Bizarre Caucasian Bestiary

updated

The introduction to my UT Press book Tex[t]-Mex includes a throwaway paragraph wherein I gesture at some future study that would highlight Caucasian entries in the bestiary of bizarre Ethnic American figuration. After all, it is not just sleeping "Mexicans," bone-through-the-nose "Africans," and murderous "Italians," (to name a few) that suffer when subjected to the logic of stereotypes, white folks suffer as well as they pass through our diverse and complex American matrices of representation.

In the book, I included this image--part of a discarded box I found around back of a cool toy store in La Jolla, CA.


Let me add to this startling artifact (the boy, in particular, is hauntingly curious), the following entry from a recent Target® Sunday circular:

Damned peculiar and certainly worthy of semiotic scrutiny--any commentators with a take out there?

In lieu of a prose gloss, allow me to profer instead this brief semiotic parable instead: