Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica

WARNING:
This is not a self-indulgent meditation on PC-user convenience.
This is not a digital utopia, nor a dystopian death spiral.
No mámes, güey

ATTENTIONE:
This is a tactical assault on the cryptoreligious myths of technological progress.
This is a counteroffensive against the mili-corp monoculture that brands digital capitalism as inevitable and benign.
¡Eso!

BEWARE:
We are not tech-optimists, digi-pushers, nor cyber-fanáticos.
We are not neo-Luddites or Chicano hippies.
We are criticones — techno-informants of the other kind.
We are Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica.

Link to the 2024 retrospective of Los Cybrids at The Kitchen in New York City

Curated by Angelique Rosales Salgado, featuring video works, archival materials, and curatorial reflections on the work of Los Cybrids.

Qué es unx Cybrid?

A Cybrid is a Latinx digi-tech artist emerging from the margins of the digital imaginary. Los Cybrids formed in San Francisco’s Mission District at the height of the dot-com frenzy through Galería de la Raza’s ReGeneration Project. Active from 1999 to 2003, the collective was composed of three core members: Praba Pilar, a Colombian-American performance artist and scholar; John Jota Leaños, a media artist and cultural critic; and René García, a digital media artist exploring Chicanx aesthetics in virtual space.

Together, we operated as a collaborative junta—intervening at the edges of the hyperlinked screen dream, where access meets refusal, where cultural mutation meets tactical media, where raza meets machine. Our performances and media interventions emerged from a refusal to passively accept the cultural, economic, and ecological violence of techno-economics. We engaged burla, satire, and installation to hack the spectacle—exposing the contradictions of “global access,” “frictionless markets,” and the fantasy of the “one-world community.” We called this practice techno-crítica: an insurgent media language grounded in una resistencia marginal, pero incisiva, media parody, and cultural subversion.

Postreal Circuits

“The real is no longer what it was.”
—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Los Cybrids continues to flicker through the circuits of the present—less a collective than an ongoing interference. In 2024, The Kitchen in New York presented La Raza Techno-Crítica, a digital retrospective curated by Angelique Rosales Salgado. The program featured TEch TV, The Global WarMaquina, and El World Brain Disorder, alongside ephemera, zines, and archival performance footage.

Rather than historicizing the work, the retrospective resurfaced Los Cybrids as a necessary glitch—an early signal in the networked struggle against the smooth surfaces of innovation and inclusion. In a moment where the simulation has collapsed into daily life, our interventions continue to resonate: against algorithmic bias, techno-extractivism, and the myth of neutral systems. Since our original work in the early 2000s, the post-9/11 era has seen an exponential expansion of state and corporate surveillance systems. Online culture has become subsumed by data capitalism, where AI-driven platforms harvest every click, message, and movement—transforming daily life into extractable code. Social media is now a field of predictive policing and border enforcement, as governments, corporations, and security regimes mine our digital lives under the guise of convenience and safety. The cybrid is not past—it is upstream, ya embedded in the code.

Selected Projects and Performances

The Global WarMaquina: The Internet and Its Discontents (2001)
A scathing dissection of neoliberal internet mythologies and global militarism.
El World Brain Disorder: surveillance.control.pendejismo (2002–2003)
A theatrical exposé of military-tech convergence, security culture, and brown-coded resistance.
Presented at Carnegie Mellon University, Brown University, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The LAB, Arizona State University, University of San Francisco
TEch TV (2003)
A television show and live performance satire dismantling mainstream representations of Latinx culture in the tech industry.
Other Disruptions