What is Mextasy!? An Introduction to the Pop-Up "Circus of Desmadres" -- A Traveling Exhibition Coming Soon to a UC Riverside, and Perhaps, a Gallery, Museum, or University Near You!

Updated October 21, 2020 | Last updated September 22, 2020

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling pop-up or gallery-based art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The traveling exhibition was originally curated by Leticia Gómez Franco for Casa Familiar, San Ysidro, California, and Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. Upcoming shows are UC Riverside (virtual via Zoom, thx Covid!) and the University of Detroit, Mercy (eventually). Recent exhibitions include shows at Iowa State University and the Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle, Washington--other noteworthy gigs include performances at Northwestern University, Wabash College, California State University, San Bernardino, and Franklin & Marshall College.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 American Library Association award-winning book with UT Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America. In addition to racist artifacts from American mass culture (the bread and butter of Uncle Sam's unconscious and the backstory for the resurgence in anti-Mexican, anti-Latina/o peoples presently), the show also features works that is "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious fusion of the Mexican/US borderlands/frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious artistic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Rafaella Suarez, and Izel Vargas.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here.

Frederick Luis Aldama and William Nericcio LIVE via ZOOM : Talking #BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, Monday October 19, 2020 @ 12noon, Pacific Time

 

Be there! Get your dose of #browntv live via zoom Monday, Oct 19, 2020 at 12 noon Pacific, 3pm East Coast, & 2pm en Tejas/Midwest... a book talk & conversation with @ProfessorLatinx & @eyegiene

register: https://t.co/S9IKNRzVop

special offer: https://t.co/Wo5kQIllpZ pic.twitter.com/4xibfpnPA7

— William Nericcio (@eyegiene) October 18, 2020

Admen and Madmen Searching for the Deep Meaning of Talking #BrownTV

Ad-peeps agree! Talking #BrownTV is the cat's pajamas! 100s of color pictures/stills. Co-authored by @eyegiene & @ProfessorLatinx via Bookshop: https://t.co/BUajA4wMvA
via @ohiostatepress https://t.co/mbleDTFubI
via AMZ https://t.co/qCrHs0cXRO | via Kindle https://t.co/1uS93PMg50 pic.twitter.com/aNa2HieZHs

— talking #browntv (@browntv12) October 3, 2020

Whiter Whites!? No! BROWNER BROWNS with Talking #BrownTV!

 

Why get your whites absolutely white when the future of our (possibly) beautiful world is brown, Brown, BROWN!?  

What am I talking...? I'm TALKING #BrownTV!!!  Add it to your fine lineup of Spring 2021 classes now and Fede and Memo might even do a drop in live Zoom-bomb of your class (for reals!) ...   TALKING #BrownTV, co-authored by Latinx phenom Frederick Luis Aldama and yours fave rabble rouser, William Nericcio.  

Sample the first pages of the book free here via NOOK: nook.barnesandnoble.com/products/9780814277447/sample?sourceEan=9780814255599  

Talking #BrownTV, now on sale via Bookshop: bookshop.org/books/talking-browntv-latinas-and-latinos-on-the-screen/9780814255599  

or, via The Ohio State University Press: ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814255599.html  

or via Bezos's evil (but convenient) amz: amzn.to/3ecVCJp or, a digital version of the same, via Kindle: amzn.to/2JUhzz1

Director's Cut! Selena Quintanilla/Chrissy Hynde (Pretenders) Piece for WOWEE ZOWEE @ HiLobrow.com | Back on the Chain Gang Becomes Amor Prohibido via Xicanosmosis

originally posted: 3/2/18 6:46 PM; repost 9/18/20 6:40am

Click to enlarge.

WOWEE ZOWEE
Selena, Amor Prohibido
William Nericcio

The silvery electronic synthesizers that open Selena's Amor Prohibido (1994) usher listeners into a lush (sweet, but not treacly) aural landscape every bit as unpredictable and split (between English and Spanish) as the South Texas coastal shores that gave birth to this singing goddess of conjunto and, after Cesar Chavez (or, maybe ahead of him) the most famous Mexican American superstar the United States has ever known.



Amor Prohibido (Forbidden Love) segues into No me queda mas (I have nothing left or nothing is left to me), a dreamy/sad meditation on loving and losing. The rest of the album is the stuff of memory, released just a few months before her callous assassination by Yolanda Saldívar, Selena's fan club president and agent for her fashion line in Mexico.

Selena's album's pièce de résistance, for me, however, is her cover / revision / rendition of the Pretenders' Back on the Chain Gang, here subjected to Tex-Mex metamorphosis by Selena and her band as Fotos y Recuerdos--the edge of Chrissy Hynde's cut is softened somewhat by the potentially cheezy synthesizer beat applied by Selena, but what emerges is actually a kind of conversation between the White American Rock and South Texas Tejano music, between the edgy pre-cursor to alternative rock and South Texas Chicano rhythms--you had no choice but to dance to the evocative catchy cadences of this next world beat, this mestizo magic.

 

Selena's title transformation also foregrounds what the Pretenders's version perhaps kept more obscure, the song a paean to nostalgia and memory (facilitated by a photograph, that most weirdly fetishistic and ubiquitous of objects).

When Selena's version was released I had recently moved to the West Coast from the chilly, barren enigma (to me) of Eastern Connecticut--I remember hearing Selena's Fotos y Recuerdos on the radio, as I bopped between Chula Vista and San Diego, San Ysidro and LA in my old 1980s-era VW Rabbit diesel. Here was a song that embodied what I came to call Xicanosmosis, (Chicana/o + Osmosis) where the jangling guitars and dangerous new wave crooning of Hynde and her band was force-fused with a decidedly "Mexican" consciousness--"Mexican" not Mexican, as it came from WITHIN the United States, from a South Texas borderlands with a mind (and wit, and language) of its own.

Selena's untimely death led to her short-term apotheosis onto the top of the music charts, but it also erased the possibility that her South Texas born/borne sound would dominate the ear-space (and the Zeitgeist) of the United States.

When JLo was chosen to play her in the requisite biopic (as if there was no difference between a Tejana and a New York Boriqua--you can imagine them in central casting "They both have big nalgas and speak Spanish"), something died, or better put, Selena died a second death--the unique charm and spark of a South Texas superstar silenced and elided a second time on the silver screen.

An edited, more pithy version of the piece above appears here, improved by the magic, pruning shears of Joshua Glenn, head agent at Hilobrow.com!

Soften the Load ...

Cover Design Work by Guillermo Nericcio García | pacificREVIEW 2006-2007

#textmex #mextasy A Short Tale of Spanish and Mexican Cartoonists Working for Disney's Daily Fishwrap Comics

William "Memo" Nericcio's & Frederick Luis Aldama's Talking #BrownTV, Public Zoom Lecture; Joanna Brooks's Mormonism and White Supremacy, Public Zoom Lecture | A Series Sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative, SDSU

Orson Welles's TOUCH OF EVIL Screening Today on TCM | Centerpiece Film of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America

Touch of Evil lobby cards, hand-tinted. This Welles classic is on later today on @tcm

An essay on 'Touch helped get me tenure, thx @ChonNoriega. Check it out here: https://t.co/eVW1jze9qN

Director's cut of essay here (free shipping!) --> https://t.co/j6p0BgUzzj thx @chrsgnzlz pic.twitter.com/6TWj4hTpRa

— William Nericcio (@eyegiene) August 30, 2020

Limited Time Offer | TALKING BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen by Fede Aldama and Memo Nericcio | $27.95 and Free Shipping

click to enlarge

The time that went into making this splendiferous ad clues you into the fact that miracles do happen! That advertising hype knows no boundaries!

Through a limited time offer (as long as inventory lasts) we can offer the new book by Fede Aldama and Memo Nericcio, the Rosie Greer and Ray Milland (opposite) of Latinx/Mexy Cultural Studies: TALKING #BROWNTV! 

Hit this button now, and it will be shipped to you from the rasquache Textmex world headquarters located in San Diego, CA!

About the book:

Talking #BrownTV: 

Latinas & Latinos on the Screen

Like two friends sitting down in front of the television together, in Talking #browntv, Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio dialogue about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities, Aldama and Nericcio analyze the ways in which Latinx performers have been mediated—with varying degrees of complexity—on the American screen. A comprehensive review of the history of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Hispanics, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Latinx performers in television and film, Talking #browntv boldly interrogates one of the largest paradoxes in the history of American television: Why are there so few Latina/os on television, and why, when they do appear, are they so often narcos, maids, strumpets, tarts, flakes, and losers?

From the subversive critiques embedded in well-loved children’s characters like Speedy Gonzalez to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in modern-era pornography, from Eva Longoria as ethnic mannequin to J-Lo flipping the sexy Latina music video on its head in “I Luh Ya Papi,” and with more than 150 full-color images, Aldama and Nericcio seek to expose the underlying causes as to why Latina/os constitute only 2 percent of mainstream cultural production when they’re the majority minority in the US. In a moment when anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric oozes from TV sets and media platforms, Talking #browntv emerges as a bold antidote, an eloquent rejoinder, and a thoughtful meditation on Latina/os on the American screen and in America today.

The critics have spoken!

“From yesteryear’s phosphorescent cathode rays to today’s digital-device blue-light glows, Talking #browntv puts a critical lens on the entire history of televisual reconstructions of Latinxs. Aldama and Nericcio at once call out all those willfully ignorant—racist!—mainstreamings of Latinxs. And they celebrate constructions of a brown TV that affirm the multicolored mosaic that make up Latinx identities and experiences in the US. Talking #browntv wakes the world to the urgency for televisual media to willfully recreate the complexity and diversity of our Latinx communities.”  

—Aitana Vargas, award-winning journalist 

for the LA Times, BBC, and CNN Expansión

“My Dinner with Andre, except with two sassy Solons waxing wise and wacky on Slowpoke Rodriguez, Superman as Mexico’s savior, and other highs and lows of Mexican muses in American pop culture. Nomás falta the Tapatio on this intellectual popcorn.” 

—Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: 

How Mexican Food Conquered America

Love to Share this Photo: The Father of the Father of #textmex, The One and Only William Nericcio (My Daddy)

Talking #BrownTV ... the REVIEWS are IN ...

A Twitter-based Discussion on Latina/o Stereotypes -- the Mexican Bandit or the Pirate in a Silver Age Jonah Hex Comic Book

first this: 

https://twitter.com/WanPilgrimm/status/1295494993721712642 

then this: 

https://twitter.com/eyegiene/status/1295548349626499073

Sunday Funnies in the Age of the Coronavirus: La Cucaracha

click to enlarge

I have a new class this Fall 2020 at SDSU called Comics and History: The Virus Eye/I. As part of that class I am uploading select dispatches on contemporary comic strips--today I did one on Lalo Alcaraz and Junco Cancho's La Cucaracha.   Check it out below: