Textmex, Mextasy, Eyegiene, and Technosexualities on the Road in the Land of Blue Turf! Lecture/Signing/Exhibition at Boise State University, April 11 @ 7pm! "Orgasmic, Semiotic Cataclysms of Eyegiene and Mextasy: Digressions of Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, & Cultural Studies in the Televisual, Techno-Ontologicial Age of the Smartphone"

Friday, April 11, 2014 at 7pm, I will be in the Farnsworth Room in the Student Union Building on the campus of Boise State University for a lecture/exhibition fusing my past and more recent researches into the sprawling miasma Tex[t]-Mex, Mextasy, Eyegiene, and Technosexualities.  The improbable and ungainly title I have used to lasso together this hoarder's treasure trawl of cultural studies goodies is "Orgasmic, Semiotic Cataclysms of Eyegiene and Mextasy." As if that was not enough, I tacked on a subtitle for good measure: "Digressions of Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, & Cultural Studies in the Televisual, Techno-Ontologicial Age of the Smartphone."  Can't wait to see Ralph Clare, Professor, Boise State, and a former student of mine back in the day on Montezuma Mesa, read that title aloud!

In any event, I will be selling, signing (and drawing cartoons) into copies of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America, and prints from the Mextasy show at the lecture--in you are a Latina/o-loving, cultural studies maven trapped in the wilds of Idaho, come on down!

The original poster appears below--the updated one with all the proper thankyous appears opposite--click to make more bigger or go here for a high-res version.

¡high-res linkazo!

click to enlarge

¡high-res linkazo!

last promotional poster variant

new poster by the cool folks @ boise state...

click to expand

Me and my friends back in the day...

Eyegiene graphic for the Boise presentation/confabulation

featuring the incredible imagination of Cyriak Harris working with the 

musical folks known as Eskmo

...and, of course, ESKMO

Eskmo: "We Got More" (Ninja Tune) from ESKMO on Vimeo.

twitter update:

boise is heating up with some orgasmic mextasy this coming friday nite @ 7pm #mextasy #textmex http://t.co/TiiZCe14kE pic.twitter.com/0C5l3DSu2k
— William Nericcio (@eyegiene) April 6, 2014

Beware Latino/a Robots or Fiesta de Cyborgs! Robotic Erotic Electric Keynote Presentation at the Boise State University THATcamp! September 13, 2014 @ 9am!

Just a quick posting with some info on my 2nd Idaho-based adventure in one year! Last Spring I was hanging at Boise State University with my Mextasy show (poster from the April 2014 fiesta-of-desmadres, opposite).

This weekend, September 2014, I have been invited back to shower tons of pictures/videos on all things digital humanities at BSU's third annual THATCamp.

What's a THATCamp?  (¡that's what I said!)...

THATCamp is an acronym-headed neologism for "The Humanities and Technology" Camp. Held at Boise's awesome Discovery Center,  the gathering will draw a diverse and eclectic group of cybernauts, pointy-headed intellectuals, artists, coders, gamers and more. 

Me? I will be holding forth (at 9am!!!! no less) on erotic robots and other cybersexually curious provocations--the result of a semester's worth of experimentation with over 200 undergraduate students at SDSU.  If you like getting up early and are anywhere near Boise, come on out and give a shoutout--a big abrazo to Memo Cordova and Francisco Salinas who made this mad improvisational presentation a reality!! I am on the bill with headliners JP Chastain and Eric Gilbert and host of other cool androids/robots/cyborgs!

Here's the ridiculous, Gilligan's Island/Ginger poster Guillermo Nericcio García whipped up for the event!

If you have read this far, you get a surprise treat! *spoiler alert* A preview of some of the graphics from the improvisational lecture entitled: "Robotic, Erotic, Electric: More Ruminating Thoughts on Literature, Film, and Cultural Studies in the Utterly Perplexing and Delightful Age of Social Media, Ubiquitous Surveillance, and the Selfie!"

What is Mextasy? --> 2023-2024 Edition! The Pop-Up "Circus of Desmadres" -- A Traveling Exhibition Coming Soon to a Gallery, Museum, or University Near You!

~ Last updated September 23, 2023  ~

#Mextasy is back! 2023-2024

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 or "Circus of Desmadres" was originally curated by Leticia Gómez Franco for Casa Familiar, San Ysidro, California, and Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. Recents shows include exhibitions/performances at Boise State University,  UC Riverside (virtual via Zoom, thx Covid!)  Iowa State University and the Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle, Washington--other noteworthy gigs include performances at Northwestern University, Wabash College, California State University, San Bernardino, and Franklin & Marshall College.

Mextasy is re-imagined, interactive art and artifact exhibition that grew out of 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 III, Perry 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.

Mextasy, the Cavalcade of Desmadres (and Cutting-edge Latina/o Art) Pop-up Exhibition is Hitting the Road and Invading Dallas, Texas @ Richland College, Wednesday, February 11, 2015!

see more here!

Holy cowboy boots, Dallas, the Mextasy exhibition is hitting Big D for a one-day exhibition, presentation, book- & print-signing, y mucho mas more at Richland College.  On February 11, 2015, Wednesday, at 4pm in Sabine Hall 118--the event is free, gratis, cheap, and open to all the fine citizens of the Fort Worth/Dallas Metroplex! The grandest Chicano in the NFL, Tony Romo, has been invited, but don't hold your breath!  The presentation includes an image-laden picture show with the fancy title of "Rethinking 'Mexicans' on TVs, Smartphones, and the Internet," but don't let that slow you down. I will signing copies of Tex[t]-Mex and my other books and shilling garish posters as well (at discount! ¡¡¡venta, venta...venga, venga!!!).

What is "Mextasy"--A Primer for the Richland College Mextasy Show

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The show, originally curated by Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas, had its last exhibition at Boise State University, for the Third Cinema Research Group and El Consulado de México en Boise, Idaho on April 11, 2014. Its latest encarnation debuts for Richland College, 118 Sabine Hall, at 4pm on February 11, 2015.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 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), the show also features works that "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious tattoo of the Mexican/US frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious semiotic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Izel Vargas, and Marisela Norte.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here. For more information and an interview with the curator/artist, go here.

An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Lorena Nava Ruggero, appears below. An other interview, focused more on the Eyegiene project, appears online on Agitprop.

LNR: What is Mextasy? Why did you create it?

WN: Mextasy is an art exhibition featuring outrageous stereotypes of Mexicans and other Latinas/os; additionally, it contains sculptures, drawings, photography, and other media that attack the notion of Mexicans as less-than-human in American mass culture. The show I opened along the Rio Grande river in McAllen (September, 2010) and in Laredo this December, Mextasy, is dedicated to the old motherland and my peculiar fatherland.

Mextasy is more than a representation of ecstasy about or for Mexico; it is about the sensuous tracings Mexican culture leaves both sides of the border. More existential state than archive, Mextasy speaks to the living organism of Mexicanicity as it moves between the bodies of Mexico and the United States--an overt and covert delicious miasma that arouses as it excites, excites as it provokes. ¡Que viva Mexico!, within and without its borders.

LNR: How does Mextasy parallel your book?

WN: Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America features over 200 illustrations, with 16 pages in full color; many of these illustrations are stock representations of Mexicans (the sleeping Mexican, the bandit Mexican, the hot, Latina femme fatale). However, the book also includes original art, digital, photographic and hand-drawn, created by me. You know English Professors are known more for tweed and pomposity than their Picasso-like skills--for that reason I publish all my art under the name of Guillermo Nericcio García, what my name would have been if I had been born 10 blocks south of where I came into the world in Laredo, Texas--a bordertown with Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

LNR: You're primarily a writer, but this is an art exhibit -- what was it like to create this kind of "content"?

WN: I have been drawing since I was three--I made my own comic book with my sister before I was ten; after that, I was the political cartoonist for my high school newspaper (most infamous drawing? of Vice-Principal Shoup as a zeigheiling facsist for his punitive pedagogy--I was almost expelled and the nuns at St. Augustine tried to censor the paper).

LNR: What will you focus on in your lectures in Texas (I noticed two speaking engagements at libraries)?

WN: I will be focusing on my ongoing forensic work on American visual culture--so I will be dealing with the image of Mexico in the United States but also with our changing optics-obsessed culture in general--from Avatar in 3-D to the IPad, we are living through a watershed moment in textual reproduction where the turn to the visual (the semiotic) is accelerating at a mind-blowing pace. Next year, my new book appears with the University of Texas Press; it is entitled Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race--parts of my talks will be drawn from that work.

LNR: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

WN: I love visiting South Texas--it is like a return to my roots; and though Northern Mexico and South Texas are in cultural chaos right now, the fallout of the Narco Wars hitting this locale hard, I think its important to remind yourself of where you come from. You would think that Southern California and South Texas are the same, but they are like worlds apart.

PAST MEXTASY EXHIBITIONS

Other recent Mextasy exhibitions include shows at (pre-boycott!) the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at La Casa Cultura Latina, the Centro Cultural de La Raza, in Balboa Park, San Diego, California; at Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Department of American Studies, University of Michigan; in San Ysidro, California (as Xicanoholic) at Casa Familiar; in McAllen, Texas at South Texas College's Pecan campus Art Gallery; at Laredo, Texas at the the Laredo Center of the Arts; additionally, it had an April 8, 2011 opening at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa; and a run at the Fullerton Public Library with Gustavo Arellano hosting! September 2011 saw Mextasy invade San Antonio College for a Tex[t]-Mex reading/signing and an exclusive South Texas MEXTASY exhibition. In 2012, Mextasy was sighted at Ohio State University; at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario; at theFront, San Ysidro, California; and in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado for the Ethnic Studies Department. Western University, London, Ontario has also hosted a show, with other exhibitons and presentations at Adrian College, UCLA, and Boise State University.

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | Revised again, September 2011 | 

Once again on Thursday, April 10, 2014 | and, still once again, October 4, 2014 |

and, once again, if you can believe it on February 4, 2015.

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 III, Perry 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.

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!

Updated October 21, 2020 | Last updated April 30, 2021

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 UC Riverside (virtual via Zoom, thx Covid!) and the University of Detroit, Mercy (eventually). Recent exhibitions include shows at Iowa State University and the Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle, Washington--other noteworthy gigs include performances 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 III, Perry 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.

Mextasy in Boise, Idaho! The Circus of Desmadres Invaded Boise State University -- Sneak a Peek!

Some snapshots from the #mextasy pop-up exhibition ... more on the event here: https://www.boisestate.edu/english/home/love-in-the-age-of-hate/

Posted by William Nericcio on Wednesday, September 22, 2021

It was a last minute lollapalooza, but I was able to get the #mextasy circus of desmadres up on the walls at the Hub...

Posted by William Nericcio on Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" Coming in August 2014 (Includes Mextasized JESSICA ALBA Print for the Boise State MEXTASY Lecture & Exhibition)

For more on the movie click the first image:

Here's a mextasized print I whipped up

for the Boise State Mextasy/Eyegiene lecture

and exhibition coming up in April--it features

the rad photography of Rico Torres!

Time Correction for the Boise State #Mextasy Extravaganza, September 16, 2021, at 6pm! #textmex #eyegiene #roboticeroticelectric

Note Time Change! Start time: 6pm! Everything but the kitchen sink hitting Boise State for a Diez y Seis de Septiembre...

Posted by William Nericcio on Thursday, August 19, 2021

Stop the Presses! #textmex #mextasy #browntv + #eyegiene hit the road, post-plague, we are now booked solid for a diez y seis de septiembre gig at boise state university, Sept 16, 2021 | details to follow!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by William Nericcio (@william.nericcio)

New Boise State Mextasy Poster!

The 2026-27 #Mextasy Tour! Book Now!

BRING ¡MEXTASY! TO YOUR CAMPUS, MUSEUM, GALLERY, DIVE BAR, etc.

— A TRAVELING CIRCUS OF DESMADRE, DESIRE & DECONSTRUCTION …

⚡️ 2026–2027 Tour | Booking Now 

Tired of beige art shows where nothing bleeds, sweats, or argues back? ¡Mextasy! is your antidote — a border-born carnival of images and ideas that refuses to behave. Curated and conjured by William “Memo” Nericcio — author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America — ¡Mextasy! turns the museum wall into a bilingual hallucination. It’s a mash-up of racist Americana, pop-art remix, and Chicano/x visual thunder — part seminar, part stand-up, part séance. 

Born in Laredo, raised on Mad magazine, Derrida, and Mexican TV static, Nericcio drags the archive out of the ivory tower and into your gallery, library, or dive bar. 

🔥 See it to believe it: Photo gallery + past shows 

➡️ http://mextasy.blogspot.com/2025/02/bring-mextasy-traveling-circus-of.html

Recent Shows? Denver 2024 installation - Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle - Boise State Pop-Up 

What You Get (Besides Goosebumps) 

Visual detonations: 100+ years of Mexican caricature turned inside-out. 

Hybrid happenings: lectures that slip into comedy, gallery talks that break into confessionals. Collaborative chaos: workshops, film nights, and bilingual brain spasms that leave people buzzing. 

How It Works 

Full circus install — Nericcio + crew transform your space. 

Pop-up guerrilla show — we hit and run, no damage deposit required. 

