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Marco Cabrera Geserick, Northern Arizona University
Superior Technology, Superior Souls: Science-Fiction and Anti-Imperialism in La Caída del Águila (1920)
In a parallel universe, during the early twentieth century, a group of international conspirators led by a Costa Rican engineer, use their genius to build a devastating technology that changes the world. With the help of wingless flying machines that release a rain of rockets that can track moving targets, and explosives that leave nothing behind except a poisonous cloud, their weapons destroy two thousand U.S. Navy boats in a matter of minutes, forcing the Union to officially abolish itself, and all European powers to declare the independence of their colonies around the world. This chapter explores the work of Costa Rican writer and professor Carlos Gagini (1865-1925), who imagines a world in which Latin American technology prevails over Imperialism. It analyzes Gagini’s novel in the tradition of both Latin American technological advances, and science fiction works; for to build the future, it first needs to be imagined.
 
David Pretel, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 
Machines, Peons and Agaves: The Visual Representation of the Henequen Industry.
This essay rethinks the technological history of the henequen industry by studying historical visual records –primarily photos and technical drawings. Its aim is to explore how visual documentation enhances our historical understanding of henequen production during the export boom that occurred between the 1880s and World War I. It shows that scraping machines and railways were the main symbols of the commodification of nature and people in this Mexican region, embodying the processes of capitalist expansion. Perhaps most significantly, it focuses on selected images of the henequen industry to unveil the coexistence of capital-intensive modern machinery and manual technologies intensive in coercive labour, all tied to the environmental conditions of cultivation and processing. In this regard, it highlights the tension between, on the one hand, the numerous historical studies (and today’s memory) that emphasize the wealth brought by the invention of scraping machines and the rapid expansion of the railway, and, on the other hand, the persistence of traditional and manual techniques of smaller scale, and often transient, employed by Maya, Yaqui, and Korean laborers.