Jaime Caleb Lazaro Moreno

Caleb Lázaro Moreno is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies. He was born in Trujillo, La Libertad (Perú) and grew up in Los Angeles, California.

Lázaro Moreno’s Master’s degree work at KU proposes that the 2008 science fiction film Sleep Dealer does more than imagine the future of capitalist exploitation for migrant workers entangled in the transnational market treaties between the US and Mexico, San Diego and Tijuana. He argues that the film engages issues of transnational race management through an emphasis on sleep and how it is dealt with and dealt out in the managing of working class, third world laborers. This emphasis on sleep and its management, Lázaro Moreno contends, is embedded within a non-linear historiography that destabilizes Eurocentric, eschatological, post-apocalyptic anxieties. In this way, Sleep Dealer may be considered a tool for analyzing the transnational, racial management of migrant workers from a decolonial theoretical position: one that requires a break with linear, dystopian futurities and with the notion of the waking state being the exclusive, isolated, psychic site of civil society.