by Scott Russell Duncan
Daizee & the Dukes of Chuco has got it all: future tech, environmentalism, empowerment, great setting, and the “cool factor”. It’s like Batman meets a decolonized Dukes of Hazzard meets Xicanx power…in the future.
The story draws the reader in with Daizee, the daughter of an engineer who developed clean energy for the world but was killed before he could do it. Daizee progresses the design and loads the prototype in her car and escapes the same corporation who killed her father. They need Daizee’s finalized design; she needs more parts to build and perfect the energy source called síva so she can give it to the world. That takes money, so with the help of her cousins in Ciudad Juarez, she uses tech to disguise her car and enter a race for 10 million dollars. If she wins, she could give the world clean energy; she just needs to avoid being killed by corporate assassins, dirty cops, or a crash in the big race.
This graphic novel’s art style matches its fast-paced, ambitious hero’s journey of a plot with bold colors and styling. E.C. Dukes, the writer and Ronnie Dukes, the artist, took the adventure and some style from the Dukes of Hazzard, the old 80s show about two southern boys righting wrongs for the people of Hazzard County. Their car, called the General Lee, had a Confederate flag on it, and no amount of “it’s about culture” statements about the battle flag can remove the stain of genocide, slavery, occupation, white supremacy, and oppression that flag represents. . The Dukes, brown artists themselves, have taken the anti-authorism and iconic car from the story and, in grand and colorful style, used it to power real and real necessary anti-establishment narratives. The Earth is on the line in real life, same as in the near-future story of Daizee & the Dukes of Chuco. The powers-that-be put up real-life barriers across the land that separate families and only care about corporate entities, not what is good for the planet or the people. Daizee & the Dukes of Chucho reclaims and remixes a fun, adventurous sci-fi comic, escaping what is oppressive and evil as they race towards hope for an even better future we all need.
This book is unique, though it wears its influences like a new style. The story is cyberpunk, but it’s Xicanx cyberpunk, which tends to oppose the same corporate oppressive polluted society as the mainstream cyberpunk, with more hope for change and celebrations of the cultures and survival of marginalized people, rather than fear and exoticism. Daizee’s fight for clean energy, use of tech, and speeding away make the cyberpunk and more hopeful aspects clear. It’s not a “survive another day in this dismal dystopia” story, it’s a “we can make the world better” story.
It matters, too, that the story is set in El Paso. The border is a place of control that Daizee leaps over as she speeds through the desert, masking her car to escape dirty cops. El Paso is a center of chicanismo, Chicano culture, home of many cultural inventions and instigations of the never-ending battle of who does the best taco: San Antonio, El Paso, or LA. This is a future El Paso, a real place with real people—a relief, for often we get a future Los Angeles that gets whitewashed and devoid of anyone brown or cultural beyond the name. The future El Paso Daizee speeds through is a part of a brown story, her story. The story is one of hope set in the future everyone can enjoy.
Scott Russell Duncan edited the first Chicano sci-fi anthology. He also authored Old California Strikes Back, a magic memoir/meta-novel.
Comments