Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow. By Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita. ISBN:13: 978-0-915745-39-5. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940168 $17.95. 6” x 9” Black & White on Cream paper 262 pages.
Keep me Posted, the sequel to Lunar Braceros, both written by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, bring us Hispanic, Latino rebels who engage on disruption and direct action in the 23rd Century. The great grandchildren of Lydia Vallejo and Frank Ho, the original rebels, inheriting the Vallejo-Ho tech skills as well as the gene to furthering the protest and rebellion, and face their own set of struggles in a dystopic Cali-Texas. The novel looks back on the 22nd century rebellion that brought reforms but not systemic change; the powerful still call the shots. What the Vallejo-Ho descendants, now residing in San TJ, really want is to do science but their social reality compels them to action and they become part of a new rebellion in Cali-Texas, even while each tries to continue doing research in astronomy, ecology and space travel to Mars. Resistance and Rebellion are built on commitment and high-tech, in the belief of their just cause and eventual success. Regardless the times and territory, and even space, rebels feel compelled to redress the social inequities that still persist from the past. Keep Me posted, Star Wars and Hunger Games are stories we love to make sense of the world around us.
Rosaura Sánchez
and Beatrice Pita continue to imagine new spaces for thinking about resistance
to state violence, subaltern histories, and futures to come. Just as their previous
book, Lunar Braceros, 2125-2148, explored the extractive colonial tools
of environmental disaster from the perspectives of moon workers and movements
across the Americas, Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow delves deeper
into the meaning of collective resistance—and how the subversive work of
survival carries within it the memories of generations. As a political allegory
for our moment, this urgent yet playful novel is indispensable for interpreting
the unfolding continuities of struggle, and for striving toward a world we want.
Christopher
Perreira, American Studies,
University of Kansas
Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita teach in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego.