Chapter 4 - “SUPERNAFTA” vs. “El Gran Mojado”

Summary

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) parodies the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as NAFTA’s liberal supporters, who represent this fight as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.” Just as NAFTA’s supporters imagine a global free market comprised solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines an "expanding symphony" comprised solely of "conductors" attuned to transnational complexity -- a vision which depends on a disavowal of the structural differences that make such collectives possible. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. At the same, Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that migrant workers can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.