Classic Stereotypes

So you are a costume and makeup designer around the turn of the century, charged with the creation of ethnic types that will "pass" for "real" on the stage and, quite shortly, the silver screen. Where do you go?

The Camera Has its Reason that Reason Will Not See

Adapting Blaise Pascal just a smidgen ("the heart has its reason, that Reason will not know"), the title of today's entry reminds us on one of the mantra's of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America: not "a picture is worth a thousand words," but its complement: "like a thousand words they lie, lie, lie." Boingboing.net is on to this today with their posting and link.



Author and Friend, circa 1996
©1996 Guillermo Nericcio García

Our 21st Century American Uncle Toms

My Sororal Correspondent in Los Angeles, Josie Nericcio, sends in a timely posting that speaks to next-generation Ethnic Mannequins doing able service in the interest of the status quo. A reliquary of older, classic race-colored artifacts is here.

African-American and Mexicanesque high colonics for the posting previous? Go here:



and here:

More Fodder for Tex[t]-Mex/Xicanosmosis Advocates

When I was in graduate school on the East Coast in the late 80s, I remember running across a teenager north of Columbia University in Spanish Harlem wearing a t-shirt that read: "bilingual, bicultural, by myself." I remember drawing a picture of it in one of my sketchbooks and then incorporating it into one of the late essays for seminars I was trying to finish at the time. This piece of clothing's poignant, succinct eloquence touched me; its irony did so as well as did the melody of tragedy it bore--who would think it? A T-shirt as opera! So it is that we turn on the old internet today to find that Hair Club for Men posterchild and neo-fascist philanderer Newt Gingrich is in the news for speaking out AGAINST bilingual education. That's as surprising as a George W. Bush malapropism or Fox News patriotic hyperbole--in other words, NO surprise. Still and all, it's good to look zenophobic racists in the face from time to time. Here's the video clip with thanx to CrooksandLiars for the original posting.

La Jolla, California, Now Part of Mexico

While I am in the debt of David Gaddis Smith for the kindly mention, I am also somewhat perplexed and concerned regarding his newspaper's command of geography. In a section of the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune usually reserved for a news round-up from Mexico, there appeared a brief mention of a recent reading and booksigning I did for Tex[t]-Mex at the one and only D.G. Wills Bookstore.



A brief video selection from the reading is available here.

An Oldie But a Goodie--"Mexican" "Flesh" Bandaids, A Sarcastic Soliloquy

What a load off my mind! Finally, I can relax! For years, dear reader, I have suffered the pain of wearing band-aids that were not my skin color! For decades, tears have riven furrows 'cross my face as I walked through a world where bandages mocked the skin color of my Latina and Latino hermanas y hermanos! Like some vestigial cousin of the "flesh"-colored crayon, Band-Aids continued propagating the charade that when we bled, we did so on pinkish "skin-canvases" that were all the same color!

Now, at long last, we rest--our friends at Johnson and Johnson having followed the progressive souls of Binney and Smith. Click the box for a close-up!


Originally posted January 2, 2007

You Know You Have Made It When You Hit Page Six

Gustavo Arellano hits the big time--the New York Post; Chicanodom will never be the same again!