Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues: Chican@/Latinx Futurism-Between Intra-History and Utopia

Being outside the Chicano mainstream, the Californian writer and scholar Alejandro Morales retells the forgotten lives of the Mexican American workers and their impact on the origin and evolution of wealth in the United States. Morales recurrently maps landscapes of dystopian and utopian futurisms in his novels. This chapter focuses on Morales’s novel The Rag Doll Plague from 1992. Standing in the tradition of Voltaire’s Candide ou l’Optimisme (1759) and Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), Morales creates a harrowing panorama of once and future outbreaks of deadly plagues which are reshaping borders and cultures into a “Hetero-Utopia”. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay; individual chapters, the contributors.