Alex Rivera, the son of a Peruvian immigrant and a native of New Jersey, has been making short films about labor, immigration, technology, and politics since the mid-1990s. His work is characterized by the experimental use of animation, archival, and interview footage in a collage form — what he has called a “rasquache aesthetic” — to raise questions about immigrant labor as a mobile commodity and the relationship of this commodity (and the bodies that perform it) to capital accumulation. His first short film, the experimental Papapapá (U.S., 1995), is a playful meditation on the mobility and metamorphoses undergone by two migrants: the potato, first cultivated by the Incas in Peru and later incorporated into the U.S. diet, and Augusto Rivera, Alex’s father. With a ribald sense of humor, Rivera suggests the convergence of his father and the potato in envisioning Augusto as a “Peruvian couch potato, eating potato chips and watching Spanish-language television.” The humor of Rivera’s work, and the bite of his critiques, can also be appreciated in Why Cybraceros? (U.S., 1997), which uses an original 1940s promotional film by the California Grower’s Council titled Why Braceros? to recount the history of the bracero program in the United States and to present a dystopic futuristic revamping of this program that imports the labor, but not the workers, from Mexico to the United States.
