Welcome Village Voice Readers and Tijuana Bible Junkies! Hola!

It's time for summer re-runs on the Textmex blog--here's an oldie but a goodie from 2008 (original posting: Wednesday, August 06, 2008)

That miscreant Mexican/Xicano wizard of yellow journalism, that wascally wabbit of Latina/o print and online media, Gustavo Arellano, has gone and linked me, via the magic of solicited commentary, with the infamy and sordid black-ink pleasures of Tijuana Bibles!

 Click here for his latest Ask-A-Mexican column. Somehow the knowledge that "Nericcio" and "Tijuana Bible" searches will forever pollute the internets with "hits" gives this poor child of Laredo, this recovering Catholic "raised by nuns," sordid, ironic solace! For more on Tijuana Bibles, the low-tech fore-runner of internet pornography click here (NSFW, and "Not Safe for your Soul," as my 7nth-grade inquisition teacher Sister Veronica would have said!, or, go for the gold, with this full-on google search.

As you can see in this sample culled from the internet opposite, the 'Bibles were as memorable for their variety of racially amped ethnic semiotics as they were for their sexual hijinks! No surprise there--as I tried to illustrate in Tex[t]-Mex, the connection between race and sex in stereotypes is not just connected or causal, it is, as it is in life, intimately linked at the level of DNA!