High Resolution Stereotypes | Jose and Maria, at Your Service

It brings me pleasure to bring to your waiting eyes in all their high-resolution glory, two of the main features from the Seductive Hallucination Galleries 1 and 2 in Tex[t]-Mex. In the book, though gloriously laid out by Lisa Tremaine, the images appear in miniature when what they really deserve is the full light of day--let there be light! Click the image.


The dynamic duo of Jose & Maria are something I have been calling ethnic mannequins. They are "Mexican" in the broadest sense of the term--they provide service as shoeshine "boy" and maid, occupations thought of as a birthright for "Mexicans"; and they do so with a smile, without attitude, and with pleasure as they shine the shoes and fluff the pillows to bring a smile to your face within the corridors of the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco (where Jose once hung his hat) and Houston. These pages are scanned from original ads that ran regularly in the New Yorker from 1988 to 1991--if you know any of the production people in advertising firms that came up with this campaign, please have them contact me at bnericci@mail.sdsu.edu as I am dying to interview them.

What really moves me about these exhibition artifacts is reverberates at the edge of the gleam of their eyes. Is it pride? feigned pride? acting? I fear I will never know. But the pleasure in the act of cleaning, an almost fetishistic jouissance from a simultaneous enactment of hygiene and subsevience--we, the readers of the ad, sadistically profit from the pleasure of their subservience like some S&M gala gone mad.

Sade lurks on the corners of this semiotic tableau, as does the photography, with its Helmut Newton-esque overtones.

More soon. This is a tough one...