Mextasy, the Cavalcade of Desmadres (and Cutting-edge Latina/o Art) Pop-up Exhibition is Hitting the Road and Invading Dallas, Texas @ Richland College, Wednesday, February 11, 2015!

see more here!

Holy cowboy boots, Dallas, the Mextasy exhibition is hitting Big D for a one-day exhibition, presentation, book- & print-signing, y mucho mas more at Richland College.  On February 11, 2015, Wednesday, at 4pm in Sabine Hall 118--the event is free, gratis, cheap, and open to all the fine citizens of the Fort Worth/Dallas Metroplex! The grandest Chicano in the NFL, Tony Romo, has been invited, but don't hold your breath!  The presentation includes an image-laden picture show with the fancy title of "Rethinking 'Mexicans' on TVs, Smartphones, and the Internet," but don't let that slow you down. I will signing copies of Tex[t]-Mex and my other books and shilling garish posters as well (at discount! ¡¡¡venta, venta...venga, venga!!!).

What is "Mextasy"--A Primer for the Richland College Mextasy Show

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The show, originally curated by Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas, had its last exhibition at Boise State University, for the Third Cinema Research Group and El Consulado de México en Boise, Idaho on April 11, 2014. Its latest encarnation debuts for Richland College, 118 Sabine Hall, at 4pm on February 11, 2015.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 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), the show also features works that "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious tattoo of the Mexican/US frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious semiotic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Izel Vargas, and Marisela Norte.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here. For more information and an interview with the curator/artist, go here.

An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Lorena Nava Ruggero, appears below. An other interview, focused more on the Eyegiene project, appears online on Agitprop.

LNR: What is Mextasy? Why did you create it?

WN: Mextasy is an art exhibition featuring outrageous stereotypes of Mexicans and other Latinas/os; additionally, it contains sculptures, drawings, photography, and other media that attack the notion of Mexicans as less-than-human in American mass culture. The show I opened along the Rio Grande river in McAllen (September, 2010) and in Laredo this December, Mextasy, is dedicated to the old motherland and my peculiar fatherland.

Mextasy is more than a representation of ecstasy about or for Mexico; it is about the sensuous tracings Mexican culture leaves both sides of the border. More existential state than archive, Mextasy speaks to the living organism of Mexicanicity as it moves between the bodies of Mexico and the United States--an overt and covert delicious miasma that arouses as it excites, excites as it provokes. ¡Que viva Mexico!, within and without its borders.

LNR: How does Mextasy parallel your book?

WN: Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America features over 200 illustrations, with 16 pages in full color; many of these illustrations are stock representations of Mexicans (the sleeping Mexican, the bandit Mexican, the hot, Latina femme fatale). However, the book also includes original art, digital, photographic and hand-drawn, created by me. You know English Professors are known more for tweed and pomposity than their Picasso-like skills--for that reason I publish all my art under the name of Guillermo Nericcio García, what my name would have been if I had been born 10 blocks south of where I came into the world in Laredo, Texas--a bordertown with Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

LNR: You're primarily a writer, but this is an art exhibit -- what was it like to create this kind of "content"?

WN: I have been drawing since I was three--I made my own comic book with my sister before I was ten; after that, I was the political cartoonist for my high school newspaper (most infamous drawing? of Vice-Principal Shoup as a zeigheiling facsist for his punitive pedagogy--I was almost expelled and the nuns at St. Augustine tried to censor the paper).

LNR: What will you focus on in your lectures in Texas (I noticed two speaking engagements at libraries)?

WN: I will be focusing on my ongoing forensic work on American visual culture--so I will be dealing with the image of Mexico in the United States but also with our changing optics-obsessed culture in general--from Avatar in 3-D to the IPad, we are living through a watershed moment in textual reproduction where the turn to the visual (the semiotic) is accelerating at a mind-blowing pace. Next year, my new book appears with the University of Texas Press; it is entitled Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race--parts of my talks will be drawn from that work.

LNR: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

WN: I love visiting South Texas--it is like a return to my roots; and though Northern Mexico and South Texas are in cultural chaos right now, the fallout of the Narco Wars hitting this locale hard, I think its important to remind yourself of where you come from. You would think that Southern California and South Texas are the same, but they are like worlds apart.

PAST MEXTASY EXHIBITIONS

Other recent Mextasy exhibitions include shows at (pre-boycott!) the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at La Casa Cultura Latina, the Centro Cultural de La Raza, in Balboa Park, San Diego, California; at Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Department of American Studies, University of Michigan; in San Ysidro, California (as Xicanoholic) at Casa Familiar; in McAllen, Texas at South Texas College's Pecan campus Art Gallery; at Laredo, Texas at the the Laredo Center of the Arts; additionally, it had an April 8, 2011 opening at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa; and a run at the Fullerton Public Library with Gustavo Arellano hosting! September 2011 saw Mextasy invade San Antonio College for a Tex[t]-Mex reading/signing and an exclusive South Texas MEXTASY exhibition. In 2012, Mextasy was sighted at Ohio State University; at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario; at theFront, San Ysidro, California; and in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado for the Ethnic Studies Department. Western University, London, Ontario has also hosted a show, with other exhibitons and presentations at Adrian College, UCLA, and Boise State University.

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | Revised again, September 2011 | 

Once again on Thursday, April 10, 2014 | and, still once again, October 4, 2014 |

and, once again, if you can believe it on February 4, 2015.

An Across-the-Pond Cultural Query! The BBC takes up the question today: "What does it mean to be Mexican-American?'

Teaser Trailer for Mextasy, the Television Series, Now LIVE on VIMEO via BLINDSPOT.TV

The first trickle of news concerning Mextasy, the TV show, is finally coming to light after a year of pre-production work with the geniuses of Blindspot.TV, a production team based in Mexico City, Miami, and Madrid.  A collaboration with Taco Shop Poet fave/Producer Miguel-Angel Soria, and Carlos Soloria, of Travieso Films fame, Mextasy seeks to rewrite the history of Mexican-American, Mexican, Latina/o, and Hispanic representation with fast-moving, filmed short stories that showcase the best writers, actors, singers, scientists, dancers, painters, and more, that just happen to be Latina/o in the United States (and beyond! Future episodes, Mextasy@Madrid, Mextasy@London, & Mextasy@Cannes, are on the drawing board).  Our website at Mextasy.TV is still bare bones, so the best way to follow our exploits is to like our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/MextasyTV

Click any of the images to screen the trailer--directed by Osiris Luciano!

Prehistoric Chicana Doings! One Million Years B.C. with Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch

updated january 16, 2015; originally published 1/27/12, 8:16 PM Pacific Standard Time

and a screengrab for the Mextasy exhibition:

Still Yet More Randy, Scary "Mexicans" From the Golden Age of American Pulp Fiction!

The Grapefruit Moon Gallery hosts a well-curated treasure trove of American pulp classics--crime, noir, Westerns... you name it.   The following entry, by Allen Anderson, is one for the ages! An all-time classic for the Tex[t]-Mex project!

Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch, SDSU's Most Famous Almost-Alum

It will come as no surprise that some of the most popular postings on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog belong to the one and only Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch. The queen of the Latina bombshells in the 60s and 70s, Welch was an epic superstar--a performer who followed in the footsteps of actresses like Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) and who presaged the likes of Sofia Vergara. All of this a long way of setting up a new picture of the Latina bombshell I recently ran across and will be featuring someway somehow in the Richland College Mextasy show next month in Dallas, Texas.

Proposed Reading List, Chicana/o Literature at CSUF

Watch out Lexington, Kentucky (AKA Mexington, Kentucky), Come April 2015, Something Mexican Your Way Cometh!

First notice here on the good ol' Galleryblog that I have been invited to bring the Mextasy traveling circus to Lexington, and the University of Kentucky, April 2015 for a couple of lectures--I am going to try to sneak in a pop-up version of the Mextasy exhibition as well, though that is still up in the air.

Here's an outline of what I will be up to there!  The series I am speaking in foregrounds notions of the  transnational and social theory:

Chicanosmosis and the Transnational Imaginary (Imaginary)
21st Century Mextasy In and Beyond the Ivory Tower

Dr. William A. Nericcio

In the closing moments of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” of America,  right at the point where all hope was lost, when imagining a progressive space for Latinas/os seems all but impossible, a turn occurs. It is a turn to hope, to a future, to something positive.

Naïve, right? 

For a Derridean (and a rascuache Nietzschean), especially a post-movimiento Tejano who had learned his craft at the feet of Gayatri Spivak, Ramón Saldivar, John Kronik, Wolfgang Holdheim, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jonathan Culler, and Carlos Fuentes, this was not a predictable move.  Theory is negative and imponderable (and insufferable), but I wanted to use it to say something different.

And I did: I coined the neologism Chicanosmosis.  Chicanosmosis or, in the book, Xicanosmosis, is a term that contemplates international intercourse through the semi-permeable fabric of the U.S./Latin American border—a site of transnational intrigue that reeks of hegemony and seduction, imperialism and the voyeuristic turn. In Tex[t]-Mex, the focus was on Frida Kahlo and American writer/artist Gilbert Hernandez, but one could have as easily have focused on El Chavo del Ocho & Pee-wee Herman, or United Fruit/CIA & Narco-cultura en las Americas (this last “narcheology,” as I parsed it in lectures at NYU/SVA in Manhattan last year, is fodder for another colloquia).

So this presentation for Social Theory will represent simultaneously a retrospective and scenes I might be accused of performing something like Nostradamus-like clairvoyance. It is the sum total of my present theoretical adventures based as it is on the writings of Fanon, Said, Sontag, Marx, Foucault, Gallop, Paz, Taussig, Liu, Borges, Virilio and more—and it is my own thing. 

Take the subtitle I have appended to the main title: Imaginary (Imaginary)--the former imaginary, an adjective, common, ubiquitous; the latter imaginary, a noun, the nominalization of the Imaginary, post-Lacan, now de rigueur in the academy. Frenchies were all the rage in the 80s and they still are in a way—this too will probably come up. (In Tex[t]-Mex, I actually created a literary term, la quiebra, in order to break with East Coast Francophiliac jargon-forging—no joke!). 

Readings are to be determined, but they will include works in progress from Eyegiene: Mutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex, Race, and the Smartphone as well as select readings from work by Edmundo Desnoes, Frantz Fanon, Slavoj Žižek, Gayatri Spivak, and others to be implicated shortly.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Happy New Year, and Feliz Año (not Ano!) Nuevo from all the Folks at the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, 2014!

 

What a year it has been! Mextasy, the pop-up Art Gallery/Exhibition continues to expand with upcoming shows in Dallas @ Richland College, February 2015, in Mexington (aka Lexington), Kentucky in April 2015, with mucho mas more to come!

Also on the horizon?!  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Mextasy might just be coming to the boobtube, to television, with a weekly show based on Tex[t]-Mex, the book, and Mextasy, the exhibition. Follow our trials and tribulations here: https://www.facebook.com/MextasyTV 

and on @eyegiene via twitter!

Have an amazing 2015!

Yours,

William A. Nericcio y

Guillermo Nericcio García

Mexican-Americans in Archie Comics, Dan DeCarlo, and Mextasy-laced Befuddlements of a Teenager's Libido

As I have shared before here in these 'pages,' I spent a fair amount of my time growing up in Laredo, Texas, reading comic books--specifically, a lot of Archie Comics.

Dan DeCarlo's Men's Humor Magazine work--not for Archie Comics!

Many of my obsessions for women were probably inculcated through the india ink wonders that are the magic of Dan DeCarlo--illustrator for Archie, Jughead, Betty & Veronica, and the rest of the gang in the Silver Age heydays of the 60s and 70s. Harry Lucey, too, illustrator for my Mextasy homage below, also takes some of the blame!

Back then, though I preferred Betty (she was nicer, and, as a blonde, an exotic for this chubby Mexican-American Laredense), it was Veronica, whose affections I fantasized about. I thought she was Mexican-American, a Latina--at the very least, she sure looked like all the middle and high school girls I was surrounded by at St. Augustine High School in Laredo.

So I dedicate this Mextasy Poster below to Lucey, whose art gave flight to my fantasies, and to DeCarlo, whose ink-bourn dabblings imprinted me forever (and yes, deranged my libido in ways that only Freud, channeling Cantinflas via Rosario Castellanos, could fathom).

Veronica Lodge, no doubt, was not Latina, not Chicana, not Tejana--but for me, young, ardent, and filled with visions of fantasized erotic futures, it did not matter.

Los Hollywood! David Tomas Martinez! Perry Vasquez! y Mucho Mas More at the Mextasy Fiesta/Birthday Party at Mi Barra, December 5, 2014, Friday, from 8pm to ???

click to make way bigggggger!

Ok, don't tell anybody (swear now!) shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Friday, December 5, 2014 at Mi Barra- Rock En Español in glorious Chula Vista, Califas, we are planning a combined birthday party (don't ask how old I am!), concert, reading, filming, desmadre extravaganza as we celebrate the announcement of Mextasy TV, my crazy venture into the world of television and streaming media with Miguel-Angel Soria, Carlos Solorio, Gerardo Bola Juarez, Alex Balassa, and other secret angels (and devils)!!!!! 

RSVP via Facebook here!

The party will start around 9pm--spread the palabra and get out a pen and mark that calendar!!!! There will be music (Los Hollywood and the one and only Perry Vasquez performing from his opus, GATES OF HECK), readings by me and David Tomas Martinez, performance art, cerveza, cool peeps, surprises, desmadres, y mucho mas more!

map to Mi Barra: http://goo.gl/maps/paCvV
fiestalinkazo: https://www.facebook.com/events/1523793981201597

The ghost of Lupe Velez sez, "Go to Mi Barra"!!!

The Latina Femme Fatale, 1929 Edition of Liberty Magazine

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Berlin Wall Comes Down, the Border Wall Goes Up! Ace Satirist Lalo Alcaraz is On It!

Mr. President: Tear down that wall! via @laloalcaraz @PochoDotCom #latism #berlinwall #immigration pic.twitter.com/qIYpvp4OxF
— CultureStrike (@CultureStrike) November 12, 2014

Now You Can Insert "Maria, the Maid" into Any Project You Dream Up!!!!

I don't know why it should surprise me that established tropes and stereotypes from the world of print media, film, and television, should make the grand leap into the digital realm, but still it does.

Take a minute and check out the 'cool' animated special effects available to you at Motion VFX!  Who are they?

"MotionVFX is a registered trademark of a company called MotionVFX, which is created and owned by Szymon Masiak. Szymon is very well known in computer graphic industry and has been working in it for over 20 years in areas like computer games, commercials and major motion pictures."

A warm thanks to my collaborator on the Mextasy.TV project (Producer/Director Miguel-Angel Soria), for sending me this latest incarnation of made-to-order, er maid-to-order, "Mexican" marionettes--the focus of a large part of my book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America with UT Press.

Here's another analog version along the same lines appeared in The New Yorker back in the day:

You can read my take on it here:

Jo Raquel Tejada, aka Raquel Welch, Immortalized at the SDSU Faculty Staff Lounge!

Readers of the Textmex Galleryblog know that we have devoted a fair amount of web-space to the pre-eminent Latina bombshell in American pop culture, Raquel Welch--go here for a roundup of postings.

But before Welch turned heads back in the day she was one of the most famous alums (though she did not graduate) of SDSU--back then she was Jo Raquel Tejada, or Tajeda (sic), as the SDSU Faculty Staff Club didactic has it, pictured here with Melvin Anderson, who seems to be biting himself in this snapshot!

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Thanks to photographer Michael Borgstrom for the camera shots!