Wednesday, November 04, 2009

MALAS @ SDSU


I am the new director of the MALAS Program (awful acronym) at SDSU! Check out our re-tooled website and list of cool classes for Spring 2010! Click the image to your left for direct access and make friends with MALAS here!

Camouflage Comics


Kudos to ace scholar-editor-author Joseph "Robbie" Borland for tipping my eyes to this remarkable "comic" on the dirty little war in Argentina! Remarkable...

The Tex[t]-Mex Caravan is Packing Up and Moving to DC for This Weekend

I am really looking forward to participating in my first national American Studies Conference meeting this weekend in Washington, DC--my panel is hyped opposite (click to enlarge). Back in the day when I was an undergraduate at UT, the American Studies program there offered me a posting in their graduate program--one that I passed up to drink of the heady waters of Cayuga Lake. Alfred Crosby ran the show back then (1984) and I always wonder what my academic fate would have been if I had stayed there in the lands of the Armadillo World Headquarters, Club Foot, Zilker Pond, Waterloo Records, and more. If you are at ASA, drop by the panel and say hi (yes it is at 8am in the morning! set that alarm!).

I will be sharing some of my more recent eyegiene-laced ruminations on Latinas and Latinos in US mass culture--including musings on Eva Longoria's and Shakira's recent embrasure of all things academic (and, additionally, Eva's penchant for acting out allegories of the Ethnic Mannequin--see the images below; Shakira has a thing for ropes as well) Hit the labels there below to your right for more info.



And Now, A Word From Out Sponsor! Tex[t]-Mex Experiment in eCommerce! UGG Boots Blowout

Readers! I have no idea why, but a kindly, talented purveyor of UGG boots from Down Under, has got it into her head that Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog readers are clamoring to adorn their feet in what she's got to offer! In her own words:

Just in time for Winter, Whoogaboots are offering readers of the Tex[t]-Mex Gallerblog a $20 gift code toward the purchase of their thermofleece ugg boots! Simply enter: 4TEXTMEX into the gift card section of their shopping cart for $20 credit on any item.

If any sales of these peculiar foot garb actually sell (and I know they are popular here on the SDSU campus), I vow to wear a pair to lecture in during the Spring semester!

Admittedly, Speedy's not looking to sharp in the image opposite, but Rita's not looking too shabby (she needs a bigger size though--or I have to go back to Photoshop 101). Whoogaboots models are much more fetching.

Jo Raquel Tejada (aka Raquel Welch) and the {LATINA} Body Politic

Tex[t]-Mex argues that Latinas and Latinos are always already sexual, the provocation to libidinal tumescence implicit in our DNA; click the image above to enter a pretty cool collection of Time Magazine covers with backstories as to the response they had on the newsweekly's readership.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Penelope Cruz in Vanity Fair


Mexican, El Salvadoran Rivalry @ Ask A Mexican

Mexicans, Cerveza, Pistolas | Mexicanos, Beer, Guns --yet another repugnant (and laughable) chapter in the history of "Mexican" representation

Thanks to George Luna-Peña for sending in the link!

Another Chapter in the History of Race in America: The Don Rickles Edition...

Don Rickles and Warner Brothers Cartoons--I confess that my vision of ethnicity in the United States is totally warped by the lenses of their various comedic artifacts. More on this to come.... Here's Rickles on Mexicans, Asians, and more....


Bimbo's Negritos! Another Chapter in the History of Racialized Representation in the Americas...


Ace Boston-based Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog detective (and sugary treats sampler) Daphne Strassmann writes in with a tip to a Guanabee post that muses (a wee-bit snarkily) about Bimbo breads of Mexico's odd little confection. Hit the product for the linkaso.

Here's a recent blog-based meditation on the same from theRoot.

Get your hands on one of my books ...