams himself in his novel Border Country

(1960).11. Noting that imperial functionaries describe their intentions as well-meaning, Spivak,

rather than point fingers, posits, And, in fact what these functionaries gave was often whatI call an enabling violation a rape that produces a healthy child, whose existence cannotbe advanced as a justification of the rape (1999, p. 371).

12. See Jillian Sandells article in this volume for a discussion of films about the genderedviolence against female maquila workers in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

13. Doris Sommers particular use of national allegory as a foundational fiction (1991) inthe Latin American context is what I reference here alongside Fredric Jamesonsprovocative observations (1986).

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Arsenstein, I. (Producer), & Arau, S. (Director). (2004). A day without a Mexican. XenonPictures, et al. 100 minutes.

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