In Case There Was a Doubt!

The intrigue evolves!

The Ramones, Post Xicanosmosis... aka Blitzkrieg Bop/ Yucatan A Go-Go

Gracias to a stumbler in Turkey with excellent taste!

After UC Riverside There's Stanford and Berkeley and...

Breaking News! The Tex[t]-Mex cavalcade has been called in to assist! I will be joining UC Riverside's ridiculously talented* Media and Cultural Studies Department for the Spring 2008 quarter--there I will serve as a Visiting Professor teaching a course on the figuration/construction of the "Mexican" in Mexican Cinema and Media. This move has been beneficently blessed by my generous keepers in the College of Arts and Letters at SDSU, so I will be chairing the Department of English and Comparative Literature and moonlighting as a Visiting Professor a couple of afternoons a week at UCR. Holy Pixar and Apple, Steven Jobs! Holy Institutional Hermaphrodite, CSU and the UC, collaborating! What's next? Peace in the Middle East?? Lions doing drinks with Lambs!? News at 11.

*Can you say Toby Miller? I knew you could! ¡¡Órale!!

Ace LA Detective Marisela Norte Writes In With a Tip for a Blast from Roberto Lovato

Beyond the Metaphor: Camera as Gun

The image-laden pages of Tex[t]-Mex record the bizarre coincidence that occurred when American expeditonary, "punitive" forces invaded Mexico to search for Pancho Villa early in the 20th Century. The coincidence? That an advance in entertainment technology (in this case, the picture postcard) jives fortuitously with an international conflict. Here's one of these infamous cards: (more are here)

And here's a snapshot of those pages from the unedited manuscript that became the UT Press book:




I just ran across a page that stores a veritable archive of similar "weapons."



The confluence of the technology of violent visuality or an optics of war--where the metaphor of camera as weapon reveals itself to be less metaphor than a material truth (gracias to Paul Virilio)--is at the heart of my Eyegiene manuscript.

Breaking News! Mexican Flags in the Trash on Cinco de Mayo! Film at Eleven....

Ace Internet reporter Josie Nericcio writes in! MORE SOON....

even more...

The Tex[t]-Mex Branded Search Engine©--Can Boxer Shorts Be Far Behind!?

Cinco de Mayo, Texas Style!

Ace Texas detective Raúl Ramos, author of Beyond the Alamo, writes from Houston with a local radio station head to head debate on eliminating Cinco de Mayo celebrations! Hit Salma Hayek's ear there to your right and give it a listen!

Friendly Dictators Trading Cards

More on these soon.

Friendly Dictators - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: Friendly Dictators

Get ready to enter the Time Tunnel!

Trading cards teach a lesson ; U.S.-backed "friendly dictators' spotlighted; [ALL Edition]
Telegram & Gazette. Worcester, Mass.: Apr 15, 1990. pg. B.11

The Hartford Courant

STORRS, Conn. - Manuel Noriega. Augusto Pinochet. Ferdinand Marcos. Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq. P.W. Botha. Efrain Rios Mont. Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier. Alfredo Stroessner. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Those names, some familiar and some not, have two things in common. They all belong to people who are considered dictators, and at one time or another, all of these people enjoyed the support of the U.S. government.

The names and the history behind them are the subject of a new series of trading cards called "Friendly Dictators, 36 of America's Most Embarrassing Allies," published by Eclipse Books in California.

Each card has an illustration of a dictator on the front, by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, with a text on the back written by Laura Sydell and Dennis Bernstein, giving a summary of their ruthless, often bloody rules and their relationships with the United States.

William Nericcio, an assistant professor of Latin American literature at the University of Connecticut here, is using the cards in his class to help his students understand the complex relationship between the United States and the Third World, particularly Latin America.

Nericcio objects to the term "Third World." "We use it to mean exotic, undeveloped countries where primitive people go about their lives in a curious fashion," says Nericcio, who is Mexican- American. "It represents those people in our terms. We use our yardstick to measure their development."

The card for Manuel Noriega, who is awaiting trial in the United States for drug smuggling, shows a picture of him in military fatigues, with snowflakes falling and President Bush in his pocket.

"Of course, now it's Noriega who is silent and George Bush who is still in office," Nericcio says.

Dictators in the series who have been assassinated, overthrown or "neutralized" (as in the case of Noriega), have the word "canceled" stamped across their cards. Col. Hugo Banzar of Bolivia appears to have been canceled and uncanceled several times.

Nericcio says that little information about these regimes and U.S. support for them finds its way into publications and television shows seen by the general public.

The authors of the cards "are working against the mainstream media, who they feel do not get the story out about U.S. activities in Central America," Nericcio says.

The cards are intended for use as a textbook, but Nericcio urged his class to be critical of the information on the cards as well.

Nericcio's students analyzed the cards as a class assignment and discussed them in class.

"We used to believe you could hide behind anti-communism, but now that communism is falling all over the world and we don't have to be afraid of it, it will not be so easy to justify support of these people anymore," says Alexandra Kennedy, 19, a sophomore.

Friendly Dictator trading cards cost $8.95 for a pack of 36 and are available from Eclipse Books, P.O. Box 1099, Forestville, Calif. 95436.
Indexing (document details)
People: Noriega, Manuel A, Nericcio, William
Dateline:STORRS, Conn.
Section:NEWS
Publication title:Telegram & Gazette. Worcester, Mass.: Apr 15, 1990. pg. B.11
Source type: Newspaper
ISSN: 10504184

Abstract (Summary)

[William Nericcio] objects to the term "Third World." "We use it to mean exotic, undeveloped countries where primitive people go about their lives in a curious fashion," says Nericcio, who is Mexican- American. "It represents those people in our terms. We use our yardstick to measure their development."

"Of course, now it's [Manuel Noriega] who is silent and George Bush who is still in office," Nericcio says.

The cards are intended for use as a textbook, but Nericcio urged his class to be critical of the information on the cards as well.
» Jump to indexing (document details)
Full Text (484 words)
Copyright New York Times Company Apr 15, 1990

The perfect denouement? the opening and closing credits of THE TIME TUNNEL!

Margarita Dolores Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth

Just a film clip from a Rita Hayworth classic:

New Legendary Heights of Narcissim... But, I Have an Excuse

A quick link to a new review of Tex[t]-Mex by a reader/buyer at Amazon.com. Fellow authors have been telling me for months that reviews on Amazon benefit the sales of books--especially paperbacks by academic authors that have a hard time busting into the Borders/Barnes and Noble megastores circuit. Apparently the reviewer in this instance is a former student (¡gracias, gracias!) and an American ex-pat in Canada (with any luck you can return to the U.S. soon, go Obama!).

Thanks for the hot review!

Los Sunday Fonnies Con Lalo Alcaraz!

Tip of the Sombrero to Yahoo for the Cinco de Mayo Plug!

New Cool Tex[t]-Mex Review from Tejas via Nuevo Mexico

...appearing here in the very near future!

I Get Emails From Time to Time...

...asking me why I dwell on the history of racial representation in America. I "stumbled-upon" this picture tonight--a living ocular, semiotic trace of the history of race-hatred in the American South.... look at it:


here's the original sourcelink. I want to write about this face--the ecstacy of racial-traced hate is a semiotic project that encompasses lynchings and minstrel shows and Hollywood films.



Not to knock our fellow primates, but the physiognomy of fear and loathing seems to reach across the species. More on this in Eyegiene, proposal presently in development for UTPress.