Science-fiction films have always been a powerful cultural force within Latinx communities. The late 70s drop of Star Wars inspired countless children on their own personal Tatooines to imagine a better future for themselves. It was a positive force, no pun intended.
On the other hand, the genre had its ebbs and flows of visual affect. At the height of Reaganite Cinema, the 80s brought forth a bastion of hyper aggressive sci-fi films with alpha white males à la Predator that laid to waste brown subjects—and dangerous alien—that normalized eco-destruction narratives.
Oil to burn was in. Green was out.
Sci-fi’s representational artifacts have changed from these earlier, largely retrograde epochs, especially when it comes to imagining BIPOC eco-harmonious futures. And no film shows this better than Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. While its central plot isn’t driven by environmental concerns, it does build into its story a significant eco-permissible Latinx moment.
First, with depicting the Mayans as afflicted by European viruses as climate migrants seeking refuge in a new environment, Talocanil. And, second, when the amphibious Latinx ruler Namor (Tenoch Huerta) takes Shuri (Letitia Wright) to his underwater kingdom, Talokan, she discovers a vibrant and thriving mega-community powered by the renewable energy, Vibranium.
Looking carefully at the script and captions illuminate key moments in the Talokan scene. The script describes Shuri looking at an “UNDERWATER GARDEN of kelp, seaweed, underwater maize and the blueish Weber Azul-like PLANT.” After witnessing “a cheerful group of TALOCANIL YOUTH [working] the crops” she exclaims “You can grow corn underwater?” which is meant to be rhetorical since Namor frames the observation with a larger reflection. He responds, “They are teaching each other, playing and working all at once”.
The film briefly deviates from the scripted lines by circumventing Shuri’s exclamation and Namor’s response, opting to arrive at the Sastun, or the vibranium made sun, instead. In the film Shuri admires the sun, never learning what the Talocanil really call it. "It's beautiful. It's made of vibranium” she remarks, to which Namor responds, “Yes. In the depths of the ocean I've brought the sun to my people.”
Namor’s declarative statement, a scientific impossibility or a rhetorical expression of grandeur, represents a sliver of the hopes and dreams of the environmentally conscious. The mere utterance that a celestial body, with its ability to empower or destroy, could be harnessed for his people is tantamount to reminding the viewers that a hopeful future exists!
The representation of Talokan as an isolated society built on the tenets of environmental stewardship and mutual aid troubles preexisting notions of environmental and racial justice. When Latinx filmgoers see a society like Talokan triumph with, not over, the environment, it can be world changing. Like Solarpunk that promotes the imagining and engineering of a thriving society built on sustainable technology and ecological harmony, so too with Talokan.
Talokan is more than the purely speculative. It is more than an imaginary tangent to the Afrofuturism introduced in the first Black Panther film. Talokan is a reality to many environmentally conscious Latinx filmgoers, reflecting the collective dreaming of a world yet to come. In this world there is no evidence of capitalist structures superimposing itself over the good of ecological harmony. Rather, it is a world that depicts a bustling economy that is conterminously dynamic with the surrounding ecological space.
Talokan is a reality to many environmentally conscious Latinx filmgoers, reflecting the collective dreaming of a world yet to come.
Talokan, as depicted in both written and filmed versions, exists as resistance that can be harnessed by the dreamers longing for hope, not fear, to sustain the green imagination. The bioluminescence of the city, its power source, the natural protective barriers of the deep, the Talocanil’s reverence for social affinity, the absence of capitalist structures, and the communitive drive for underwater agriculture are all indicative of an ecological utopia formalized by narrative elements and catalyzed by speculative dreaming. Those dreams could inspire the next generation of Latinx engineers to resolve the energy challenges and quell the onslaught of ecological threats brought on by a changing world. Those dreams could encourage the next generation of Latinx creators to see the world in a defamiliarized way, to us, that does not perpetuate social and economic constructs that are simply not working.
Those dreams could inspire the next generation of Latinx engineers to resolve the energy challenges and quell the onslaught of ecological threats brought on by a changing world.
Perhaps Talokan could embolden science fiction creators to experiment with the collective over the individual, and the hopeful over the dreadful. The magic of this type of storytelling is not born out of the mind of the storyteller, nor is it from the filmmaking process, but from the eyes of the survivors of climate migration, environmental and racial injustice, and unregulated capitalism that has dominated the real and narrative world for generations. One hopes that the children of the Latinx millennials indoctrinated by Reaganite Cinema would be the generation to relish in a narrative future without lead or fear, but rather one full of greenery and love.
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