The Remarkable Jim Crow Museum: A Macabre, Bracing Meditation on Race, Ethnicity, and Collecting in the Americas

As a collector and curator of real and digital artifacts, I have to give credit where credit is due--I just spent a sleepless hour wandering the virtual corridors of the Jim Crow online museum. Formidable stuff.

For anyone with an interest of the history of race and consumer culture in the U.S., it is a must-see, must-visit archive of horrors. Here's a taste from the curator, David Pilgrim's, essay "The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects," about the time he visited a collector of African American tchotchkes:

If I live to be 100 I will never forget the feeling that I had when I saw her collection; it was sadness, a thick, cold sadness. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of objects, side-by-side, on shelves that reached to the ceiling. All four walls were covered with some of the most racist objects imaginable. I owned some of the objects, others I had seen in Black Memorabilia price guides, and others were so rare I have not seen them since. I was stunned. Sadness. It was as if I could hear the pieces talking, yowling. Every conceivable distortion of black people, our people, was on display. It was a chamber of horrors. She did not talk. She stared at me; I stared at the objects. One was a life-sized wooden figure of a black man, grotesquely caricatured. It was a testament to the creative energy that often lurks behind racism. On her walls was a material record of all the hurt and harm done to Africans and their American descendants. I wanted to cry. It was at that moment that I decided to create a museum. source.

For the main site, hit the image here to your right.

Tex[t]-Mex Versus the Sleeping Mexican

No offense to the turf of my wonderful blogger-mate Maribel Alvarez, but I have to share a story of irony. My book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America is about stereotypes--"Mexican" stereotypes that propogate like bunnies in American pop culture. So look what I see every morning as I look out over my breakfast. No, really, here, look:


My neighbor and colleague [!], a Brit and a friend, has a window adorned with a glass sleeping "Mexican." It is an artifact, a glass monstrosity, that cries out to the world and me with eye-bourn tales of Latino woe. Daily, my Cheerios and migas are soured, my psyche harassed, by a stained glass tchotchke that mocks this Mexican with its pithy semiotic "funnyness."

Get this... I have not told him a thing; have not even made a joke about it, can't bring it up!

I am speechless--me!

Somehow, I have to bring it up.... Maybe a gift of the book for X-mas????? In the meantime, I will try to sit in a chair that does not face that window!

Here are some other items I have meant to post and have not found the time--let me throw them up here now and get back to them soon.... The first is an artifact from a store here in San Diego on India Street that specializes in the sale of sleeping "Mexicans" and "Spaniards"--they who wisely siesta at the hottest time of the day:


What I LOVE about this bank is that this "Mexican," or whatever "he" is, is NOT sleeping, and is, in fact, emblematic of industry--he's a BANK!



More on this soon!

Lastly, a photo from US Weekly outing celebrity tackyness but throwing a link into Mexicans in the process:



More to come--remember: almost ALL the images in the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog are clickable and enlargeable! Hence the name "gallery-blog." Thanks to Moises in Chicago for asking.


update

Regarding the comment below from a former graduate student and future professor: GRACIAS!