Zoom / hybrid setups for the cautious or cash-strapped. 

💰 Price? Negotiable. Art first, spreadsheets later. 

Who’s Survived It So Far University of Denver • UCLA • UC Riverside • Iowa State • Nepantla Arts (Seattle) • Casa Familiar (San Ysidro) • San Antonio College 

If your gallery’s got walls that can take a punch — or an audience that’s hungry for something that bites back — we should talk. 

📩 Contact: memo@sdsu.edu 🌐 More proof, madness, and mirth: mextasy.blogspot.com

Wishing for more details, pictures, and streaming media? Go here:

➡️ https://bit.ly/circusMEX2026

Stereotypes are Funny as Shit Until the Proverbial Shit Hits the Fan...

Distracted from my day to day life as the chair of an English Department, I was indolently reading my favorite columnist and BFF* Gustavo Arellano, aka Ask-A-Mexican, OCWeekly's irreverent, peculiar, and delicious ace detective of the the Latino/a dasein, and, as per the usual, I was laughing. Try not to read and enjoy this ghost-of-Rita Hayworth-inspired rant--that crazy Chicano Mesican can write! [click to enlarge]


But the flipside of all that laughter and something Arellano has helped to out more than anyone is the fact that Mexican stereotypes feed the self-loathing lusts of Mexican-hating fools everywhere. After all, these gobs of semantic and semoitc hate are so right at hand. Next to dumb blond jokes, Mexican-slurring chistes are manna from the skies for Glenn-Beck- and Lou-Dobbs-channeling-doofi (plural of doofus) from Calexico to Boise, from West Lafayette to Storrs, Ct.

Sorry for the downer post, but you read this, watch CNN Headline, and Fox New,s and its about all you can do to smile in the morning. Luckily Arellano's pumping some gnarly-good correlatives and correctives!




*Best Freakin'-fulano Friend

WEDNESDAY | 1/26/11 | THE DONKEY SHOW Fiesta! At the Santa Monica Museum of Art! Featuring Josh Kun, Jim Heimann, and Yours Truly...

If you click the images and links below you will see that I am presenting a lecture tonight, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 @ 7pm, along with Josh Kun, USC, and Jim Heimann, author/editor, Taschen Books, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  It is the inaugural party for The Donkey Show, a new exhibition curated by Kun & Heimann for SMMOA.  I am excited to be asked to be part of the fiesta!  Imagine that the shade of Jean Baudrillard, cross-dressed as a "Mexican" encounters the ghosts of Remedios Varo, Rosario Castellanos, Frida Kahlo, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin (in Andy Warhol's boudoir)--that's the frisson in the air one gets from this striking new curatorial intervention.  

The simulation par excellence for "Mexico" in the California imagination is the infamous Donkey Show. There are, of course, two of them, both apocryphal, both, also, oddly real: the Donkey Show is the infamous sex show, the staple of the beastial Mexican bordertown underbelly, the Donkey Show is where one goes when one inhabits the border (really, this is no surprise as the instersticial is at once the world of the exotic, the world of the "strange").  It is a magic dark space where the spectacle of taboo, denied sexual magic between human and animal is a real possibility.  Both real and imagined, legendary and banal, the Donkey Show in Tijuana lore embodies a magic world much like that of Alice in Wonderland--only here the Cheshire cat is more like John Holmes, Alice more like Stoya..... a traditional magiclandia of the frontier where witness and agent are one.

The other Donkey show is equally beastial, equally Baudrillardian--or Borgesian, or Sarduyan, for the Latin Americanists who want to kick the Frenchies to one side.  This is the painted burro, the striped donkey or zonkey, that tourists ride for the pleasure of the camera. This cannot be forgotten! The zonkey and the tourist only exist in connubial harmony for the hungry maw of the camera--the tourist shot that becomes a mantle-piece curiosity for visitors from Madison, Boise, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New Rochelle and beyond.

Both Donkey shows, the sexually overdetermined mythical/real beastiality spectacle and the tourist trap sidestreet staple are products of monstrous spectacular scenes--interludes for the eye or the camera that mark the psyche and mark "Mexico" indelibly in the mind's eye, in the eye's mind--in the I's memory and nostalgia.

See you there!

Click the graphic more more info or go here:

http://www.planetillogica.com/thedonkeyshow

Also, this just in! One of my amazing former

students and cool amigo zaps this picture in

in honor of the show! Que Viva Zonkeys!

Chuy Dominguez tattoo by Kiki Platas done in Tijuana at Tinta Distinta!


Even more info here: