More on Animation

I am jumping on this bandwagon late but I wanted to note the work of El Tigre producers Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua of Tijuana--here's a story from last March from the LATimes. Here's a Spanish-language promo bumper for the Nickelodeon series:


El Tigre PKG from giancarlo sabogal on Vimeo.

More Contemporary Animation: Rinee Shaw

While prowling think faesthetic, I happened across this striking short story--cataloged here more for my interest in contemporary animation than stereotypes:

little forest from rinee shah on Vimeo.

animation by rinee shah



music: still light by the knife



www.rineeshah.com

Comic-Con, San Diego, Pablo Jaime Sáinz, and Latinos in Graphic Narrative

Just getting around to scanning a nice piece on Latinas/os in the world of comic books that Pablo Jaime Sáinz had in Enlace, the Spanish-language version of the Union-Tribune newspaper here in San Diego around this time last year; the piece is in Spanish and features great graphics and writing!


Blogger saved the image smaller, so here is more readable copy:

Marisela Norte, Correspondent-at-large on Kohler Advertising

Mexico City Newspaper on Tex[t]-Mex

A quick link to a kindly review that appeared last year by Kelly Arthur Garrett; now, also, here in color facsimile form (above).

Mexico Now and Tomorrow...

If you want to put your sentient finger to the pulsing, throbbing vein of Mexico, now, look no further than Daniel Hernandez's amazing blog out of Mexico City by way of Califas!

"African" Eyegiene: Of Ethnic Mannequins and Ethnic Subjects

Allegories are my thing. I love them--really love them. Here, in the advertisement to your right, one encounters an allegory of epic proportions--some odd parable of cuisine, race, physiognomy, myth (Narcissus?), folds together in a minor spectacle. Does the illustration show a man in wonder, in love, in desire for himself; or, more likely, for the chocolate. And are we then to ignore the synecdoche of chocolate for African, African for chocolate that lingers there on the fringes of our pscyhe. Will he melt in my mouth? Will I melt for his mouth, or, for that matter, for the chocolate. An allegorical circuit of desire inhabits the space of this striking representation. Here, then, at the intersection of race and autoerotic libidinal desire rests the mystery of cultural studies, the question for those of us that travail in this field of odd arts and uncanny artifacts: do we, in speaking to these mysteries, unfold new knowledge? Or, do we, in the process, of our "wisdom," weave new densities of spectatorial exploitation.  I tried to wrestle with this oddity in my meditations on Lupe Vélez, and I still wonder if I am not, some weird, affected, "intellectual," version of TMZ, but for ethnic studies, for cultural studies, some odd prolix version of the paparazzi, showing hot pictures for fun and profit.

Juxtapose that painted scene, author unknown, (I only know that Félix Potin is a European food manufacturer and distributor), with this one, of Josephine Baker, from Yale's Beinecke collection. Baker was "real," not painted, and profited handsomely from her brilliant performed spectacles.

Ostensibly we are confronted at once with two examples of "Black" or "African" subjectivity, but the "reality" factor of photography throws us conundrums that the painted advertisement does not. In the photo, Baker is a "captured" object, but she is also, at once, a performing actor--the pomade in her hair, the sentience in her agile, avid gaze reveal an agency that belies the passivity of her nude form. More on this in the book, Eyegiene, coming from UT Press when I get off this blog and start writing in earnest!

The Time Tunnel

At a key moment in Tex[t]-Mex, I invoke the memory of Irwin Allen's the Time Tunnel television show--a way of setting the reader up for my own trip down my nostalgic synapses to my childhood laughing my ass of at Speedy Gonzales cartoons; Hulu, NBC's online YouTube competitor, just made all of season one available--the credits alone are priceless! The embedded commercials, I could do without!

Anti-Mexican Loathing Reaches New Heights

My thanks to my new correspondent Amy Sara Carroll of Michigan (by way of Corpus Christi, Tejas) who zaps me this sobering story from the Border:

BORDER ANGELS UPDATE

THANKS TO ALL thanks joined us this past weekend as we serviced various rescue stations in the Imperial Valley. Sadly every one of the more than 40 stations we went to were vandalized and the water emptied out while the containers were slashed by a knife.

On June 14th there was a minutemen reunion in Campo, the same weekend one Mexican migrant was shot and killed and two others were injured. Coincidence?

Please be vigilante as attacks increasing. tonight on NBC NIGHTLY NEWS there will be a report on local and national immigration patterns, as well as day laborers, casa del migrante etc.

We need your help more than ever and you can greatly help our cause by buying a BORDER ANGELS TSHIRT on line www.borderangels.org or sending a donation to our all volunteer group so we can buy more water and supplies.

Blessings

Enrique Morones
Border Angels
P.O. Box 86598
San Diego, CA 92138
www.borderangels.org
(619) 269-7865

And Then, Quite Suddenly, Another "Mexican"--Remembering Baba Looey!

Bob Logan's amazing site reminded me tonight of another "Mexican" I need to chronicle, another ersatz animated would-be son and daughter of Aztlán who needs to once again see the light of day. To whom do I refer? The one and only and infamous, Quick Draw McGraw's swarthy sidekick burro, Baba Looey! Here's a taste of Hanna Barbera's crapimation from 1959 featuring McGraw and Baba Looey in "Bow-Wow Bandit."

George Carlin, R.I.P.

More Eyegiene!

Not so Klandestine San Diego Anti-Mexican Shenanigans

I am in debt to all-too-infrequent correspondent Mark Dery for this link to this fine article by my friend and colleague Emeritus Professor of Chicana/o Studies Richard Griswold del Castillo and Carlos Larralde on the back history of the Klan in San Diego. In our days of heated anti-Mexican sentiment and sentimentality to an era that was beaner-free in the hearts and minds of Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and their klans, the piece is a sobering bit of detective work--especially for SoCal Mexicans.

Here's Dery's note:

"Here's the nut graph (as journalists say) in the article you linked to:

During the 1930s, the Klan began to merge with like-minded organizations such as the Silver Shirts League, the MinuteMen*, and the White Guards. Historian Stephen Schwartz affirmed, "Many adherents of the Silver Shirts were former members of the Ku Klux Klan." The San Diego Silver Shirts League, "a deadly fascist inspired group," was planned with the purpose of attacking blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. Inspired by the Nazi SS mystique, the Silver Shirts saw themselves as an American counterpart, enforcing Aryan racial superiority through intimidation and violence. ¶The Silver Shirts had other branches scattered throughout the United States. The San Diego chapter was well-known but ignored by most city officials who did not consider their anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican propaganda a problem."

*The Minutemen*. Italics mine. File this one under Santayana's Ghost: "Those who forget the past," etc.

Ethnic Mannequins: Pull the Tongue and More!!!

Oops! I forgot a key part of the paper "toy." Yikes!

original posting: June 19, 2008

When it comes to the history of ethnic figuration in popular culture ephemera, it is hard to imagine a better source in terms of range and quality than Pillpat's on Flickr. Two recent finds that should end up in cutting edge research in ethnic or cultural studies:


Heritage Auctions comes close as well: