Streaming Josh Kun on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog

ESPN-Style XICANosmosis! USC, Mark Sanchez, Mexico, Football, and "America"

OCWeekly's got a great feature on USC's starting quarterback this year, the one and only Mark Sanchez! Click the quarterback for the full story!

Mexicans in the Cantina, Again, Old School-style, But with Family Values!

y tu mamá también | alfonso cuarón's epic meditation on homo-hetero mexican libidinal exploration

I recently re-screened Cuarón's masterpiece when I was finishing up my visiting profe gig at UCR--this flick is well worth the price of admission; this is a cinematic gem and, perhaps, the most honest depiction of Mexican male friendship and psychology in the americas you are likely to rent!

Archive of Visually Provocative Artifacts of Mexico

Click here for more from the servers at the New York Public Library--kudos the M.W. Harper for the link!

Chihuahuas, Burros, T-Shirts, and "Mexicans": A Micro-Rant

There is nothing explicitly or implicitly demeaning or debilitating with associating particular animals with particular countries--poodles with France, say, or camels with Saudi Arabia, bulldogs with England, and chihuahuas with Mexico; animals, humans included, have a history, and because of the vagaries of evolution and climate, various preponderances of animals can be found in any number of nations. No big deal.

And it was no big deal years back, at least to this critic, when Taco Bell started its series of yo quiero Taco Bell commercials featuring an infamous and widely debated chihuahuahueño:



If anything, the star of this commercial, "Dinky" or "Gidget," (depending on your take on a controversy) is like the "Mexican," Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston) from Touch of Evil (tirelessly documented in the first chapter* of Tex[t]-Mex); but where Vargas eschews pre-Psycho hot gringa Janet Leigh for the affections of Orson Welles in a fat suit, Gidget/Dinky ignores the allures of amor for food--the culinary wins out over the erotic, as, coincidentally enough, with Welles!

Both "Mike Vargas" and the yo quiero Taco Bell pooch play against 'type, against stereotype, given that the history of "Mexicans" in the cine/cultural space of America was always decidedly sexual--a dastardly sexuality, a swarthy eroticism accelerated to the point where "Mexicans" as synecdoche for sexuality isn't much of a stretch.

But other efforts are less "innocent." So it is that I have taken the time to out the Tex[t]-Mextian "normalcy" of Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua coming soon to a theater and blu-ray disk near you. And now I take the time to note the "humor" of "Mexican" T-shirts:




Drunk frat boys do need to wear t-shirts in TJ, I'll grant you that--the spectacle of melanoma soliciting pale skin the last thing one needs to see while cruising the sights and sounds of Avenida Revolución. But this out sized, be-testicled beast, semiotically fused with it's semantic equivalent, "Mexico," cries out for further scrutiny. Already a synecdoche-rich term (testicles or "balls," as shorthand for moxie, chutzpah, fortitude, drive, etc. with virulently masculine overtones), here its symbolic equivalent looming there in green between the silhouetted burro's back legs, screams out with force, --this is the power of images they silently scream, they stealthily infuse the psyche through the eyes with the veritable force of an orchestrated cacophony: balls, testicles [texticles?], huevos, force, strength, machismo. ¡ay caramba!

More on this to follow.


* "Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil"

Steinbeck Redux en Califas.

Just a quick link to an eloquent posting!

And Then, Quite Suddenly, Another "Mexican"--Remembering Baba Looey!

Bob Logan's amazing site reminded me tonight of another "Mexican" I need to chronicle, another ersatz animated would-be son and daughter of Aztlán who needs to once again see the light of day. To whom do I refer? The one and only and infamous, Quick Draw McGraw's swarthy sidekick burro, Baba Looey! Here's a taste of Hanna Barbera's crapimation from 1959 featuring McGraw and Baba Looey in "Bow-Wow Bandit."

Plastic Man in Mexico

Another vintage priceless commodity in the history of "Mexican" figuration in the Americas. Here, oddly, gringo comic side-kick to Plastic Man, Woozy Winks, seems to be collaborating with the gnarly and cruel "Mesican," Tricky Toledo!

Mex in the Sex in the City

I will have to more about this in the days that follow but the producers of Sex in the City owe the nation of Mexico a huge apology. Between the jokes about Mexican water and food and would-be primitivity (Miranda demands of a Mexican bus-boy, "Is their wi-fi" [here in the sticks\), this has to be the most offensive panoply of Mexican stereotypes in a mainstream American film since the Greaser film series--when Charlotte craps her pants in front of her botoxed cronies (whether from "Montezuma's Revenge" or all the damned pudding she's has mainlined) it is a moment of allegorical fitting justice.

Couple to this the neo-Aunt Jemima role of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie Bradshaw's (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) girl Friday, and Darren Star et al are in for a tar and feathering of a special sort. More soon! Others are on this as well.

Absolut Caves to Mounting Fascist Pressure, aka SELL SELL SELL More Vodka, Comedy be Damned!

Yikes!

...an update off the AP wire...

When Racist Fears of the Reconquista Meet the World of Advertising and Shilling Yummy Vodka, Yummy Vodka's Going to Win!

Kudos to the LA Times for throwing this under my eyes--don't miss the link to the Flickr site (especially the public comments section) where the original image-post went up to read the reason a lot of Latinos are afraid to go out at night. Other photoshopped takes on the ad appear there as well.