Consuming Monsters: Borderlands Ecogothic Science Fiction in Tears of the Trufflepig

F rom its origins in the eighteenth century, gothic literature has deployed horror and the supernatural to manifest anxieties over a wide range of invisible threats, such as technological and scientific progress; past and present forms of colonialism; and, more recently, environmental crisis.As Kelly Hurley explains, the gothic is "a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernaturalized) form." 2 Monsters, specifically, are said to embody these fears, as they are designed, like their name suggests, to reveal and warn. 3Accordingly, monsters are "the ultimate incorporation of our anxieties-about history, about identity, about our very humanity." 4Thus, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts, cultures and specific cultural moments can be read through the monsters they engender. 5Mexican and Chicanx writers and filmmakers have captured the anxieties around the militarized U.S.-Mexican border, along with the harmful social impact of neoliberalism and globalized capitalism in the borderlands, through what Micah K. Donohue has termed "borderlands gothic science fiction." 6Films such as Sleep Dealer (2008), directed by Alex Rivera, and the novels Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009) and Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow (2020), both jointly authored by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatriz Pita, are examples of this genre.In the intersection of borderlands science fiction and cybergothic literature and film, monsters emerge in the shape of robots, cyborgs, and digital phantoms to warn us of a dystopian future when migrant workers' exploitation and dehumanization result from transnational capitalism.