Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Mistress of Electrolysis

I remember writing the first draft of "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" on a plane on my way out to Purdue for their then annual Romance Languages conference. I was reading a biography of Rita Hayworth at the time (guilty pleasures that double as scholarly research) and had run across amazing revelations regarding Hayworth (née Cansino) and her father (incest!) and Hayworth and her "barber" (electrolysis to lift her hairline), both dispatches couriered to my eyes courtesy of Barbara Leaming--Time reviewed the book back in 1989.

Latina bombshell? Spanish femme fatale? The mysteries of Margarita metamorphosis take up the better part of 40 pages in Tex[t]-Mex in a chapter entitled "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor."

Here's a snippet of Cansino/Hayworth in living color from Blood and Sand (dir. R. Mamoulian; 1941). Count the number of fused "Spanish"/"Latina" tropes in the clip--here's a hint: can you say "bullfighting"?


Lovely Rita! What a curious clip--shades of Almodovar's Matador.

A last note on Rita-archeology: I recently ran across a book-length work focused wholly on Hayworth/Cansino published by Adrienne L. Mclean for Rutgers University Press--a scan of it off Amazon reveals a more than decent take on the Alzheimer-felled star.

postscript

Let me state here in public and for the record that the only reason Tex[t]-Mex EVER appeared in print, aside from nagging, utterly welcome, periodic chingasos from Davíd Carrasco, was the support and encouragement of Arturo J. Aldama, killer of many trees for all the books he has published in the fields of ethnic studies and cultural studies, and editor, in particular, of Violence and the Body, where the existentialism/electrolysis piece finally got published the way I had imagined it in the first place--snapshot to your right. While the Rita chapter in Tex[t]-Mex is extensively revised and features many new Hayworth pictures, it has to be said that without the Arturo Aldama, my UT Press opus would never have seen the light of day. Gracias con un abrazo fuerte a Profe Aldama!

Rita Hayworth, Charles Vidor, Gilda | When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential

updated

ORIGINALLY POSTED 2/20/07


Tex[t]-Mex's oldest chapter, the one that started it all in a way, features a mouthful of a moniker that goes by the name of "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor."

If I had the chapter to write over again, I think I would have spent many more pages teasing out the allegories implicit in the Charles Vidor 1946 Rita-vehicle Gilda. Seen here, in an image whisked away from Dr. Macro's inimitable site, is the face (or is it 'faces'), that launched an existential and follicular crisis in the history of Latina figuration. The electrolysis-assisted odyssey that lead "Mexican" Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino to Hollywood bombshell Rita Hayworth, is one for the ages.

Additionally, in a clip here from via TCM that I wished I could have embedded in my book, I have also included the infamous "Mame" sequence from Gilda.


Don't think for a second that Rita (aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino) and Vidor, the director, are not aware of the irony of the song's lyrics.

Here, in a picture from last year, your Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblogger reveals his affections for Margarita Dolores Cansino!

Margarita Cansino, aka RITA HAYWORTH | pre-electrolysis...

source

click to enlarge



and.... post-electrolysis... (I think!)...

source

Rita Hayworth: When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential

A new photo of Rita Hayworth, around the time that Hollywood was de-swarthifying her "Mexican" looks via electrolysis--a process detailed in the Rita-laced pages of Tex[t]-Mex.

Source.

First Rita Hayworth and Electrolysis and now Che Guevara's Lock of Hair

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog already has enough problems dodging the taunts of "hair fetishist" from unruly readers what with my ongoing archeology of Rita Hayworth's use of electrolysis in her transformation from Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. Now, Che Guevara's hair enters the picture as the BBC is reporting that a lock of the revolutionary's and Chicana/o poster child's hair is up for auction. Next thing you know Speedy Gonzales will star in a short animated feature with a bikini wax!

The dark side of all this follicular frivolity? Go here.

Before She Was RITA HAYWORTH (And Before Over a Year of Electrolysis), Margarita Dolores Carmen Cansino Roamed Southern California

The transformation from Margarita Carmen Cansino to Rita Hayworth is the stuff of Hollywood legend--and one of the minor obsessions of this blog. In any event, I ran across the best pre-electrolysis shot of Rita I have seen in awhile--it is reproduced below and here.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth: A Thank You to Barbara Leaming

Though I credit her cool biographies in the notes of Tex[t]-Mex, it's time I gave a loving shout-out to Barbara Leaming, author of If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth and of Orson Welles: A Biography; I don't know if Tex[t]-Mex would have worked if I had not stumbled upon Leaming's writings. Biographical gleanings dot the pages of the first two chapters of my book, "Chapter One. Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil" and "Chapter Two. When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor." Yes, the titles are too long! Thanks, I've heard it before!

In any event, here are two images off the Heritage Auctions site that are really amazing--as with most images on this blog, merely click the picture to be treated to a high-resolution image:

Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino!

While spelunking the internet I stumbled upon this low-resolution print of a period 8 x 10 publicity glossy, post-electrolysis!, of the one and only Rita Hayworth--aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. I ran it through the alchemy of photoshop and was able, via filters and philtres, to render this decent print archived here for research and presentation purposes.

Gilda Redux in Elle

In a chapter entitled "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential," I do a number on Rita Hayworth, aka, Margarita Dolores Cansino, as I ponder the nexus of race, ethnicity, and celluloid at work in her biography. Elle Magazine recently did a fashion meditation on Rita's work in Gilda; I am in debt to one of my Naked Mirror students for bringing it to my attention:

Margarita Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth

Just a snapshot of Rita, post-electrolysis, that I thought I would add to the Rita-archeology archive:

Rita Hayworth, Film Noir, and Tex[t]-Mex's Unwritten Chapter

When it takes you sixteen years to finish a book, you can't imagine the relief when you finally see that baby in print--and now, with the first anniversary of the publication of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America, I am just getting around to thinking about some of the things I left out, forgot, or screwed up in writing the book. This Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog is part of that process of rectification, illumination, re-invention, and revision.

While I am pretty happy with the chapter on Margarita Dolores Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" (witness the number of times I have come back to it in these "pages"), the one thing about it that does bother me is the short shrift it gives to Hayworth's noir classic Gilda. In my web spelunking, I happened across a page on noir and Charles's Vidor's film that I found useful for its quality AV assortment (the Turner Classic Movies embedded trailer for Gilda is first-rate) and archive here for future reference even though the author's preachy sermons ("Gilda! Don't strip") I could do without.

More on Gilda in the future.

Breaking Nose, er News! Salma Hayek, Our 21st Century Rita Hayworth

Our ace North Hollywood websleuth, Josie Nericcio, chimes in with the net revelation that Salma Hayek, my cherished Mexican superstar, may have, estilo Rita Hayworth with her year's worth of electrolysis, may have altered her Mexican physiognomy in pursuit of Hollywood fame and fortune.

Holy Joan Rivers Batmans! Stop the presses!

Martha Higareda to Play Chicana Opposite Keanu Reeves

I love this interview (or here, practice your Spanish!) with Mexican actress Martha Higareda in the modestly anemic Keanu Reeves/Forest Whitaker romp, Street Kings. It is so squeaky clean and normal, it might have appeared in the pages of the St. Augustine Knights, my first writing/editing gig back in high schoool. The only fly in its ointment? The interviewer's amazement and glee over Higareda erasing her Spanish accent for the role. Hell, if Rita Hayworth can undergo a year of electrolysis to shed the phrenologist's/eugenicist's curse of a swarthy hairline, the least our latter-day Latina miss can do is elide her curséd Mexican traces! Luckily, the cultural genes of this latter-day trodder of boards are hard and down.

Skin Color, Skin Whitening and the Scourge of Being Too Dark

Big besos to Michael Wyatt Harper, our Southland correspondent, who checks in with a link to some riveting radio that muses upon recent trends in skin lightening! Holy Rita Hayworth! What's next? A new vogue on hairline electrolysis? Click the image above to be teleported right away.

Rita Hayworth Overload

The chapter on electrolysis as a proxy for the existential, my homage to Rita Hayworth, is one of my favorite chapters in Tex[t]-Mex. I just stumbled on a site that archives snapshots from various sources of Rita, aka Maria Dolores Carmen Cansino. Go here for a Ritarcheology visual trough.

Gilda, Starring Rita Hayworth, aka Margarita Carmen Cansino

One of the oldest chapters in Tex[t]-Mex, the Rita Hayworth/Electrolysis/Existentialism piece (which began as a conference talk for the Romance Language Conference that used to go down at Purdue University), focuses on the series of events, desires, coincidences and catastrophes that went into the creation of this legendary Hollywood femme fatale. Here, in stunning youTube video, the trailer from Gilda:

Rosario Castellanos

It is hard to find good material on Rosario Castellanos on the internet--either that, or my google-surfing skills are beginning to atrophy. In any event she plays a central role in my work if not my world view--the title of the Tex[t]-Mex chapter on Rita Hayworth reveals some of that debt: "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor." I just found a decent review of her work by Christopher Rollason here.

Another nice piece is here. More on Castellanos, "the woman who knew Latin" in my next collection for UT Press, Eyegiene. The best collection in English is UT Press's The Rosario Castellanos Reader edited by Maureen Ahern--unbelievably out of print! Happily, there seem to be a fair amount of copies on Amazon and other used book outlets.

The Restoration: Chicano Osmosis and Rita Hayworth from VIOLENCE AND THE BODY

I am in the process of restoring files that were massacred when I stepped down as webmaster of literature.sdsu.edu, Fall 2009--two are now available again: English 606a: Osmosis, Fracture, and Desire in the Chicana/o Novel (hit the image, opposite) and "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" from Violence and the Body for Indiana University Press (click on lovely Rita, above).

The Chicana/o novel seminar eventually morphed into the xicanosmosis section of Tex[t]-Mex; the Rita piece similarly found its final form in Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America.

UPDATE

Two more restorations, "'Pee-wee Watching" and "Artif[r]acture," are live here.

Biography/Backstory | William Anthony Nericcio

Last Updated April 27, 2010 | Recently Updated Friday, May 12, 2017

nota bene: a less wordy, image-saturated alternative to this site is here.

eliable dispatches from elite, clandestine West Coast intelligence agents reveal that Dr. William Anthony Nericcio (aka "Memo," aka "Bill") directs an eclectic and innovative cultural studies graduate program at San Diego State University, aka MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. He also serves as a Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Other stealthy West Coast snoops confirm that he labors at SDSU in various academic disguises including: digital humanities lead faculty, cultural studies scholar, American and Latin American literature prof, Chicana/o Studies devotee, ALA/Choice Award-Winning Film Studies maven, American Studies lackey, and last, but not least, feverish rasquache Tejano acolyte of deconstruction 

(the Jacques Derrida t-shirt always gives it away). Other embedded, shady scouts contend Nericcio's diverse academic pursuits are merely an ivory-tower nested front, a nefarious cover for the Chicano writer's true obsessions: graphic design, web-surfing, Man Ray's photography, Euro/Indy movies, Bill Elder, Remedios Varo, Jacques Derrida, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Meret Oppenheim (of late, Haruki Murakami, Tara McPherson, and Darren Aronofsky also draw his eye).

Before joining SDSU's crack team of talented, hermeneutic misfits, Nericcio held earlier postings at The University of Connecticut, his first, most infamous English Department posting, and at Cornell University, where, working with taskmaster mentors (Carlos Fuentes, Dominic LaCapra, Edgar Rosenberg, Wolfgang Holdheim, Nelly Furman, Enrico Mario Santí, Gayatri Spivak and Henry Louis Gates Jr.), he completed his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature with a dissertation entitled The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas. 

Our well-paid East Coast gumshoes and informants tell odd, whispered tales regarding Nericcio's time in Ithaca: his enigmatic midnight chats with Vladimir Nabokov's surly ghost in Zeus's cafe, Goldwyn Smith Hall, far above Cayuga's waters; his now epic 2am street-fight with four drunk Cornell gringo frat-rats in a snowstorm near the corner of Court and Tioga; his critical theory lucha libre disputes with Derrida-glosser Jonathan Culler and Culler's curious better-half, Cynthia Chase (a relative of once-funny, SNL-alum Chevy Chase), who deemed Nericcio's hieroglyphic notetaking a mark of incipient moronity (opposite); his legendary tequila-induced, body-sculpture-snow-angel-making with LA playwright Oliver Mayer at the top of the Buffalo St. hill; and lastly, his boisterous conjunto dancing alongside Carlos Fuentes in an Ithaca Union hall. Sadly, our usually reliable 'townie' snitches loitering outside the Haunt have failed to document these claims. 

However, not all is lost, as our diligent Northern Mexican agents, not at all resembling Mikey Vargas (Charlton Heston) from Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, recently discovered that Nericcio, a recovering Catholic school boy from South Texas (seized 1st-grade snapshot to your left), received

his Bachelor's of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin (1984), this while working part-time at the Texas Tavern (now demolished) and The Cactus Cafe as a barrista/bartender and prowling posh 6th Street cocktail lounges. This was also the time when Nericcio, along with Jay Whitley aspired to 80s, new-wave, music stardom in the indy, third-coast, rock combo, The Dyed Blondes--de rigueur recording studio snapshot to your right.

Now headquartered near the California/Mexico border with SDSU, he serves on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS) and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies in addition to his English and CompLit teaching shenanigans. A native son of Laredo, Texas, with assorted ancestors hailing from General Téran (near Monterrey, México), Partanna, Sicily, and (it is silently whispered) the merry ol' island of England, (and maybe even Tunis!) Nericcio tells anyone willing to listen that he is a post-Movimiento Chicano. In this vein, the testimony of well-placed former students is useful, with numerous depositions existing that attest to Nericcio being a 'a Sicilian Tejano' or to him publicly declaiming nostalgic, nationalistic odes to Flaco Jimenez, La Llorona, 'Tejas' and the Rio Grande river. Other witnesses speak of overhearing eloquent soliloquies in San Diego dive bars wherein Nericcio, between sips, confesses his obsessions with Sleestaks, The Get-Away Chase Game, Al Jaffee, Monty Python, Kurt Wiese, Captain Kangaroo, Mannix, The Banana Splits, Medical Center, Wacky Packages, La India María, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, Land of the Lost, Dean Martin, Los Polivoces, Mil Mascaras, the late Edward Said, Gamera, and H.R. Pufnstuf.

Nericcio has published articles on Orson Welles's proto-Chicano masterpiece Touch of Evil (in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance), Octavio Paz's shrouded schizophrenic political oscillations (Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93), and Jorge Luis Borges's, Eugène Delacroix's, and Jacques Derrida's unlikely textual mènage-á-trois in Susan Daitch's LC. In 1996, Nericcio's "Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the Visual" appeared in the pages of Mosaic--the sprawling, illustrated essay was one of the first scholarly pieces to appear on comics in academe. In 1998, his illustrated exposé on Speedy Gonzales, "Autopsy of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium," was brought kicking and screaming into the world by Camera Obscura, A Journal of Feminism Culture and Media Studies--now distributed by Duke University Press.

2002 saw the appearance of three publications: 1) a revised and expanded essay on Rita Hayworth, electrolysis, and the existential in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State; 2) a gratuitously illustrated meditation on Gilbert Hernandez's illustrated biography of Frida Kahlo in NYU Press's Latino/a Popular Culture; and 3) a short rant on anti-undocumented worker violence, the Marquis de Sade, and California law enforcement for BAD SUBJECTS, UC Berkeley's HOT Lefty rag. Another piece from that era (2004), ten years in the making, for The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies examines the Paul Reubens' masturbation scandal back in the 1990s and is entitled "Watching Critics, Watching Journalists, Watching Sheriffs, Watching Pee-wee Herman Watch: The Extraordinary Case of the Saturday Morning Children's Show Celebrity Who Masturbated"--reliable snitches claim the highlight of the opus is some odd revelation about transvestites, transgendered bodies, Medical Center (The Fourth Sex, 1975), and Robert Reed (opposite), the pater familias on the Brady Bunch. 


Other noteworthy scholarly gigs include Nericcio's London lecture, "In the Storm of the Eye: Pages Torn From a Voyeur Semiotician's Diary During the Plague of Bad Theory"(1998), for Goldsmith College and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and "Cinematography, Photography and Literature: Robert Frank's Aesthetic Triptych" (2000) for the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA), San Diego. Nericcio's also has lectured abroad at the Freud Museum in London where he spoke on the 'fertile' connection between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic work and the Viennese wizard's collection of erotic antiquities--this took place during a Fall 2001 Semester in London where Nericcio worked as a Visiting Senior Lecturer in Literature for the Foundation for Interational Education and SDSU (note the surveillance photo to your right, that's him with the strange expression standing by Freud's infamous couch). Apparently the Freud Museum guards failed to inform London authorities of various improprieties with Herr Sigmund's couch as in San Diego, Spring 2002, this candid shot was taken of Nericcio ranting about Nietzsche at a pacific REVIEW public reading. 2003 opened with Nericcio joining the editorial advisory board of Gobshite Quarterly an independent international literary magazine.

Travel also seemed to be on the agenda with lectures at NEMLA, The University of Connecticut's Department of English, and Brown University's Department of Africana Studies, topped off with a visit to the Netherlands where Nericcio chaired a panel and delivered a lecture at the first Congress of the International Association of American Studies in Leiden. Summer 2003 found him once again leading a group of adventurous SDSU students to London for the 1st annual LONDON CALLING, SDSU Summer Program. He has subsequently led UK-junkets in 2005, 2007, and 2009.

