Sunday, September 22, 2019

What is Mextasy!? An Introduction to the Pop-Up "Circus of Desmadres" -- A Traveling Exhibition Coming Soon to a Gallery, Museum, or University Near You!



Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling pop-up or gallery-based art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The traveling exhibition was originally curated by Leticia Gómez Franco for Casa Familiar, San Ysidro, California, and Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. Upcoming shows are at Iowa State University and the Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle, Washington. Its most recent shows were at Northwestern University, Wabash College, California State University, San Bernardino, and Franklin & Marshall College.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 American Library Association award-winning book with UT Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America. In addition to racist artifacts from American mass culture (the bread and butter of Uncle Sam's unconscious and the backstory for the resurgence in anti-Mexican, anti-Latina/o peoples presently), the show also features works that is "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious fusion of the Mexican/US borderlands/frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious artistic tracings of Raul Gonzalez IIIPerry Vasquez, Rafaella Suarez, and Izel Vargas.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here.


Friday, August 16, 2019

Laredo and Deconstruction: Roland Barthes, Mojado!

I just ran across one of my publications--a photographic deconstruction of my hometown of Laredo, Texas--available as a preview on Google Books. It sports one of my longest titles (and that's saying a lot as most of my titles are huge, annoying my editors and typesetters to no end over the years!). 

It's called “Roland Barthes, Mojado, in Brownface: Chisme-laced Snapshots Documenting the Preposterous and Fact-laced Claim That the Postmodern Was Born along the Borders of the Río Grande River, " and appears in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia.

Apple's Safari app sometimes has a hard time parsing Google's code--if the essay does not appear below, go here to see it.

 

Friday, July 26, 2019

Preparations Full Steam Ahead for the Iowa State #Mextasy Pop-Up Exhibition and Lecture--Part of Their U.S. Latino/a Studies 25 Year Anniversary Symposium -- Saturday, September 28, 2019. Sun Room, Memorial Union

Preparations Full Steam Ahead for the Iowa State #Mextasy Pop-Up Exhibition and Lecture--Part of Their U.S. Latino/a Studies 25 Year Anniversary Symposium -- Saturday, September 28, 2019. Sun Room, Memorial Union

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Jewish Solidarity Against Latina/o Victimization/Oppression by ICE: UPDATES via Twitter

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Test Posting: Publications by William Nericcio

Tuesday, July 02, 2019

Thursday, May 16, 2019

#repost from mextasy.blogspot.com ||| My Latest Piece for Joshua Glenn's Amazing HILOBROW.COM site on Gilbert Hernandez, Errata Stigmata, Love and Rockets, and Ocular Ontology now LIVE!

Really excited that my new piece for the #awesome online mag HILOBROW.COM has gone live! See it here: https://www.hilobrow.com/2019/05/15/seriocomic-20/ . . . OR . . . keep reading for the longer (unsnipped by Hilobrow editor/magician Joshua Glenn's devilish pruners) director's cut:


Ghost in the Mirror
Gilbert Hernandez's Errata 
Stigmata Revisited
William A. Nericcio 
16 May 2019




Can it ever be written that a comic book panel, or a series of them, changed the career of an English Professor?   

Mind you, please delete the image of a be-tweeded, bearded, white man with leather patched elbows, pipe, and avuncular grin. I am a down and dirty creature of the U.S./Mexican border, and while not quite “street” I am a little scruffier than your average Ivory Tower dandy gringo.



And I am mad about comics—all comics! Richie Rich, Little Audrey, Sad Sack, the Silver Surfer, Betty and Veronica …. Don’t get me started on Betty and Veronica.

As with all images on this posting, click to enlarge!

But it is the comic I pick up in 1985—the one with Gilbert Hernandez’s “Tears from Heaven: The Life and Times of Errata Stigmata” that breaks my mind, or scars my synapses, or wounds my ocular ontological core. 

Errata, a young girl growing up in a fictional Central American town called Palomar (think Mayberry with sex, drugs, and aliens), witnesses the stabbing murder of her parents by a serial killer named Tomaso (we don’t know this in 1985—I would argue that Beto, aka Gilbert, doesn’t know this in 1985, or has not dreamed it up yet).



In that instant, in that witnessing, everything goes to pot, and her destiny is sealed.  She grows up as a precocious young adolescent being raised by a Jewish-American uncle and utterly abusive aunt, Zephie, in the United States.



The result of her murder-filled witnessing?



She suffers from the stigmata, hence her name, that is, she bleeds from the sites associated with the crucifixion of Jesus.



Jesus Christ!



In the panels here, lifted from the original comic, Hernandez focuses (pardon the pun) on the connection between seeing and being: the ocular and the existential.



In the last panel, the one I have dreams about, a dislocated, disembodied eye explodes with viscera across a mutantly giant television screen with Errata mutely witnessing.  I have gone on to to write numerous articles and soon, three books on Latinas/os and Visual Culture and I think all of them come back to that panel—the young orphaned witness with her face, unseen, to the screen.  



The smartest undergraduate I ever “taught” (I am not sure I taught her anything) the independent film maker Diana Contreras, interrupted me when I was lecturing in class about this panel at SDSU in 1991. I was speaking endlessly about the dialectical relationship between witnessing and being, between seeing and existing—you know the drill: “blah blah blah.”



She interrupts my lecture to tell me and my 120 students, "Nericcio, that’s not a TV screen, it’s Errata’s mirror."



I shut up.



I had nothing left to say.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Monday, May 06, 2019

Mariachi Flor de Toloache #auralmextasy #mextasy #mariachi

Thanks to my Women's Studies MA mentee Bertha Rodriguez for turning my ears on to the #auralmextasy wonders of this femme supergroup!