Mexy Excitement (and Latina/o Hijinks) Your Way Cometh, Adrian College, Michigan, and the Midwest!!!!! The MEXTASY Exhibition September 2013

Streaming video updates below | August 25, 2013

The rumors I started are true--nurturing my wanderlusting Tejano fetish for the American Midwest (where even Cleveland or Columbus shimmer on the horizon of my consciousness like Reykjavic or Paris do for others), I have set my sights again on Michigan (sorry Ann Arbor, no Wolverine desmadres this time) and the balmy climes of Adrian at a college there called, you guessed it, Adrian College. Located near the financially infamous (of late) Motor City of Detroit, Adrian is known for fences. That's right! Fences--and whilst this gives your border-rat textmex blogger some pause (especially with the all the neo-fascist fervor for border walls these days), I am going to hold my tongue for the moment as the fine liberal arts college is also know for something much more important--social justice.

Here's wikipedia on Adrian: "In the late 19th century through early 20th century Adrian was known as the 'fence capital of the world,' when J. Wallace Page invented the first successful wire fence. Throughout this period, Adrian was one of the first fencing manufacturers in the world and its fences were shipped as far as New York, Berlin, Asia, and Africa." Working in Adrian's favor is the denouement of this microhistory where J. Wallace Page's company  sponsors "the highly successful Page Fence Giants Black baseball team." But Adrian is also known for Adrian College, according to USA TODAY, the "#1 Up-and-Coming College in the Midwest" and I am thrilled to bring my Tejano/Califas-drenched exhibition and lectures to Adrian's shores! The other great thing about Adrian College? It's a thriving abolitionist-era institution of higher ed!

So how will it go down? Adrian College's Shipman Library has installed the full Mextasy exhibit (Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious) in its Heritage Room on the main Adrian College campus. The exhibition will be housed there from August 26 to September 13, 2013. Students and the community can see the exhibit anytime the library is open with Shipman Library regular hours running Monday through Thursday, 8am-1pm; Friday, 8am-5pm; Saturdays, 10am-5pm; and Sundays from 12pm-11pm.

more below the posterlink 

Get your own signed, numbered poster print here at the Mextasy semiotic shack!

There will be two major media-rich presentations associated with the Mextasy extravaganza. There will be a community lecture entitled  "Compulsively Desirable, Utterly Loathsome: Mexican and Latina/o Bodies in the 21st Century" on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, in Jones 110, 7:00pm–8:00pm. And there will be a campus lecture as well Thursday, September 12, 2013, entitled "Disrupting the Optical Hegemony of Stereotypes Now: Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene, and the Visual Dynamics of a Technosexual Tomorrow" in a room to be announced, 12:00pm–1pm.  A big gracias goes out to the Mextasy event sponsors: The Office of the Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs, Modern Languages and Cultures, Collegium II, ALPHA/Fin-Com, Institute for Ethics, Student Life, Multicultural Programs, Department of English, and the Institute for Creativity. 

An even bigger thank you and abrazo goes out to Professor Aïda Valenzuela, without whose imagination, vision, and drive, this event would never have happened!

EXTRAS

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a video and a cartoon for the Adrian College Lectures!

1. Humphrey Bogart and Alfonso Bedoya light up the screen in a scene from TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRES

2. Classic SPEEDY GONZALES antics from CANNERY WOE

 

click image for the streaming page

last promo posters--as with most images here, click to enlarge

Revisioning the Mexican Revolution!

Click the image for the story!

National Camera by Roberto Tejada

...just ran across National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment on Amazon--will do a posting after I snag a copy and review it...

Xicano/Chicano Photography: Gronk's Eyegiene

High Fashion Chicana Metamorphosis: Eva Longoria in Citizen K Magazine

There are high-resolution scans of the fashion spread here (other versions are here). The most curious image for the purposes of Eyegiene is the one above. It is a montage of three shots of Eva, as "patient," "doctor/cinematographer (16mm, no less)/voyeur," and gurney attendant. Most of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America was a meditation on the history, consequences, and legacy of Mexican figuration in the mass media--Ruven Afanador, an illustrious fashion photographer from Bogotá, Colombia, has, with his brilliant lens and his equally compelling Mexican-American model/actress, said all I said there, and all I can hope to say in my next volume, Eyegiene, with a few snaps of his camera and maybe a quick session with photoshop.

eyegienic photography by marc philbert

Lisa Orozco, Life Through a Chicana Lens: Xicanosmosis Between Califas y Tejas

One of my fave shots off the site:

Remembering Rosario Castellanos

One of the original Mexican literary independents, Rosario Castellanos left behind a broad body of literary work in multiple genres that, in my view (and anticipating the dynami French duo of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva), ushered in, along with Luisa Valenzuela, a Latin American new-wave of feminist critical theory.

I was looking for a good picture of Castellanos (click the cool poster, opposite, from a conference in Chiapas last month) and stumbled upon a New York City based artist, Alicette Torres, who recently incorporated Castellanos into a photographic series that muses upon Latin American literary suicides--I always thought Castellanos died accidentally, electrocuted in Israel with the less-than-fortuitous combination of a bathtub and an electric appliance; regardless, Torres's photos are well done, and the series concept breathlessly clever!


Find more photos like this on Brooklyn Art Project


Here's another recent gallery show with xicanosmotic brilliance that I scooped off of Torres's postings! Gracias, gracias.



Castellanos's ghost and legacy looms large in Tex[t]-Mex--in particular, the key Lupe Vélez chapter, "Lupe Vélez Regurgitated; or, Jesus's Kleenex: Cautionary, Indigestion-Inspiring Ruminations on 'Mexicans' in 'American' Toilets."

Dadanoias Findings!

Amazing New Lupe Velez Print Up for Auction: Rita as well

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Another Chapter in the History of Race in America...

Life Magazine Photo Archive Now Live on Google Images

Regular contributor David O. García writes in with a semiotic headsup!

From: "David O. Garcia"
To: "Bill Nericcio"
Subject: LIFE photo archive is available online
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:43:59 -0500

Bill,

Yesterday the LIFE photo archive became available via Google. Do a search for your favorite Mexican images and see what comes up. As a photographer I am stoked! Here is a story on the deal.

Best,

David

All Black Italian Vogue Hits the Newstands! Next Up? An All Chicana Glamour! An All Mexican Details?

I have written about Steven Meisel's singular work here before and if the New York Times has got it right, and I trust that they do, he's done it again!

Once a Latin Americanist, Always a Latin Americanist

Back in the day, (1988 to 1999), I was a full-on, licensed, practicing Latin Americanist literary critic publishing essays on Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz*, a dissertation on alienation in Latin American Literature† and so on y so on. 

These days, visual media cultural studies take up a lot of my plate and I find my old school Latin Americanist roots melding with my new school semiotic obsessions--hence this quick link to boston.com's cool new Big Picture blog and an entry on Brazil. Amazing photography and more.



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*Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93
†The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of America. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1989. Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (June 1990), 50(12):3943-A.

Clichés and Stereotypes

The obsessions of Tex[t]-Mex and the predilections of Eyegiene fold together nicely in the archival work, photography, collage, etc that you find at Dadanoias.net. Her latest series of self-portraits, meditating provocatively on the nature of cliches are more than curious. NSFW if your work finds breasts offensive.

A Striking Visual Sensibility: Another Eyegienic Photographer

"Mr. Toledano" has talents and a eyegieinic sensibility that are both compelling and provocative--go here for the Hope and Fear series referenced above, and here for an extensive portfolio.

The Legacies of XicanOSMOSIS and Latina/o Eyegiene

There is a certain schizophrenic aesthetic afoot amidst the pages of Tex[t]-Mex. While the book attends to the evolution of certain semantic traces--the way "Mexicans" figure as a kind of shorthand for sexuality in American pop culture--it is also very much focused on semiotic tendencies and aberrations: in particular, visual monstrosities or "ethnic mannequins" that pass for Mexicans in U.S. mass culture. The last movements of the book identify a process of xicanOSMOSIS found at the semiotic/semantic crossroads, the word/image verge of Mexico and the U.S.--the term, a hard-wrought, annoying-for-some neologism, fuses the dna of Osmosis, from the biological sciences, with Xicano/a, a purposed, agit-prop, spelling-supplementation holdover from the 1970s Chicana/o movimiento.



XicanOSMOSIS is not hard to grasp; in the book, I use it as a description for characterizing what happens when the visual and literary cultures of Mexico and U.S. fuse in the melting pot of the Americas--Gilbert Hernandez's rendition of the life of Frida Kahlo is the example foregrounded in the book.

All this preamble to direct you to the amazing archival/aesthetic work of Enrique Soto Eguibar from Mexico. His site, at zonezero.com, is well worth the price (free!) of admission. Soto Eguibar's eye, fitted with an almost steroid-infused sense of irony chronicles a flaneur's take on the streets of Mexico and combines it with an artist photographer's gifts of composition.

My favorite!?



Rough Translation: "Only MY chicharones (fried pork rinds) will make a sound around here" which can be rendered as "the buck stops here" or "I rule this roost!"

Rio Rene Yañez, the Andy Warhol of Tortillas, Photography, and more

Rio Yañez, aka "El Rio," is a San Francisco artist with a sharp eye, lurid range, and a clever sense of humor that sets his work apart. The last part of Tex[t]-Mex chronicles the workings of something I call Xicanosmosis, the seeping, sharing, breathing, bleeding exchange that typifies the cultural intercourse of Latin American and the United States. Yañez's work, like that of Gilbert Hernandez, (especially his tortilla-as-canvas initiative), is a provocative example of our next-wave post movimiento Chicana/o arts renaissance.

For a quick take on Gilbert Hernandez, click on the Amazon.com page here, and click on the second thumbnailed image under the Tex[t]-Mex book cover--Amazon now allows contributors to annotate images, an amazing tool for art historians and cultural studies geeks alike! After you click on the tiny image, roll your cursor over Hernandez's depiction of Frida Kahlo's head for an embedded cyber caption. Annotations of images of Rita Hayworth and Lupe Vélez appear there as well.