Centennial Honors College
Western Illinois University
Undergraduate Research Day 2012
Podium Presentation
GIFT
Bobby Dillon
Faculty Mentor: Everett Hamner
English and Journalism
The goal of this short story is to illustrate the effects of free trade policies such as
NAFTA, while simultaneously engaging the Science Fiction literary tradition. Drawing on
research of the negative effects of globalization and NAFTA on Mexican working-class
maquiladora/factory workers, this story follows a young man caring for his mother and
two children who has been made a victim of the [fictitious] Global Initiative for Free
Trade [GIFT]. This story engages science fiction by presenting a dystopian, futuristic
setting in which globalization has become so profound and sanctioned as to have
affected the working and lower class of every nation the way it has affected the working
class of Mexico and the United States, essentially turning all lower to middle class work
(globally) into the same type of exploitative, unsafe, and unjust work that has existed in
Mexico for years. In this future, all workers are unskilled, lacking the autonomy that is
held in such high regard and considered to be of such import amongst those who study
the alienation and exploitation of labor. This short story uses speculative fiction to
illustrate genuine, real problems that many working class citizens, indeed, of all nations
deal with in light of NAFTA and globalization. Its focus is sociological as well as literary.
The issues dealt with are real ones, though exaggerated and hyperbolic in a way that
only Science Fiction as a genre can accomplish.