Mexican Superheroes, Working Immigrants, XicanOSMOSIS, and Dulce Pinzón

original posting: 3/5/08

It may be the times (and a facebook query from a regular reader), but I think the present anti-immigrant zeitgeist demands that we rethink the way we see these mostly brave, valiant, documented and undocumented sojourners--no one makes us do that better than Dulce Pinzón.

Xicanosmosis is one of the key concepts that emerges in the closing sections of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in American. A mouthful of a word, XicanOSMOSIS is a name loaded with salacious, reproductive overtones; it describes a peculiar process or phenomena where the high-brow and low-brow miasmal excesses of U.S. pop culture and the equally sordid and delicious emanations of Mexican mass arts fuse, co-mingle, spoon, and "splorf" into and onto each other in a veritable orgy of creative synergy and aesthetic synesthasia. You can see xicanosmotic climaxes and much, much, much more at work in the brilliant art of Dulce Pinzón, especially her Superheroes project.


Pinzon's fabulous gallery of ocular delights imagines an urban metropolitan setting where working Mexican immigrants are re-imagined at their labors clothed in the garb of DC and Marvel comics finest--Spiderman, the Flash, the Thing, Batman, and more. The go-to target of fascist racist pundits, the working poor, the swarthy immigrant, is re-visioned as the epitome of American fantasy, the Superhero.


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