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Eminent Chicano author Alejandro Morales's contemporary and renowned novel The Rag Doll Plagues is a compelling text of social critique and postmodern craft. Since its publication in 1992, critical reception of The Rag Doll Plagues has been substantial and varied, but almost exclusively laudatory.1 Morales's novél is celebrated for its stylistic and generic experimentation, for its strident critique of social inequalities, for its reconceptualizing of borders and cultures, and for its vision of the future as a reflection of our contemporary world.2 Many point to the inspiration and intersection of Morales's fiction with that of Latin American authors, and many others address the central tropes of illness and the intersections of medicine, technology, and politics.3
The Rag Doll Plagues is a tripartite text. The novel's first book, "Mexico City," addresses the post-Conquest squalor of a newly colonized Mexico City. The second book, "Delhi," concentrates on a Santa Ana barrio and urban divisions based on ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and the then-mysterious onslaught of AIDS in the late 1970s. The third book, "Lamex," is a futuristic imagining of a borderless California/Mexico characterized by isolated enclaves of a community delineated by socioeconomic class. While the three books are woven together through theme and style, "Lamex" is the capstone of the novel, bringing the unifying threads of the social critique into sharp relief.4
Within the novel's three books, and with dark irony, Morales critiques racism, global capitalism, and the exploitation of labor, particularly as these are inextricably tied to race. Revolving around a theme of disease and the incessant search for treatment and cure, the novel also focuses on a critique of the sterility and technology of medicine as well as the lack of attention to the causes of disease, which Morales mostly concludes are a result of neglect of the environment. Threading this social critique across five centuries from the sixteenth century through the imagined late twenty-first century, Morales illustrates the cyclical repetition of history, the idea that despite humanity's "advancements," ignorance and abuse of power perniciously persist.
The stretch of such an extended time frame across the three books of the novel feeds into Morales's postmodern strategies of craft, including the collapsing of linear time and the unifying the thread of repeated rupture of time by the...