Banal Mexican Stereotypes Sample #1,345,673: Abbott and Costello Comics #6 1948

What gets me about these stories is their banality--of course one could do a focused semiotic interrogation of the various "Mexican" tropes at play in the story below: banditry, sordid Latina sexuality (and fickle-ity for gifts), inanity, ignorance, etc. But more interesting to me is how wide-spread these tropes are by the 1940s--in a minor comic, put out onto the market to cash in on Abbott and Costello's fame as comics and movie stars, Mexico and the Middle East (note the main story in link #1 below, and the cover) are backdrops for 'comic' fun. The exotic erotic (and criminal) nature of the "other" is like oxygen--breathed in without a thought and yet essential in the construction of a "good" "white" "fun" American "self."

As with most of the images on the #textmex galleryblog, clicking the picture gives you a high-res version of the original scan.

Thanks to regular contributor Sergei Hasenecz for the links to these stories--here and here and here:

https://humoropedia.com/abbot-costello-comic-strips-5/

http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=19175

http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=46329

 

Yet Another Posting on Rita Hayworth aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino

It has been awhile since I posted here--it's just so much easier, for some reason, to post on the Textmex Facebook page. Still, I shouldn't ignore the site that made many of my career successes possible!

So, today, yet another Rita Hayworth posting, fueled by semiotic wonders gleaned from Dr. Macro's utterly wonderful celebrity photography page. Click any of the images for a high-rez version of the photograph.

For more on Rita, see my early essay on Hayworth, free and online here: https://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/nericcio/hayworthDERRIDA/ or, the final, extended essay meditation on Rita in Textmex available (with free #mextasy posters!) here: http://eyegiene.tictail.com/product/text-mex-seductive-hallucinations-of-the-mexican-in-america

Quick Mini-interview in the Red Chair | William Nericcio @ SDSU

From a few years back, a quick posting of a mini-interview with yours truly, produced by the marketing folks @SDSU:

Throwback Saturday | The Week I Appeared as a Coverguy for San Diego Citybeat or Whatever Became of 'ChiChi BoomBoom, Le Woof'

Check out the original posting from this blog!

#throwback #repost … the heights of ridiculousness meets #mextasy in this snapshot from @sdcitybeat 2010, the Best of San Diego issue… the result of a collaboration with indy scribe legend @kinsee … Here was my backstory on my “circus of desmadres” alter ego: “The hinted-at bastard son of Margarita Dolores Cansino (aka, Rita Hayworth) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Generalisimo Guillermo “El Guli” García was born in Mérida, Mexico in 1957. Originally recruited by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North to serve as a rightwing fascist Contra in the United States’s secret wars against Nicaragua and the Sanidinistas, “El Guli” dropped out of the notorious School of the Americas in Panama (where, apparently he pantsed Manuel “Red Underwear” Noriega” causing a scandal) and ran off to Leiden, the Netherlands, where he studied literature, art, and philosophy while brilliantly starting a secret Utopian society based on free-love, hashish, India Pale Ale, and Indy music (perhaps the reason he has been seen frequenting North Park divebars of late). Teamed with his inimitable pooch “ChiChi BoomBoom, Le Woof” he aspires to once again rule benevolently over his adoring masses. For more on El Guli, check out his site. Rumors persist around City Beat central, the Generalisimo is actually Dr. William A. Nericcio, Director of the MALAS Program at SDSU. These claims are not to be believed and are thought to be the work of Tea Party operatives.”

A post shared by William Nericcio (@william.nericcio) on May 5, 2018 at 11:50am PDT

Sex Drugs & Rock or English 525, My Day Job...

Devoted readers,

I don't put food on the table from the earnings of this blog--this labor of love only brings in the joy of encountering readers and fans who have found my efforts in Tex[t]-Mex useful, diverting, outrageous, and/or not a waste of time.

However, my day job is important as well--being a Professor of Cultural Studies & Literature at SDSU--there, this summer, I am teaching an American Literature class open to all majors, undergraduate & graduate.

More info here:

Toni Morrison's heralded first novel, The Bluest Eye, just one of the books you can read this summer in our English 525: Sex Drugs Rock class.
Posted by SDSU Department of English & Comparative Literature on Sunday, March 18, 2018

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

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!

#repost from mextasy.blogspot.com |||| The TV Pilot for MEXTASY is Screening @ Franklin & Marshall College as Part of Their Spanish Film Festival #mextasy

The TV Pilot for MEXTASY is screening at Franklin & Marshall College as part of their Spanish Film Festival--the #mextasy pop-up exhibition is coming along for the ride as well (me too!!!!). Be there Wednesday, March 28, 2018!  Here's the teaser for the series that is presently in production-hell limbo!

Teaser Mextasy Ingles from Blindspot on Vimeo.

More info: https://www.fandm.edu/academics/academic-distinctiveness/humanities/humanities-events-calendar/spanish-film-festival2

here are some of my graphics to promote the event--

click to enlarge and feel free to share!

 

After the event goes down, pictures will be archived here:

Mextasy/Textmex Meets the Opera! Come on Out!!! #mextasy #sandiegoopera

Tomorrow I will appearing with Nicolas Reveles and a fabulous soprano star, Michelle Law, at the La Jolla Community Center—the guest of @sandiegoopera. Tickets and more info? Hit the link in my bio or go here: https://www.sdopera.org/engage/taste-of-opera

A post shared by William Nericcio (@william.nericcio) on Feb 20, 2018 at 9:14am PST

Mextasy Coming to Franklin and Marshall College

A New Way To Track My Obsessive Collection of Mexy-Connected Sightings | #mextasy #textmex

Click here for the link!

 

 

Friends of Textmex! Come on Out to the West Coast and Earn a Masters Degree in Textmex-style Cultural Studies with MALAS!

Giving Thanks! Junot Diaz @ SDSU January 31, 2018

Updates to Textmex, Mextasy, Eyegiene, London Rocks, SDSU Press y More!

A quick 2018 update on what I am up to--a reminder that though this blog is still active, more frequent updates appear here on the Textmex/Mextasy Facebook page!

Here's a direct link to the radio interview in the embedded post below.

A Quick Link to 30 Past Bizarre Caucasian Bestiary Postings from the Textmex Galleryblog!

Quick! Hit Anderson Cooper (and/or "Anderson Cooper") to directly access years and years of #bizarrecaucasianbestiary postings on the Textmex Galleryblog!

Mami Chula's, RIP, The End of a Laredo Tradition | #repost + Update!

Textmex Galleryblog Video Edition from Mextasy on Vimeo.

Mami Chula's, a unique place to wet your whistle, and, to no one's surprise, not always a place of great repute...

and, a sad coda...

Postscript: It has been pointed out to me over the years how lame my efforts at 60 Minutes style journalism were back in 2010 (always leave the camera running)--and probably still now! So here, for starving eyes, a true insider video from Laredo's "Ice House of Infamy."