Thursday, December 31, 2015

"The Stuff a He-Man's Dreams Are Made Of" | John D. MacDonald's Mexico-based PLEASE WRITE FOR DETAILS, "Hotly Spiced with Latin Savvy," or Yet Another Chapter in the History of "Mexicans" in American Mass Culture (Fawcett Paperback Edition)

The sombrero clues you in to the Cuernavaca
setting for MacDonald's opus
I was stumbling around the internets and chanced upon an old Pulp paperback fiction blog I used to follow, Pop Sensation! There I found John D. MacDonald's PLEASE WRITE FOR DETAILS, a rather minor moment in American literary history, but a treasure trove for Mexican/Mexico/Latina/o stereotype scouts like yours truly.  Check out the original blog posting here or hit the images opposite and below--click them and like most images on this blog, they get more bigger.

As for critical commentary, I don't have much to add--it would be re-going over the endless arguments that appear in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America! And, dear reader, I care too much for you to do that.  
Nothing says "I know 'Mexicans' like a pipe-foregrounded
author photo!


Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Merry Christmas from the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog!!!! #mextasy


The shades of Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Lupe Velez, Ricardo Montalban, Speedy Gonzales (still alive, I think), join me in wishing all the visitors to the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog the merriest and mexiest of Christmases.

Here are some recent graphic desmadres I dreamed up for the upcoming presentations/exhibitions at Penn, Cornell, Arizona, and Kansas--more on those upcoming gigs here!  Own your own by shopping my Society6 tiendita/shoppe here.






Saturday, December 19, 2015

Holy Mestizaje, Mr. Spock!!!! #Mextasy Poster Classic

New Poster Over at the Eyegiene/Mextasy Poster Shoppe!

"The Bad Breath of the Devil Will Make Lupita Steal Again!!" Sigmund Freud's Christmas Nightmare! Mexican Santa! Director: René Cardona's Santa Claus, 1959 {October 1960 (USA)}

original posting 12.9.2011 | updated posting 12.22.2012


Merry Christmas y Feliz Navidad from all the loco agents of desmadres at The Textmex Galleryblog...





More on this "holiday classic" here... Lobby cards from this x-mas "classic" below...

click to enlarge

Feliz Navidad and Merry Christmas from the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog

Originally published: 12/22/12 3:46 PM Pacific Standard Time


Wishing you and yours 
a stereotype-free 2014!!!!

Your gift?  The voice
of Speedy Gonzales, Mel Blanc,
"The Hat I Got for Christmas is too Big."*

*note: the bizarre lyrics of the
song merely confirm the argument
in Tex[t]-Mex regarding "Mexicans"
as synecdoche for a sordid sort
of sexual potentiality--but I will
hold this comment in reserve
for the rest of the holidays.


Christmas-time Semiotic Legacies of the Mexican Cinema's Golden Age

originally published 12/11/07, 10:16 AM


Tex[t]-Galleryblog would be a Scrooge if it did not share this tasty semiotic artifact I ran across this morning, a lobby card while trawling the visual cultural riches of the internet. Rene Cardona's Santa Claus--think Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer filtered through the mind of a peyote- and absinthe-sodden Ken Russell--is a movie for the ages.

IMDB's listing on this Dante's Inferno-laced holiday classic is here--an Onion review of it is here. Those crazy 'bots on Mystery Science Theater did a send up of Cardona's classic--regular readers of this space who own the DVD are welcome to send me a copy for Christmas, pretty please!

Update:
Holy Mother of God, I have struck the motherload--dig this archive of black & white stills from this glorious and decadent evocation of Santa Claus!



Friday, December 18, 2015

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Louisiana's TURBOSQUID!!!! Yesterday's Most Pathetic Stereotypes Reimagined for the Digital Age of All our Cyber Tomorrows or Need a Sexy Latina or Bandit for your Animated Video


One of the infamous original members of the Taco Shop Poets and co-conspirator (along with Carlos Solorio) on my Mextasy.TV desmadre, Miguel-Angel Soria seems to have nothing else to do but to send me massive amounts of cyber tidbits filled with thrilling stereotype updates from the world of television and film production.  There, nestled in their dens in Hollywood (and Louisiana), these maniacs are busy building the NEXT generation of hot Latina bombshells, the next iteration of Alfonso Bedoya's I-don't-need-no-steenken-badges Mexican bandit.   Go here or here or here for your morning dose of digitally fine-tuned ethnic mannequins or peek above and below!

I love the way the African American digimannequin may be conceived of as a sexy business woman with some professional edge, whilst the winsome Latina lass's only concrete ontological quality is her essential sexyness--no business chops required!  The company that produces these monstrosities is called Turbosquid, out of Louisiana--maybe ace pinhead Bobby Jindal is associated with these cyberdumb rascals

Ack!!!!

