Bugs in the capitalist machine: the schizo-violence of Alejandro Morales's The Brick People.(Critical essay)

In his novel The Brick People (1988), Alejandro Morales depicts both the process of deterritorialization initiated by Porfirio Diaz and the Mexican Revolution, which creates flows of Mexican migrations across the US-Mexico border, and the process of reterritorialization instigated by the modern US capitalist system, by which Mexican immigrants are constrained within the United States as a captive labor force. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have suggested that this dual process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is essential to the workings of the modern capitalist machine, which depends upon a strict class axiomatic to control the decoded and deterritorialized flows of capital, people, and information. However, in Morales's novel, the dual process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization is ultimately upset by schizophrenic flows, which they define as the surplus product of the decoding and deterritorializing machine of capitalism. In the novel, these schizophrenic flows are unleashed by supernatural and human acts of violence (including plagues of devouring insects, a massacre of Chinese immigrants, and the kidnap and brutal murder of a twelve-year-old girl), and they create a "slit in the canvas of reality" (Morales 161) that reveals the limits of the capitalist machine. (1) Ultimately, Morales suggests that only by following the revolutionary potential of these violent schizo-flows can the captive Mexican workforce of the brick factory escape the strict social constraints imposed by the modern US capitalist system.

The Brick People is a biographical and historical novel, based on the life of Morales's parents and their experience coming from Mexico to the United States. (2) It tells the story of Octavio Revueltas, who migrates from Mexico to Southern California to work in the Simons brick factory. As Morales notes, it was Mexican labor in the first half of the twentieth century that created the "material to house, build, and develop the economy of Southern California. They were in a sense the backbone of industry that was never recognized; one of the great links, important, crucial, silent links, unrecognized links of a great economic chain" (Gurpegui, "Interview" 11). (3) Morales's novel traces the process by which the Mexican peon (or landless laborer) is deterritorialized by the despotic machine of Porfirio Diaz's Mexico and incorporated into the modern capitalist machine of the early-twentieth-century United States as a migrant laborer who must sell his labor capacity. At the same time, Morales shows how the process of deterritorialization is accompanied by a process of reterritorialization, whereby the Mexican migrant laborer is incorporated into the artificial neoterritoriality created by the Simons brick factory. The brick factory, constructed by its owner Walter Simons on the model of the Mexican hacienda, constrains the physical movement and economic mobility of its deterritorialized Mexican workers in order to maintain a captive labor force for its own system of production.

Deleuze and Guattari provide a useful model for interpreting the economic, social, and representational transitions depicted by Morales in The Brick People. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe how such transitions occur between three types of social machines: territorial, imperial (or despotic), and modern capitalist. In a social machine or "socius," the parts (human beings) are integrated and organized to perform certain tasks, and the flows (of capital, people, and information) are coded so as to control the forms of desire inherent in any human machine: "The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated" (33). The first form of socius is the territorial machine in which the social body remains integrated with the natural body of the earth. For example, among the indigenous cultures of the Americas, tribes are divided and organized into clans; however, tribal identity depends upon a sense of interdependence with the land, which cannot be divided or owned. The territorial machine "subdivides the people, but does so on an indivisible earth.... When the division extends to the earth itself, by virtue of an administration that is landed and residential, this cannot be regarded as a promotion of territoriality; on the contrary, it is rather the effect of the first great movement of deterritorialization" (145-46).

This first movement of deterritorialization marks the transition from the territorial to the imperial or despotic machine, from the immanent unity of the earth to the transcendent unity of the State, in the figure of the despot. The despotic State replaces the territorial machine and yet "maintains the old territorialities, integrates them as parts or organs of production in the new machine. It is perfected all at once because it functions on the basis of dispersed rural communities, which are like pre-existing autonomous or semi-autonomous machines from the viewpoint of production" (198). This concept of the despotic social machine, which maintains archaic territorialities while integrating them into a new system of production, provides a useful model for understanding the social organization of pre-revolutionary Mexico.

During Porfirio Diaz's dictatorial rule (1876-1911), Mexico underwent a period of limited economic development. Industrialization through the investment of foreign capital and modernization of the transportation system through the construction of vast railroad networks provided some of the necessary constituents of a modern capitalist system. However, rural lands and the agricultural workers who formed the majority of Mexico's laborers remained firmly under the control of the semi-feudal hacienda system, an aristocratic remnant of the colonial period. John Rutherford suggests, "As the basis of Mexico's agricultural system the hacienda was weak and insufficient. The average hacendado had a medieval disregard for the virtues of productivity, expansion, and technical advance.... The stable and continued enjoyment of possession was what was important to him, not increasing profits" (241).

What did increase under this system was the amount of land controlled by the hacendados (large landholders) at the expense of the rancheros (small landholders) and ejidos (communal villages): "One estimate places the number of dirt farmers who lost communal lands at 5 million" (Garcia, Desert Immigrants 34). Many of those displaced by such expropriations migrated to the northern Mexican states and later across the border. Garcia notes, "Between the turn of the century and the start of the Great Depression, more than one million Mexicans arrived" in the United States (Desert Immigrants 35-36). However, the majority of the landless rural population in Mexico remained immobilized and bound to the hacienda by the system of debt-peonage. Pre-revolutionary Mexico was thus the site of a profound economic conflict between an ingrained semi-feudal agrarian structure and an emerging modern capitalist system.

In his novel, Morales scathingly depicts Porfirio Diaz as a despotic tyrant who rules Mexico with "bread and the club": "bread to the Bravi [his private army], Rurales [the national police], army, bureaucrats, foreigners and the Catholic Church, and to the common Mexican in the cities or the countryside he reserved the club which he used mercilessly" (74). Diaz considers himself the "father of all Mexicans," and Morales suggests that his patriarchal rape of Mexico is embodied in his phallus, "his fatherly, enormous penis," that "impregnated the country with foreign economic interest which exploited Mexicans and Mexico" (74). For Morales, the "only authentic element of Mexico at the time was the enslaved masses considered no better than beasts" (74). Rather than face enslavement within the "neofeudal system on the haciendas" (74) or death at the hands of the Rurales, many Mexican peasants were forced to migrate to the United States to escape Diaz's despotic machine. Morales depicts the process of deterritorialization ...