November 2003 saw Nericcio working as the warm-up act (spycam shot opposite) for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba for the La Jolla Music Society. December 2003, Nericcio delivered a harangue for Affirmative Action at the San Diego MLA for its ADE/ADFL enclaves. In February 2004, Nericcio enjoyed his Spring sabbatical--but took a break from

occasional naps by jetting up to the East Coast in February for a cool Gangster Symposia at the SUNY Stony Brook Humanities Research Institute--click young John Gotti's mug to your right for more info.

In Summer 2004, Nericcio, taking a break from the vagaries of the University Lecture Hall, traded chalk for pine tar as he played utility outfielder for the league-leading National City Dukes in the San Diego Adult Baseball League. Fall 2004 he started up with his Sinematic Bodies: Intro to Lit and Film circus (which featured, among other things, a mad dash across campus by mimes (chapeau Antonioni) and started overseeing the production of cultural studies tomes with Harry Polkinhorn for Hyperbole Books--touted by the one and only, notorious and untoward Playboy Magazine as one of the reasons SDSU won best "party school" in 2005. Spring 2005 saw the startup of his Freud's Bastard Children class and the Literature After Derrida lecture series. Fall 2005 saw Nericcio lead a graduate seminar on his fallen guru Jacques Derrida (Chasing Derrida) and teach a comedy seminar (Naked, Loud, & Broken) in honor of his mentor, Richard Simon. 2006 was filled with flights of sinemadness with Michael Powell and Walker Percy; frolics in the imperial bedroom, with James Joyce, Homer and Carlos Fuentes; prowls down the alleyways of film noir and pulp fiction with Orson Welles and Quentin Tarantino; and ended explosively with seductive hallucinations with a 500 student introduction to literature delirium in Wiik Auditorium.

Original cover proposal, Tex[t]-Mex

2007 began with a bang as Nericcio finally finished his 16-years-in-the-making magnum opus for the University of Texas Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--it appeared January 15, 2007. Since 2007 and into 2008, the Laredo ex-patriot has been spotted at Oberlin College, Purdue University, USC, Los Angeles's Skylight Books, The Universty of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas, San Antonio, and the University of San Diego hawking his wares and generally trying to invoke academic mischief. In October 2010, Nericcio invaded Ohio State University for a lecture and book-signing; Janurary 2011 found him hanging with donkeys in Santa Monica while March was spent talking about televisual psyches at the University of Michigan and April sped by with Nericcio talking space and Mextasy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Latest rumors center around the existence of some character named Guillermo Nericcio García and an traveling art show named "Mextasy" and "Xicanoholic"--but reliable sources for these shadowy whispers are proving hard to find.

Indulgent visitors to this page waiting for hell to freeze-over can peek at online syllabi from Nericcio's collection of past courses or sample this alternative index of WWWeb-based mischief where many of his essays are available in Adobe's ubiquitous pdf format. Also available are two illustrated fragments from his theoretical memoir on the US/Mexico border: "Re-membering Laredo" and "Almost Like Laredo"; book reviews of Charles Bukowski's finale Pulp, Rudolfo Anaya's new age weeper Jalamanta, and Richard Rodriguez's bizarre smash bestseller Days of Obligation (these pieces originally appeared in World Literature Today);an illustrated transcript of Nericcio's Museum of Photographic Art introduction to Pull my Daisy (a collaborative oddity by Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg); and lastly, a scathing send-up of Ray Bradbury's, Edward James Olmos's and Disney's cine-chimera, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.

Lastly (for the poor, misbegotten soul who has scrolled this far down the page!), do please click below to view the birth of Nericcio's efforts as a Ford Focus Spanish-language voiceover star and would-be commercial actor--directed by Print Magazine superstar Sean Desmond. Or, alternatively, click this link to see a San Diego City Beat story for which Nericcio SWEARS he did not pay or another yellow press wonder that documents the trials and tribulations of teaching 500 student classes at SDSU.

Ford Focus Commercial | Student Film from Mextasy on Vimeo.
Me and Sean Desmond and his crew got together in 2009 to film this student film/commercial. One of the best shoots ever!

Lastly, there's more information, here, from wikipedia.

Also, some links to my published works:

    

View My Stats