Bugs in the Capitalist Machine: The Schizo-Violence of Alejandro Morales’sThe Brick People

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. …