Yikes!

Laredo and Deconstruction: Roland Barthes, Mojado!

I just ran across one of my publications--a photographic deconstruction of my hometown of Laredo, Texas--available as a preview on Google Books. It sports one of my longest titles (and that's saying a lot as most of my titles are huge, annoying my editors and typesetters to no end over the years!). 

It's called “Roland Barthes, Mojado, in Brownface: Chisme-laced Snapshots Documenting the Preposterous and Fact-laced Claim That the Postmodern Was Born along the Borders of the Río Grande River, " and appears in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia.

Apple's Safari app sometimes has a hard time parsing Google's code--if the essay does not appear below, go here to see it.

 

Coming this December from the OSU Press and the Fused Minds of Fede Aldama and Memo Nericcio... TALKING #browntv

Bossons' "Mexican" Chalk Figure! ack! #nomextasy

Preparations Full Steam Ahead for the Iowa State #Mextasy Pop-Up Exhibition and Lecture--Part of Their U.S. Latino/a Studies 25 Year Anniversary Symposium -- Saturday, September 28, 2019. Sun Room, Memorial Union

Preparations Full Steam Ahead for the Iowa State #Mextasy Pop-Up Exhibition and Lecture--Part of Their U.S. Latino/a Studies 25 Year Anniversary Symposium -- Saturday, September 28, 2019. Sun Room, Memorial Union

Jewish Solidarity Against Latina/o Victimization/Oppression by ICE: UPDATES via Twitter

Holocaust survivor Bernard Marks confronts ICE director Thomas Homan - and compares ICE raids to Nazis raids.#JewsAgainstICE

pic.twitter.com/BaMGARYjZS

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) July 12, 2019

Protesters here are singing in Hebrew and Spanish, chanting and insisting they will not be moved. #DC police have blocked off the street outside #ICE headquarters, where a handful of protesters are dancing. No sign of arrests outside the building so far. pic.twitter.com/Zide3tCibe

— Marissa J. Lang (@Marissa_Jae) July 16, 2019

We are going to shut down business as usual until Congress shut down ICE. Don’t believe us? ⬇️ @NeverAgainActn @CosechaMovement pic.twitter.com/4CThRxjFkr

— Alyssa Rubin 🔥 (@aly_mixed_up) July 16, 2019

Test Posting: Publications by William Nericcio

#Pendejooftheminute July 15, 2019 Edition!

And then there was that time I gave a lecture on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather... | September 2015

Click to  Enlarge

Just ran across a lecture of mine from 2015 on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather... in 4 parts:

part 1
https://youtu.be/c2rhLTXKkWc
  
part 2
https://youtu.be/Hzflig6p8rg
  
part 3
https://youtu.be/erVQ_CsvNq4
  
part 4
https://youtu.be/DYYVo8uyqXs

Once More With Feeling: Mexican Stereotypes Ride Again!

A Follow Up Sequel of Sorts to Tex[t]-Mex, Co-authored with Fede Aldama, OSU's Amazingly Prolific Scribe, Appears This Christmas from The Ohio State University Press! Viva the #mextasy

When Italians Promote and Translate Animated Pieces from the United States featuring "Mexican" Characters or My Latest Speedy Gonzales Sighting! #mextasy

 

See all the details here!

Emerald Hills Middle Schoolers Invade SDSU Campus for a Quick Tour...

#repost from mextasy.blogspot.com ||| My Latest Piece for Joshua Glenn's Amazing HILOBROW.COM site on Gilbert Hernandez, Errata Stigmata, Love and Rockets, and Ocular Ontology now LIVE!

Really excited that my new piece for the #awesome online mag HILOBROW.COM has gone live! See it here: https://www.hilobrow.com/2019/05/15/seriocomic-20/ . . . OR . . . keep reading for the longer (unsnipped by Hilobrow editor/magician Joshua Glenn's devilish pruners) director's cut:

Ghost in the Mirror
Gilbert Hernandez's Errata 
Stigmata Revisited
William A. Nericcio 
16 May 2019

Can it ever be written that a comic book panel, or a series of them, changed the career of an English Professor?   

Mind you, please delete the image of a be-tweeded, bearded, white man with leather patched elbows, pipe, and avuncular grin. I am a down and dirty creature of the U.S./Mexican border, and while not quite “street” I am a little scruffier than your average Ivory Tower dandy gringo.

And I am mad about comics—all comics! Richie Rich, Little Audrey, Sad Sack, the Silver Surfer, Betty and Veronica …. Don’t get me started on Betty and Veronica.

As with all images on this posting, click to enlarge!

But it is the comic I pick up in 1985—the one with Gilbert Hernandez’s “Tears from Heaven: The Life and Times of Errata Stigmata” that breaks my mind, or scars my synapses, or wounds my ocular ontological core. 

Errata, a young girl growing up in a fictional Central American town called Palomar (think Mayberry with sex, drugs, and aliens), witnesses the stabbing murder of her parents by a serial killer named Tomaso (we don’t know this in 1985—I would argue that Beto, aka Gilbert, doesn’t know this in 1985, or has not dreamed it up yet).

In that instant, in that witnessing, everything goes to pot, and her destiny is sealed.  She grows up as a precocious young adolescent being raised by a Jewish-American uncle and utterly abusive aunt, Zephie, in the United States.

The result of her murder-filled witnessing?

She suffers from the stigmata, hence her name, that is, she bleeds from the sites associated with the crucifixion of Jesus.

Jesus Christ!

In the panels here, lifted from the original comic, Hernandez focuses (pardon the pun) on the connection between seeing and being: the ocular and the existential.

In the last panel, the one I have dreams about, a dislocated, disembodied eye explodes with viscera across a mutantly giant television screen with Errata mutely witnessing.  I have gone on to to write numerous articles and soon, three books on Latinas/os and Visual Culture and I think all of them come back to that panel—the young orphaned witness with her face, unseen, to the screen.  

The smartest undergraduate I ever “taught” (I am not sure I taught her anything) the independent film maker Diana Contreras, interrupted me when I was lecturing in class about this panel at SDSU in 1991. I was speaking endlessly about the dialectical relationship between witnessing and being, between seeing and existing—you know the drill: “blah blah blah.”

She interrupts my lecture to tell me and my 120 students, "Nericcio, that’s not a TV screen, it’s Errata’s mirror."

I shut up.

I had nothing left to say.

TextMex Animated Gif Tester ...

#mextasy just a test--go on with other internets distractions!