Over 21 years ago the border arts renaissance was alive and well in San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Baja California; here's a poster from my personal collection from the CRUZANDO FRONTERAS film festival... As with most images on the galleryblog, click to enlarge...
KPBS-TV premieres “Imagining Tijuana,” Tuesday June 29th at 11PM. It's one-hour documentary focusing on the city’s unique history, contemporary realities, and its place in the popular imagination. Artists, writers, sports figures, business executives and renowned professionals from Tijuana’s Paseo de la Fama (Walk of Fame) take part in a lively exchange about Tijuana's current situation as well as the possibilities and challenges confronting their community.
Award winning director Isaac Artenstein (“Break of Dawn,” “Border Brujo,” “Tijuana Jews”) juxtaposes news footage, contemporary artwork, vintage post cards, landmarks and other images to create a dynamic and compelling narrative. The original soundtrack by Tijuana’s own Jaime Valle helps capture the themes and sensibilities of this near-mythic border city --- and our own imagination. See a taste of it here.
A big abrazo to Pablo Jaime Sáinz who passed along this press release from the CECUT, Centro Cultural de Tijuana with info on the Rosario Castellanos panel last Thursday!
The bodies of two Tijuana police officers are found in the back of a stolen pickup truck, and all the evidence points towards an FBI informant as the prime suspect. Complicating matters, a newspaper story by Ricardo Ramos paints an extremely unflattering picture of Priority Homicide, a public relations nightmare that’s going to require some fancy footwork by Pope, Taylor and Brenda to set right.<<
Yes, that would "complicate" matters. Because the narco butchery of a couple of cops isn't nearly complicated enough, from a couch potato's-eye view. What's a little threat to civil society compared to a public-relations nightmare? What's an extremely unflattering spectacle of brute violence and the near-total breakdown of social control compared to an extremely unflattering picture? Where's Baudrillard when you need him?
The theme-parking of social pathologies: a growth industry, in el otro lado.
I just stumbled upon this cool old post from the shills at UCR regarding their former (he's at USC now) prof's sartorial edicts with regard to Tijuana sales folks.... cool read! What's especially moving is the symphony of semiotic play afoot in the phenomena Josh Kun exposes--in a kind of Jean Baudrillardian wet dream, the eclectic and colorful mayor of Tijuana colludes with his street vendors in a kind of cacophony of "Mexican" costuming. Simulacras of "Mexicans" dressing as "Mexicans" to shill pirated facsimiles of Bart Simpson, Calvin and Hobbes et al.
You can hear Kun's take on things from NPR; click the image below!
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.
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"
![The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_KqWRy3aDsokE_MKZPvSky0JCY5DtTUqNZ1YcuqLN4LzX6kUbISADnHe9CR8IEBlhVVcnUnXMjc1EY54oLPx-aOoWF_VdXOokJ2Y2smvV1WCxEu2TZguczGSloiFnkz4iQ_SkIi56dw/s1600/111Screen+shot+2014-04-01+at+10.jpg)
IMAGINING TIJUANA
I just stumbled upon this cool old post from the shills at UCR regarding their former (he's at USC now) prof's sartorial edicts with regard to Tijuana sales folks.... cool read! What's especially moving is the symphony of semiotic play afoot in the phenomena Josh Kun exposes--in a kind of Jean Baudrillardian wet dream, the eclectic and colorful mayor of Tijuana colludes with his street vendors in a kind of cacophony of "Mexican" costuming. Simulacras of "Mexicans" dressing as "Mexicans" to shill pirated facsimiles of Bart Simpson, Calvin and Hobbes et al.
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!
