5/6 Brainstorm 6, Haleh Mawson

Gonzales takes a far more expansive view of technology than Western tradition. Whereas our minds are primed to imagine steel and silicon when it comes to tech, she includes the tools of midwifery, herbal remedies, rites, books, songs, and Indigenous knowledge, effectively expanding the definition to include New World objects and practices. Her technologies serve not only as a way to improve quality of life, but as a way to "construct[] the sacred landscape and ceremonial ecology" (Gonzales 86) through the human body, connecting each life to the universe and to the community. There is, overall, an emphasis on the continuity of knowledge, of technology as a way of transferring knowledge across time and place. You can see that in the "Clumsy Sky" video through the photos on the wall, which depict a legacy of performances and eventually includes Girl in a Coma themselves.

This broadened definition of technology seeds the ground for Chicanafuturism. Science fiction is built upon the power and possibilities of technology. There has to be some kind of past for there to be a future, and having this living legacy of Indigenous and Mexican technology allows Chicanafuturists to call into question accepted narratives of the past and present, and "defamiliarize the familiar" (Ramirez 190) and, perhaps, make familiar that which would otherwise be strange. Essentially, this background allows them not only to deconstruct and repurpose Western technologies, but to craft an alternative future based on different beliefs and different values.

- Haleh