Constructing the Ethnic Body: Stephen Greenblatt on Al Pacino as Shylock in the The New York Review of Books

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.

Even Latina Mannequins Are Divorcée Strumpets

update | June 12, 2009

What happens when flaneur semioticians get into fights with strumpet "Latina" simulacra and...

...ersatz "Latino?" puppy dogs!




original posting 3/13/09

My thanks to Anabel Lima who mailed me this amazing update to my earlier posting regarding the ethnic mannequins that Old Navy is parading about these days. No surprise that "Eva," the Latina, is a hot to trot, divorcée harlot! Click to enlarge!



update, June 5, 2009

These bizarre videos, fusing multicultural focus group ethnic manneqins with the shilling of cheap cottons have some mesmerizing power about them! You can't look; you can't look away:


The Supermodelquins in Town Gown Proposal - Watch more Funny Videos

Of course, pregnancy chisme is the order of the day. The surprise, gringoesque Josh is the perp instead of swarthy Enrique!

Old Navy's Mexican Mannequins

Readers of my Ethnic Mannequins/Obscene Machine Graduate Seminar blog will be well familiar with my fetish when it comes to the ersatz human--so look what comes in with the newspaper this weekend, a Spanish-language circular for Old Navy featuring, literally, ethnic, "Mexican" mannequins. More on this in Eyegiene.

The Fine Art of "Funny" "Mexican" Stereotyping

I have noted this before recently, but stumbled upon more trash today! But give credit where credit is due and tip your sombrero to the folks who put Family Guy on the air--they are the best at crafting tex[t]-mextian fabrications of ersatz and "funny" "Mexicans" on the air today; another recent sampling from Hulu:

Ethnic Mannequins: Pull the Tongue and More!!!

Oops! I forgot a key part of the paper "toy." Yikes!

original posting: June 19, 2008

When it comes to the history of ethnic figuration in popular culture ephemera, it is hard to imagine a better source in terms of range and quality than Pillpat's on Flickr. Two recent finds that should end up in cutting edge research in ethnic or cultural studies:


Heritage Auctions comes close as well:

Bizarre Caucasian Bestiary

updated

The introduction to my UT Press book Tex[t]-Mex includes a throwaway paragraph wherein I gesture at some future study that would highlight Caucasian entries in the bestiary of bizarre Ethnic American figuration. After all, it is not just sleeping "Mexicans," bone-through-the-nose "Africans," and murderous "Italians," (to name a few) that suffer when subjected to the logic of stereotypes, white folks suffer as well as they pass through our diverse and complex American matrices of representation.

In the book, I included this image--part of a discarded box I found around back of a cool toy store in La Jolla, CA.


Let me add to this startling artifact (the boy, in particular, is hauntingly curious), the following entry from a recent Target® Sunday circular:

Damned peculiar and certainly worthy of semiotic scrutiny--any commentators with a take out there?

In lieu of a prose gloss, allow me to profer instead this brief semiotic parable instead:

¿Lalo Alcaraz, Waltero Disneyzia de la futura?

It just HAD to happen! If African-Americans had their Fat Albert back in the day, it was only a matter of time before Chicanos would have their own Warner Brothersesque visionaries tracing out and inking our future tomorrows! OK, maybe it's more Hanna Barbara meets Dick Tracy meets Deputy Dawg than Foghorn Leghorn and Speedy Gonzales, but it's still a hoot--and that "Chivo" character will either endear or scare the shit out of you!

Without further ado, it's time to prepare your eyes for Lalo Alcaraz et al's rock'n rollin', low-riding, semiotically delicious mini-epic The Chuco Brothers!



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