“Space is the place,” Sun Ra famously proclaimed. There is important logic in this: For marginalised and exploited peoples, space represents both their alienation as well as visions of fugitivity or escape. We see this in the forthcoming Transplanetary Americas: Art, Outer Space, and the Latinx Imagination by Robb Hernández, described by the publisher as the author’s exploration of “how the modern space race has driven (Latinx) artists to look upward and attune to expressions derived from the solar system and beyond … in a theoretical and methodological framework he calls transplanetary relationality.” We see it, too, in Alan Chazaro’s recent poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built for Us (2026). And now we see it in Xicanxfuturism: Codex 1.
E. G. Condé says in the volume’s preface that this anthology—or, to use the term preferred by the anthology’s editors, codex—asks what the shape of the future will be for Xicanx (also variously/previously known as Chicano/a/x) people, and offers this definition of Xicanx: “Neither wholly white nor indigenous, American nor Mexican, the Xicanx is the cyborg that inhabits the frontera.” Similarly, Xicanxfuturism finds solidarity and meaning in other futurisms—Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and Indigenous futurism—and so editor Scott Russell Duncan acknowledges a wide range of anthologies as antecedents to Xicanxfuturism: Codex 1, as well as the work of Catherine S. Ramírez, the originator of Chicanafuturism. [1]
What all of these futurisms and the work produced in them have in common is resistance: pushing back against hegemony, and against erasure. Futurisms are for people who dare to imagine themselves in the future when those in power don’t. They give voice to those who’ve been silenced, providing space for them to write, paint, speak, photograph, and document their lives, and in so doing to create their own archives. However, not everyone will agree on what and how to document, nor about what the future may look like. The dreaming in this volume presents solutions that “may not quite be possible,” Duncan says; regardless, “questions are part of Xicanxfuturism.” Therefore Xicanxfuturism, Dr. E. C.-Dukes agrees later, is “an artistic tool” that exists to create “complicated solutions to complicated problems in [Xicanx] society.”
Also in the introduction, Duncan reminds readers that Xicanx people have survived multiple apocalypses (not least genocide and colonialism) and are prepared to survive many more. It’s striking, too, to consider the context in which these Xicanx creators are producing their work: Xicanx people remain colonised. The point is that Xicanx people, unlike many other peoples dreaming the future, are not post-colonial in any sense; they and their lands are still occupied, as Scott Russell Duncan says. Xicanxfuturism today therefore serves as preparation for a decolonial future, or for the possibly many steps leading to that: “We are ever evolving,” Duncan writes, “anticipating the next cycle, the new mutation we need for the current generation to survive.” It’s a position of hopefulness.
“We have lost the land, but we have our minds, but just barely.”
There’s much today that serves as an existential threat for Xicanx people: Official government policy leading to anti-”migrant” raids; climate change; the loss of land and languages; and economic exploitation—because, as many creators in this anthology point out, Xicanx people form the very backbone of the US economy. They are the farm workers, child minders, health workers, janitors, bus drivers, and factory staff that keep the US running. And no matter the official line of successive US governments, far from being aliens, Xicanx people are the indigenous people of the land. Their migratory patterns have existed for thousands of years, long before colonisers came and created their (artificial) borders.
The creators featured in this codex include Osmani Ochoa, Luis Valderas, Ernesto Mireles, Pedro Iniguez, Martin Hill Ortiz, Ernesto Ayala, elindiocopyright1985, Angela Acosta, Juan Manuel Pérez, Erika Said Izaguirre, E.C.-Dukes, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, Dante Olivas, Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos, Samantha “Eggsy” J., Colton “Cuca” Campbell, Rocio Anica, Frederick Luis Aldama, and Ricardo Tavarez. The volume collects fiction and non-fiction, poetry, and art.
Readers will find the codex fragmentary—but this is not necessarily a point of failure for a codex, which, even when fragmentary, will still serve its function of transmitting information to the future. It opens with various thinkers proposing their tenets of Xicanxfuturism. Common themes are its speculative nature, its acceptance of and openness to those who are marginalised (like the queer community), a focus on new modes of existing in the future, and that Xicanxfuturism is necessarily decolonial. Issues important to Xicanxfuturism are identity and language, land and the environment, justice, Indigeneity, spirituality, recognition of the ancestors, and gender inclusivity; it stands against “white supremacy, bigotry, xenophobia, and genocide,” as well as capitalism and imperialism. Xicanxfuturism is, at its core, liberatory:
Xicanxfuturism aims to release us from our chains to one-dimensional thinking that makes us believe there is only one way to success and instead puts forward other ways of living, being, and thinking. The purpose of Xicanxfuturism is to expose our physical and mental enslavement by white Euro-centric dominant ideology, to expose our subaltern status to each other and not for the benefit of the oppressor. Xicanxfuturism is by, for, and about Xicanx people. (Dr E. C.-Dukes)
Another recurring term in the anthology is raza, meaning race in Spanish, used and reappropriated by Xicanx people to mean “the people,” or “the community.” Spanglish is, in this volume, the lingua franca reclaimed from the colonisers by the various people groups considered Xicanx–rather like English has been the language that Afro- and Africanfuturism and other futurisms have gathered around.
Another important concept is Aztlán, which technically means the mythical home of the Aztecs, but which was taken up as a nationalist symbol by the Chicano movement of the 1970s. [2] Aztlán is said to cover the southwestern United States and Mexico. As a mythical homeland, it’s a powerful focal point for Xicanxfuturist imagining, and is referred to frequently. In this collection, the concept appeared especially (although not exclusively) in “Cyber Aztlán,” “Las Raíces de Aztlán,” and “Insurgent Aztlán: The Liberating Power of Cultural Resistance.”
In “Las Raíces de Aztlán,” Ernesto Ayala also corrects the historical record by writing about the erasure of the US’s indigenous peoples: “The USA is usually depicted as a country much like all others,” he writes, one “that came about through a war of independence and then through a Civil War that helped end the brutal practice of chattel slavery practiced against African people. The original inhabitants are painted as folkloric relics of a distant past which unfortunately somehow disappeared with the ‘advancement of civilization.’” This refrain is taken up again in “Insurgent Aztlán: The Liberating Power of Cultural Resistance,” in which Dr. Ernesto Mireles reminds readers that, contrary to what archival erasure may suggest, the histories of colonised peoples did not end when their colonisers arrived. Rather, these peoples “[developed] in new ways under new conditions.” These post-colonial histories must be considered legitimate, he argues. They may not be the histories we want, but they’re the histories we have. “Everything is interconnected and related,” Mireles says, “and what is here now withers away, but not before its contradictions help something else develop anew.”
Mireles is also the source of the most cogent explanation of, and argument for, Xicanxfuturism in the codex. “Dispatch From an Aztlán Insurgent” is his stirring, radical call to action, as well as a polemic covering the failures and missteps of the Xicano movement. Mireles feels the movement has lost its way by looking to European radical traditions (for example, Marxism) “as if somewhere locked in the dusty writings of these Old World Marxists is the only path to Indigenous liberation.” This when Xicanx people have their own heritage in “20,000 years of Meso-American civilization.” He is contemptuous of land acknowledgements, which are hardly “challenges to the settler colonial system.” In this essay, Mireles is thinking through what’s necessary for the Xicanx movement to succeed; it won’t be through the use of, to quote Lorde, the master’s tools.
Coming in for particularly fiery criticism from Mireles is the second Trump administration, “a signal flare for white supremacy.” Mireles contextualises Trump’s so-called “anti-illegal migrant” but in fact xenophobic policies against Brown people: This is the violent, brutal continuation of settler colonialism. “Brown children continue to be ripped from their parents’ arms,” Mireles writes, “a practice that has continued uninterrupted during the past five centuries, caged like animals, forced to represent themselves in courtrooms—infants, toddlers, and teenagers navigating legal systems that barely acknowledge their humanity.” Mireles criticises Xicanx people for “playing defense” in this situation of existential crisis. He further extrapolates that Xicanx people, bearing the burden of labour in the hyper-capitalistic United States, risk a very plausible future in which they’ve been turned into cyborgs, alienated from their own bodies (something we already see glimmerings of in the Global South, like with Meta’s content moderators in Kenya, or gig workers training AI) in ”a dystopia where Brown labor persists without Brown bodies,” as in Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008).
For Mireles, all this is a matter of national liberation for Xicanx people, and he sees both resistance and collective action as the way to get there. No transformation can happen without this encompassing vision, he argues; no future can be possible without it. He stands firm on the idea that the enemy can be defeated, no matter how bad things look today: “Alienation and capital are not unstoppable forces; they are the scaffolding of a system that can be dismantled. […] Alienation is not our fate; it is our battleground.”
Mireles’s passionate and articulate polemic gives context and purpose to all of the varied art, poetry, and SF in this volume. In addition to the aforementioned essays, the codex includes works such as Osmani Ochoa’s “re: <migrant>futurism,” about defiance in continuing migration:
Conceiving a future where everyone/Is liberated, without:
borders / walls / displacement / immigration status / exploitation / occupation / surveillance / white supremacy / transphobia / xenophobia / misogyny / machismo / imprisonment / deportations
and
Our bodies are starships. Our vision, our star map
Of future utopias that emerge from our own hands
Luis Valderas’s artwork, “The Horizon,” shows mass migration from the viewpoint of a space capsule re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Pedro Iniguez’s poem, “Low (Orbit) Rider,” is about a “Chiconaut” who “hasn’t been planetside/since his youth” after the Great Migration, and returns for a glimpse of “Earth’s azure beauty” from space. In elindiocopyright1985’s artwork, we see a pedestrian crossing on a planet’s ring; Angela Acosta’s short story, “May We Be Named,” has a protagonist searching the archives and her Tía Flora’s memory for traces of her people’s past. A coyote figure, the one who helps migrants cross the border, shows up across the collection, like in E.C.-Dukes and Ronnie Dukes’s graphic story, “Uber X Frontera,” and in Osmani Ochoa’s “Coyote and Planet Genesis.” A couple of stories are about farming that looks nothing like the monocultures of colonising powers, as in the complex “Titan’s Promise” by Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos—which also touches on the false promises of migration to space as mediated by tech billionaires—and about organising while doing so, like in “Come Los Ricos. Eat the Rich” by Dante Olivas. Colton “Cuca” Campbell’s poem, “The Mask of the Ciberando,” cleverly references and remixes cultural knowledge “within a decolonial tradition of poetic banditry.”
Given this variety of works, without Mireles’s clearly articulated vision and statement of intent, the message of the codex would otherwise be somewhat diluted for readers—although perhaps not for those who already labour for a Xicanx future. With it, however, the collection coheres into an undeniable statement.
There’s a (welcome) flurry of activity and production in various futurisms, and Xicanxfuturism: Codex 1 is an important addition. It’s a call to arms for Xicanx people, and a painful reminder that what Xicanx people in the US are experiencing today, what we see on the news every day, is because they remain colonised, a nation within a nation. Once again, what Fannie Lou Hamer said remains true: Nobody’s free until everybody’s free. This is also a call to solidarity for those outside the Xicanx community: Global imperial capitalism is an oppressive system, and the fight for a Xicanx future must be our fight too, as allies. We can all dream together for a future that includes all of us. As editor Scott Russell Duncan says in the introduction to the codex:
“There is hope in ourselves and in our ability to combat exploitation of the environment and our own bodies. Our stories, art, and essays demand it.”
Endnotes
[1] The works listed by Duncan are: Bill Campbell’s Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (2013); Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture (2013); Shane Hawk’s Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (2023); Grace L. Dillon’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012); and Joshua Whitehead’s Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (2019). [return]
[2] Teresa Palomo Acosta. Aztlán: The Chicano Movement's Symbol of Identity and Nationalism. The Texas Historical Association. [return]