Tuesday, November 22, 2016

October 30, 2006 Saw the First Textmex Galleryblog Posting...



Has it really been 10 years and 23 days? For a decade then, this site has been documenting the history of "Mexicans" in the American imagination in the 20th and, now, 21st centuries. And what a story it is. I knew when I started the Textmex Galleryblog that there were oodles of cultural artifacts that I could never stuff into the pages of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America.  First off, you would need a page-count akin to the old Encyclopedia Britannica, which UT Press would never go for, and second, you would need the patience of a Samuel Johnson to pull of such an epic project.I took the easy route of using the World Wide Web, and the rest, as they say, is history. In any event, I was scouring the internets for classic 20th century pulp western images of "Mexicans" and I found some new examples--more for the neo-fascists in Trump's camp to absorb as they mount their bid for temporary (I hope!) hegemony:




This last one below is the most curious--there is no "Mexican" in sight, rather the "Mexican Meeting" is a cipher / shorthand for illicit sexual potentiality--one of the chief theses stuffed into Tex[t]-Mex: the "Mexican" as synecdoche, as shorthand for the inauguration of a 'dark', 'hot' coupling.

You can read about the origins of the Textmex Galleryblog here: http://textmex.blogspot.com/2012/03/about-text-mex-galleryblog.html







No comments:

Post a Comment

Get your hands on one of my books ...