 



Wednesday, November 25, 2015

"I...I'm an Indian, Susan": Yet Another Chapter in the History of Ethnic Americans and the Comics, Native American Edition


click to expand
Pappy keeps striking gold over at Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine--this time it's a comic that Fredric "I Killed the Comics with the Comics Code" Wertham took out of context in his anti-comics Inquisition of the 50s. "Forbidden to Love Him," a First Love comic, features a Native American who can pass--a common tale enough in the 50s when anti-miscegenation laws were the order of things in America. The crowd-scene from the climax, opposite, looks like a snapshot from a pro-Trump rally!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Textmex Galleryblog!

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Friday, November 06, 2015

"Spanish John: The Caballero Killer" Latin Lover Sighting! "Spanish" (this time!) or "Mexican" (or Argentine, for that matter)--Yet Another Page in the History of a Stereotype


Just enough time for a quick link to Pappy's cool comics blog for a story from 1948 featuring a dapper "Spanish" Latin Lover (spoiler alert! he may not be "Spanish"). Longtime visitors of this blog are familiar with my familiar reminder that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry are not field-tested, post-poststructuralism Anthropologists--a fancy way of saying that until quite recently, it just did not matter! It's akin to what happens in Southern California where Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, (even Brazilians!), are all "Mexican." In any event, this blog is dedicated to tracking the evolution of the Latin Lover stereotype and this tale, from 1948, is killer!



Saturday, October 10, 2015

The History of Weird Tales: The Short Version? They Are Not Weird at All--Merely Compulsively Repeated, Projected Nightmares of Mexicans, Africans, Arabs, Asians, and More Running Off with Gorgeous White Women

It comes as no surprise when the main plot point becomes obvious in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--that the history of Mexican and Latina/o figuration in the cultural space of the United States is an endless loop of hallucinations, fantasies built around fear of miscegenation, promiscuous female sexual want, etc.  The backstory of xenophobia and nativist pandering from Hitler to Trump is merely a projection of genetic pool anxiety--the caucasian nightmare of swarthy n'ere-do-wells frolicking amidst white women's pudenda!

Weird Tales no doubt fueled these fears--fears that echo loudly with 'birthers' rant about taking back their  country, when anti-miscegenation rage (often fueled just by the sight of a biracial body (thanks Obama) or the sound of a Spanish-language accent) takes center stage. Here's wikipedia (give them some money so they stop acting like PBS around pledge-days) on Weird Tales:

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre. Edwin Baird was the first editor of the monthly, assisted by Farnsworth Wright.[1] The subgenre pioneered by Weird Tales writers has come to be called "weird fiction". The magazine's office were initially at 450 North Michigan Ave, Chicago, but later moved north to 840 North Michigan Ave.[2] {... more

Which brings us to a recent posting from the Golden Age Blog--chock full of telling Weird Tales covers; here, the utter fear/desire for S&M-laced sexuality between endangered caucasian lasses and dark-skinned, violent men explodes off the page with pornish regularity.








Sunday, October 04, 2015

Verónica or Veronica? Mexican-Americans in Archie Comics, Dan DeCarlo, and Mextasy-laced Befuddlements of a Teenager's Libido

Updated 4 October 2015, first published December 2014 



As I have shared before here in these 'pages,' I spent a fair amount of my time growing up in Laredo, Texas, reading comic books--specifically, a lot of Archie Comics.

Dan DeCarlo's Men's Humor Magazine
work--not for Archie Comics!
Many of my obsessions for women were probably inculcated through the india ink wonders that are the magic of Dan DeCarlo--illustrator for Archie, Jughead, Betty & Veronica, and the rest of the Riverdale gang in the Silver Age heydays of the 60s and 70s. Harry Lucey, too, illustrator for my Mextasy homage below, also takes/gets some of the blame!

Back then, though I preferred Betty (she was nicer, and, as a blonde, an exotic for this chubby Mexican-American Laredense), it was Veronica, whose affections I fantasized about. I thought she was Mexican-American, a Latina--at the very least, she sure looked like all the middle and high school girls I was surrounded by at St. Augustine High School in Laredo--those memories still hound my synapses, a Catholic-school altar boy and lecter, surrounded by unthinkably beauty.

And so it is that I dedicate this Mextasy Poster below to Harry Lucey, whose art gave flight to my fantasies, and to Dan DeCarlo, whose ink-bourn dabblings imprinted me forever (and yes, deranged my libido in ways that only Freud--channeling Cantinflas via Rosario Castellanos--could fathom). Veronica Lodge, no doubt, was not Latina, not Chicana, not Tejana--but for me, young, ardent, and filled with visions of fantasized erotic futures, it did not matter.

