Dave Malcolm, SDSU Prof Extraordinaire, RIP

My essay, "Autopsy of a Rat," the Camera Obscura (37) Speedy Gonzales exposé that went on to become the central chapter of Tex[t]-Mex would not be what it is without an unforseen assist from an SDSU College of Education giant--a professor and a friend by the name of Dr. Dave Malcolm. Professor Malcolm was directly responsible for revealing the research that led to my unearthing and "carbon-dating" of the untoward and salacious birth of the name "Speedy Gonzales" in Hollywood and California. RIP my friend, RIP.

World War II Propaganda: Links to Yet Another Chapter of the History of American Stereotypes: Japanese Flavor

Boingboing.net is up with a link to a site where an avid visuoarcheologist is uploading scans of WWII-era filmstrips; the second one on the Japanese enemy is bracing; too bad the original LPs backing the filmstrip are missing.

Toying With a New Blog Logo...

MIT rocks!

First It Was Cavemen Replacing Mexicans on Network Television and Now...

First it was Cavemen, yes Cavemen!, replacing The George Lopez Show on ABC--"Mexicans" replaced by Cro-Magnons with the flourish of a network programmer's pen in the flash of an eye. Now Girls, yes GIRLS! find themselves in the same boat as our Mexican friends: here the problem is less that of mispresentation than ANY representation at all. Another chapter in the long, gnarly history of stereotypes:


click the headline for the scoop!

MCASD, Touch of Evil, and literature.sdsu.edu

Just a link to a nice local piece on Neil Kendricks's and my collaboration in hosting local area indy film screenings. More soon.

Chicanidad, XicanOsmosis, and the Sexually-laced Psyche

One of the ways we can interrupt the logic of stereotypes is to complicate our representation of essential categories like "sexuality" or "identity."

For Chicana/o writing then, the narratives of an Arturo Islas (The Rain God) or John Rechy (City of Night) are heady indeed; especially with regard to the way they cause certain "Latino" heterosexist or heteronormative (gracias to Michael Borgstrom [scroll down]) tendencies to wobble or destabilize--Mexican "bandits" aren't always straight and aren't always bandits, and so on and so on.

All this as a preface to a review of Rechy's new memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman, in the SFGate by Ilan Stavans.

I am working on a revision of a chapter on the work of Rechy in an old manuscript I never published entitled Portraits and Signatures: An Analecta of Chicana/o Literature; the original manuscript was greenlighted and contracted by the great Alexander (Sandy) Taylor of Willimantic, Connecticut-based Curbstone Press, who sadly passed last November. For various reasons, I never finished that book and am now driven to do so to pay my debt to Taylor and Curbstone (and to Martín Espada as well, who was one of Portraits and Signature's first readers), to whom I owe the debt of tenure and more.