“A Latino science-fiction art project allows us to imagine otherwise and escape the paralyzing borders and anti-immigrant sentiment in this country,” said Robb Hernández, an English professor at the university who organized the show with two in-house curators. “Rather than being bound to our punishing gravity and our horizontal understanding of border-crossing, these artists are looking upward to imagine new notions of citizenship, boundaries, who belongs and who doesn’t.”

“Remember, in space we are all essentially aliens,” he added.

With $350,000 in funding from the J. Paul Getty Trust, “Mundos Alternos” (“Alternate Worlds”) is the most expensive and research-intensive show that U.C. Riverside’s art center has produced to date.

It is also a good example of a show that might not exist without the Getty’s underwriting of the sprawling transcultural arts initiative known as Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, short for Latin America/Los Angeles, opening next month. A way to support scholarship in underdeveloped fields, PST: LA/LA, as the project is known, began in 2011 with the Getty funding 50 museums in Southern California to develop shows about the region’s art history from 1940 to 1985. With $16 million in Getty financing, the new initiative on Latin American and Latino art involves about 70 nonprofit institutions in the area; nearly as many commercial art galleries will be offering self-funded shows on the theme.

This year’s survey was inspired by the demographics of Los Angeles, where nearly half the population has Hispanic roots, making the area a cultural nexus. Nearby, in Riverside County, 47 percent of the population, and 29 percent of the university’s students are Chicano or Latino.

Several museum curators took PST: LA/LA as a rare opportunity to integrate Latin American and Latin-diaspora artworks. Like “Mundos Alternos,” the much-praised “Home,” which opened in June at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the forthcoming “Radical Women” at the Hammer also mix artists from Latin American countries and the United States to explore economic, social or political transformations.