[2] A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants.

Sleep Dealer is set in a future, militarized world marked by closed borders, virtual labor, and a global digital network that joins minds and experiences, where three strangers risk their lives to connect with each other and break the technology barriers.

Here, workers are connected to the network via suspended cables that plug into nodes in their arms and back, allowing them to control the robots that have replaced them as unskilled labor on the other side of the border.

Memo and his father must trek on foot to buy water by the bag while monitored by security cameras armed with machine guns.

One summer, a remote-controlled military aerial vehicle operated by the security forces of Del Rio Water catches Memo monitoring a frequency used by the drones.

After heated aerial dogfighting, Ramirez manages to blast a hole in the dam, directly where Memo's father had once tossed a pebble in helpless frustration.

Memo receives news from his home and neighboring subsistence farms, celebrations of returning ancestral waters, albeit not necessarily a permanent one.

The movie won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award,[3] the Alfred P. Sloan Prize[4] at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, The H.R.

Mr. Rivera — a brilliant young director — takes his audience into a future of “aqua-terrorism” and cyberlabor that I wish I could dismiss as implausible..." in his review of the 2008 New Directors/New Films Festival.

[5] Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times wrote "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, "Sleep Dealer" is a welcome surprise.

Chicanafuturism de-familiarizes the familiar and challenges the status quo of society by re-imagining reality or providing alternative representations.

The possibility of complete human exploitation of foreign labor markets through the use of nodes becomes a little less fictional with the referential point of Tijuana today, thus, de-familiarizing what is familiar.

Arguably the most important cultural impact of the film, Sleep Dealer provides representation of people of color and humanizes political issues through characters such as Memo and Luz.

In Aimee Bahng’s book Migrant Futures, she points out that “Sleep Dealer argues for and instantiates the production of alternative futures that fight against not only obsolescence but also obfuscations of the past that paved the way for the colonization of the future.”[10] That is to say, Sleep Dealer not only criticizes the current system but works to deconstruct the narrative mechanisms that uphold colonial influences.

Sleep Dealer contributes to the Latinxfuturist works that try to represent people of color as well as re-imagine a future without the colonialist androcentric oppressive forces that mark today’s society.