Inspired by Afrofuturist visions of an inclusive future, Catherine S. Ramírez imagines a future made, shaped, and inhabited by undocumented workers, a group of people who are often ignored, maligned, or persecuted, but whom the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed as essential. Focusing on the figure of the Mexican economic migrant, she explores dystopian visions of labor and extraction in Latinx speculative fiction. She also probes undocumented workers’ paradoxical position as both essential and excluded. Ultimately, she calls for a post-undocumented future—in other words, a world in which no one is undocumented.
Catherine S. Ramírez
Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a scholar of migration, citizenship, and race