Memory Lane: The Hot Tamale Kid

When I was not scarfing down Milky Ways, reading comics, and pasting Wacky Packages to the good furniture in our house, I was probably at the candy aisle at Barrera's Stop & Shop in Laredo, Texas on Corpus Christi Street, buying more processed sugar and looking for more tasty morsels of inked gold! (more comics!). Occasionally, I would buy these "Mexican" laced goodies, "Hot Tamales" immortalized on Jason Liebig's flickr site. Little did I know that decades later I would be adding another chapter to my growing list of collectable "Mexicans." "Maria" meet "The Hot Tamale Kid"--a marriage made in heaven (at least a sort of Francis Galton meets Westworld heaven).

Speaking of Wacky Packages, here's one that had me rolling on the floor back in the day...


... and one that makes me cringe now...

Apoplectic Bloggers, Apologetic, Barrister/Psychiatrist-guarded Chicana Grifters, Hannah Montana, and 15 Minutes of Infamy

I don't know why a blog that aspires to track the dodgy shenanigans of Latina/o stereotypes should turn its eye this way, but I can't seem to ignore the nefarious doings of one Priscilla Ceballos, a Tejana from Garland, Texas, who, in the sincere desire to score Hannah Montana tickets for her daughter, ghost-wrote an essay for her daughter wherein she alleged said daughter had lost her father in the Iraq war. While the blogosphere is busy tarring and feathering Señora Ceballos (nifty screengrab above), said tale becomes yet another odd Tex[t]-Mexual allegory--but this time the star at the center of the storm is a Tejana scribe, a sharp little cookie with a gift for fiction, who has written herself into a tale of woe.

You think I am exagerrating on the tar and feathering, taste a little of d-listed's screed.

The Today show feature on the escándalo is worth the price of your click if only for the shot of Ceballos flanked by her lawyer and a psychiatrist! Hijole, holy ghosts of Dombey and Son and Freud!

A good deal of Tex[t]-Mex meditates on the idea of the ersatz or "constructed," fabricated human; and from Ceballos's painted-on eyebrows and tattooed lipstick to Hannah Montana being the fabricated alter-ego of a character named Miley Stewart (played by the actress Miley Cyrus--daughter of Billy Ray "Achy Breaky Heart" Cyrus), we find ourselves awash, astray, adrift in oceans of simulacra, of delicious, well-crafted, media-fanned fakery, that Jorge Luis Borges schooled us on in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Jean Baudrillard reminded us of with his "simulacra." It would be funny if Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Nazi scapegoating of Jews (and, did you know?, the flagellants 14nth century scapegoating of Jews*), and anti-immigrant bashing by neo-Klan pundits didn't work and thrive through the same logic.

There's more to write about here, but I have to think about it.... More to come.



*Lurid recreations of the same can be witnessed on the History Channel's Plague docudrama!

Essential updates from Hasta Los Gatos and Guanabee--gracias to 'Hasta for the links!