Touch of Evil | Charlton Heston | Waves of Grain | Waves of Illegal Aliens (sic[k]), Undocumented Workers

The mention of Charlton Heston, aka Touch of Evil's Miguel "Mike" Vargas, and his NRA-affiliation got me to thinking and reading yesterday, and it caused me to fall across a Salon.com hosted pdf. Now you would have to be "loco en la cabeza" to underestimate the impact that gang violence is having on major and minor urban spaces from Los Angeles to Detroit, from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico to Sao Paulo; however, the particular and sophisticated graphic representation of the same from those gun-loving folks at the National Rifle Association are a tad, shall we say, extreme? In particular, for the purposes of this galleryblog and its lifelong pursuit of "Mexican" and Mexican-American representation is U.S. mass culture, the depiction of Chicano street thugs (latter day banditos)...



and a soon-to-be-deluged white family--this somewhat selective juxtaposition is telling.

Gustavo Arellano | Jacques Derrida | Cantinflas

repost of November 22, 2006 old school galleryblog

Someone whose probing eye riffs with the rasquache vibe (think Jacques Derrida in Cantínflas-drag) of the Tex[t]-Mex project, is Gustavo Arellano, a Swift-like Chicano satirist whose work appears in the OC Weekly and whose new book ASK A MEXICAN is just out and selling like hot tortillas on a cold Mexico City morning. Or maybe, to be totally honest, it is Tex[t]-Mex that aspires to match the funny and dead-on indictments, disclosures, jokes, political jabs and nasty revelations that make his Ask-a-Mexican column the hit it is! Nestled in the heart of Gringolandia, dodging the jibes and punches of Southern California anti-Mexican voodoo (as close as you can get to a national pastime in SoCal), Arellano's virulent semantics are enough to make a Califas skinhead pee his pants. Arellano's bon mots have come to key parts of my crusade against seductive hallucinations of "Mexicans" in America.

For my indulgent readers who have been clamoring for video on this site, I forthwith produce here via the magic of internet streaming (uncanny voodoo in its own right) illustrative samplings of the late Jacques Derrida and Cantinflas--savvy cultural innovators whose ironic melodies provide the score for much of what it is I do as a semiotically obsessed cultural worker.

First, here's my dear departed theory guru talking about writing:



Second, we turn to Cantinflas, born Mario Moreno Reyes (1911-93), and not just by the way, had a father who worked in the post office; so did I. Food for thought for Pynchon-styled conspiracy theorists!

Migrant Workers | Gamers | On the "Literature" of Hate

English 725 Seminar Agent Natalie Susi writes in to the Text[t]-Mex Galleryblog with a tip to a gaming blog story on racist, anti-immigrant entertainment; the link is here. A newstory on this tex[t]-mexual travesty is here.

Need a purge--introduce yourself to the work of Louis Hock whose work is on display at the SDSU Art Gallery.

Cinemachismo, Sergio de la Mora, "Mexicans" in Film

This entry is just a quick pointer to the cool work of a mate of mine in the University of Texas Press stable--Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film by UC Davis Prof Sergio de la Mora. A selection from the intro is available by clicking the image opposite or directly from UT Press here. As opposed to Tex[t]-Mex with its focus on estadounidense filmed artifacts, Cinemachismo concentrates on rethinking "Mexicans" in Mexico, with keen chapters on Pedro Infante, Jotismo, Pancho Villa, prostitution and, in a timely epilogue given the recent Renaissance of Mexicans in Hollywood, Gael García Bernal.

Salma Hayek, Latina Movie Stars, and Show Bu$iness

Toward the end of the Lupe Vélez chapter in Tex[t]-Mex, an interlude unfolds wherein I suggest--with all the cynicism anticipated of a literature professor and practicing Nietzschean/Marxist/Derridean/Cantínflasian--that things have not changed much when it comes to the Latina bombshell trope since the first part of the 20th century. But things do change (or, at the very least repeat themselves: even Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino, rose to own The Beckworth Corporation, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures.

So it is we note today the coming of age of Mexican juggernaut Salma Hayek, who has penned a sweet deal with the namesake company that brought us Singing in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz and, even, Soylent Green--MGM Studios. Click the Variety.com image below for the details; the original story appeared here; another take on the tale is here.

Gracias to the Beautiful People at La Bloga!

Here's a warm cyber abrazo to the writers, editors, contributors, and raza at La Bloga for their kindly Monday morning posting!

Tex[t]-Mex Goes Hollywood!

Tex[t]-Mex has decided to go Hollywood and allow the lurid and intoxicating delights of its wares to infect your synapses, then you've got to do it right! Put your own self in lights here--you know you want to!

Speedy Gonzales Knockoff

Just a quick headsup with a quick link to my course-focused, student-driven blog, The Obscene Machine, where one of my hungry graduate students ran across a peculiar and familiar "Mexican" friend in La Jolla, California.

Classic Stereotypes

So you are a costume and makeup designer around the turn of the century, charged with the creation of ethnic types that will "pass" for "real" on the stage and, quite shortly, the silver screen. Where do you go?

The Camera Has its Reason that Reason Will Not See

Adapting Blaise Pascal just a smidgen ("the heart has its reason, that Reason will not know"), the title of today's entry reminds us on one of the mantra's of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America: not "a picture is worth a thousand words," but its complement: "like a thousand words they lie, lie, lie." Boingboing.net is on to this today with their posting and link.



Author and Friend, circa 1996
©1996 Guillermo Nericcio García

Our 21st Century American Uncle Toms

My Sororal Correspondent in Los Angeles, Josie Nericcio, sends in a timely posting that speaks to next-generation Ethnic Mannequins doing able service in the interest of the status quo. A reliquary of older, classic race-colored artifacts is here.

African-American and Mexicanesque high colonics for the posting previous? Go here:



and here:

More Fodder for Tex[t]-Mex/Xicanosmosis Advocates

When I was in graduate school on the East Coast in the late 80s, I remember running across a teenager north of Columbia University in Spanish Harlem wearing a t-shirt that read: "bilingual, bicultural, by myself." I remember drawing a picture of it in one of my sketchbooks and then incorporating it into one of the late essays for seminars I was trying to finish at the time. This piece of clothing's poignant, succinct eloquence touched me; its irony did so as well as did the melody of tragedy it bore--who would think it? A T-shirt as opera! So it is that we turn on the old internet today to find that Hair Club for Men posterchild and neo-fascist philanderer Newt Gingrich is in the news for speaking out AGAINST bilingual education. That's as surprising as a George W. Bush malapropism or Fox News patriotic hyperbole--in other words, NO surprise. Still and all, it's good to look zenophobic racists in the face from time to time. Here's the video clip with thanx to CrooksandLiars for the original posting.

La Jolla, California, Now Part of Mexico

While I am in the debt of David Gaddis Smith for the kindly mention, I am also somewhat perplexed and concerned regarding his newspaper's command of geography. In a section of the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune usually reserved for a news round-up from Mexico, there appeared a brief mention of a recent reading and booksigning I did for Tex[t]-Mex at the one and only D.G. Wills Bookstore.



A brief video selection from the reading is available here.

An Oldie But a Goodie--"Mexican" "Flesh" Bandaids, A Sarcastic Soliloquy

What a load off my mind! Finally, I can relax! For years, dear reader, I have suffered the pain of wearing band-aids that were not my skin color! For decades, tears have riven furrows 'cross my face as I walked through a world where bandages mocked the skin color of my Latina and Latino hermanas y hermanos! Like some vestigial cousin of the "flesh"-colored crayon, Band-Aids continued propagating the charade that when we bled, we did so on pinkish "skin-canvases" that were all the same color!

Now, at long last, we rest--our friends at Johnson and Johnson having followed the progressive souls of Binney and Smith. Click the box for a close-up!


Originally posted January 2, 2007

You Know You Have Made It When You Hit Page Six

Gustavo Arellano hits the big time--the New York Post; Chicanodom will never be the same again!