Saturday, October 03, 2015

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, Eyegiene, and Mextasy are all now on Instagram!

One click and you are there!


One of the #mextasy prints from the UTEP show last year! #mextasytv coming soon! mad info? hit the URL in my bioblurb

A photo posted by bill nericcio (@william.nericcio) on

Demi Lovato, Mexican-American, Latina Celebrity, Nude, in Vanity Fair Magazine or "Who says Latinas/os in Hollywood don't get enough exposure?"

Some of the images are striking, star Demi Lovato fierce, sans makeup...



...others are provocative, still strong, but also very 21st century edgy, "meta"



...the whole premise of the shoot is Lovato's rawness, strength, spontaneity, but there is something else working there as well, the reincarnation of a trope documented throughout Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America. There, illustrated ad nauseum, is revealed the birth of the sexualized, cinematic "Mexican"--an organism whose sexuality comes before the psyche, in fact, a sexuality that is always already writ large, in the genes and on the forehead.

Patrick Ecclesine's photographic collaboration with Lovato reveals a star in metamorphosis and while we cannot look away (nor should we), we should also understand the dynamics of that glance.

See the backstory, with video, here.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

More Latin American Stereotypes Than You Can Shake a Stick At... #mextasy #textmex @eyegiene

I love Pappy's comics blog--one of the best in the biz!  And I love the treasure trove of stuff he unearths and shares; with or without knowing it, he has curated one of the best short histories of Latina/o representation available on the net!  A grand tip of the sombrero to Pappy!

Here's his latest find!  Click the image for the entire story:


Monday, September 28, 2015

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Rita Moreno, Latina Bombshell, Spitfire, {Fill in the blank}-another Sordid Tale of Tex[t]-Mex and Mextasy

As I feverishly lurk the broad galaxies of the internet, I run across textmextian treasures and mextasy-laden artifacts that boggle the imagination; such was the case this morning when Internet chum Carolina Gonzalez tagged my name onto a picture posted by Latina/o studies fellow profe-in-crime, Ricky Rodriguez.


I had never seen this particular photo of Rita Moreno, of West Side Story/Hollywood fame and infamy--I write "infamy" as a quick perusal of the internets led me to this Daily Mail story focused on the sordid, tawdry elements of the gifted actress's life.  Here's an extract with the bulk of the article linked below--spoiler alert!  Brando was great in the sack! Elvis Presley a dud!!!  Every stereotype documented in my book Tex[t]-Mex gets a cameo in this sweaty piece of yellow journalism!

Few women can say they dated Elvis Presley just to make Marlon Brando jealous, but then few Hollywood stars had the voluptuous sex appeal of Rita Moreno. 

Men couldn’t take their eyes off the New York girl who as a child got off a boat from Puerto Rico and went on to win an Oscar playing that  émigré role — fiery Anita in West Side Story. 
And while Presley left her cold, Brando almost forced her suicide, when a botched abortion and his serial infidelity during a turbulent eight-year affair drove her to overdose on sleeping pills. 
‘We were locked in the ultimate folie a deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him,’ she says of Brando in a revealing new autobiography, Rita Moreno — A Memoir. 
Now 81, she lays bare Hollywood’s ‘golden age’ as a tawdry and misogynistic era, while her description of her relationship with Brando is something he would hardly want on his epitaph.  
Her lovers not only included two of the biggest sex symbols of their age but also actors Anthony Quinn and Dennis Hopper, and the celebrated British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.  
The latter, she reveals, frightened her off with his fetish for sado-masochism, sitting her on his lap and making her look through a photo album of men smacking women’s bottoms. 
Dubbed the ‘hot Latin spitfire’ — which the hard-working actress hated — Moreno spent her career fighting a Hollywood that cast Hispanic actors in any role that required a non-white.  
Moreno starred as the graceful royal Thai wife Tuptim opposite Yul Brynner in The King And I, but also played innumerable Red Indian squaws and Mexican dancers. 
But her dark complexion also attracted Brando, who had never got over his first object of desire — a Danish-Indonesian nanny — and craved exotic, darker-skinned women for the rest of his life.  
Born Ruby Dolores Alverio, Moreno was five when her mother took her from poverty in Puerto Rico to a new life in the U.S.

Pick your poison!  Each image links to a slightly different story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2304230/Rita-Moreno-I-dated-Elvis-Presley-make-Marlon-Brando-jealous.html



Lastly, a higher res version of the image that started this posting:


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