Thank God the Golden Age of Mexican Stereotypes is Over

All right. All right. I will cop to it: I am begin facetious!

But this casting call for a movie, set in of all places, Laredo, Texas, caught this self-exiled Laredense's roving, internet-weary eye.

What follows is a "real" advertisement that went out on The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) hotwire.

CASTING: "TALK TO HIM" SAG SHORT FILM

PRODUCERS: ALEX CASTILLO, NICK OCEANO
DIRECTOR/WRITER: NICK OCEANO
Casting Director: NICK OCEANO
Shoot/Call Date: 3/31 and/or 4/2
Location: LOS ANGELES, CA

CASTING BACKGROUND ACTORS

A coming of age-story about Mark Garcia, a troubled teen whose parents are going through a divorce. During a family visit, Mark hangs out with his cousin, Luis, from the 'other side of the tracks,' and the two venture across the Texas-Mexico border for one fateful night.

MEXICAN BAR PATRONS - (MALE & FEMALE, 18 - 65) Seeking to find authentic Mexican or Hispanic-looking patrons for two different scenes: (1) A Mexican brothel bar and (2) A Texas lounge bar in Laredo, Texas. MEXICAN-LOOKING actors ideal.

MEXICAN FEMALE PROSTITUTES - (FEMALE, 18 - 65) Seeking to find authentic Mexican or Hispanic-looking prostitutes for scene in Mexican brothel bar. MEXICAN-LOOKING or dark-skinned (non-Anglo, non-African-American) actors ideal.

Actors of all types welcome.

TO APPLY: please submit a link to your picture and resume to Steve Mann, Associate Producer, at stevemann716@yahoo.com

Mann may want to do some more research.

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.

WKXW, Mexicans, and "Entertainment"

Our University of California, Santa Barbara doctoral degree correspondent has checked into the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog with more shreds of infamy!

Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:21:57 -0700
From: MARC GARCIA-MARTINEZ
Subject: Tex[t]-Mex's raison d'etre
To: memo@sdsu.edu

Bill,

Here we go again, amigo. from the site:

Two weeks ago, Mr. Carton and Mr. Rossi started “Operation Rat a Rat/La Cucha Gotcha,” a listener-participation game that encourages people to turn in friends, neighbors and “anyone suspicious” to immigration authorities. They introduced the segment with mariachi music and set the campaign to end on May 5 (Cinco de Mayo), a well-known Mexican holiday. At the risk of stating the obvious, the phrase “La Cucha Gotcha” is meant to evoke the Spanish word for cockroach.

Mel Gibson and the Maya

Looks like beleaguered Jewish folk are not the only harassed group that needs worry the wrath of anger-management-poster-child Mel Gibson! Now Central American academics and all sorts of Latinos will need to learn the nuances of duck and cover. God forbid anyone ask a question of Mad Max when it comes to his representation of Latinos in Apocalypto. Glosses on this tale of Catholic Australian Drunks gone loco are here, here, and here.

Cool Story in City Beat about some of my union activist work

Chris Ware, Cameras, and the Psyche

Just a quick link to the Obscene Machine Blog, where Chris Ware shows what happens when cameras start messing with the psyche! The Tex[t]-Mex project is nothing more and nothing less than a sustained (some might say obsessed) interrogation of what happens when words and images are simultaneously deployed in the interest of telling a story--in the case of this book, the "seductive hallucinations" and ethnic mannequins that pass for "Mexicans" in America. What one gets is a semantic, semiotic, ontological ménage-à-trois that tests the wits of all--as if the various and sundry superpowers of a literary critic, art historian, visual theory maven, and existentialist philosopher had to be brought to bear in an instant (someone call a psychoanalyst quick!). Ware's work calls our attention as it is an example of an art that forces our aforementioned mix of simultaneously deployed critical methodologies and it advances said quad-cluster of skills at the same time--imagine a cocktail of Remedios Varos [2] and Jacques Derrida, some odd cloned fusion or Man Ray and Roland Barthes and you begin to, wait for it.... , get the picture. These issues are at the heart of, or, to hone the metaphor, infect the retina of Eyegiene--my follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex.

Andrés Martinez, Kelly Mullens, and the Los Angeles Times

Now these are the kinds of scandals Mexicans and Mexican Americans should be getting into--a gnarly, salacious, untoward, perhaps even tawdry, newspaper-public-relations-celebrity-we're-in-cahoots, or, in this case, in-bed, -together scandal! Here's the skinny. The LA Times has its own version here. Martinez's version of the facts are here! Holy Citizen Kane, Batman!

KPBS, Tex[t]-Mex, and the Radio

I did a segment with Tom Fudge of THESE DAYS on KPBS Radio
this morning in support of my mini-tour for Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America--a direct MP3 download/podcast of the show is available here. Later in the day I briefly appeared on KPBS's Full Focus, but that had everything to do with our impending CSU strike and little or no (save for the camera) to do with the hijinks in Tex[t]-Mex.

If "Mexicans" are Synonymous with Dangerous Dark Sexuality then "Africans" Equal Savages

A certain irony occurred to me even in the days when I was home in Laredo, Texas, watching Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies (waiting for flashes of Maureen O'Sullivan in the lagoon sequences). Whenever the drums sounded, I knew that danger was in the offing, and that, pretty soon, the mise-en-scene would be filled with dark, screaming, bone-wearing, spear-hurling, face-painted "Africans." I knew also that Tarzan would find some way to sooth the swarthy beasts (being half-ape himself). Tex[t]-Mex unearths amazing and late, great, Eddie Said on Tarzan--well worth the read!

The irony? I was always sort of a radio-loving, morse-code parsing goober. I knew intellectually that the drums were a form of proto-longrange communication system and that far from ominous, dark, occult, and hence evil (recall: I am a recovering Catholic), said rhythmic rumblings were nothing more and nothing less than a Nextel antecedent, some early incipient form of long-distance text-messaging: "Trzn 8nt cool," or something like that.

The image above, 1950s sensation-pulp by Ron Turner, is a fine entry in this field of Africanesque figuration. Thanks to drawn.ca for the headsup!

Semiotic psychic enemas for the foregoing materials is to be found in the critiques of Bogle, Gates, Marks, and Golden.

The San Diego Reader's Barbarella on Tex[t]-Mex

"Seedy Gonzales" An On the Road Posting from Oberlin College

Here I am in lovely Oberlin, Ohio, a guest of the dynamic student organization, La Alianza Latina, on remote broadcast from the Mudd Library (rumored by local chismosas--can you say Marisól LeBron?--to be designed as an architecturally salacious, ersatz pudendum!). Esconsed from the elements in Mudd perusing emails, I've discovered that my Studio City, California correspondent Josie Nericcio, film-school, sound editor (Technicolor!) y mi hermana sent me the following link from the Daily Show entitled "Seedy Gonzales." As Tex[t]-Mex traffics in the universe of all things Speedy, it is fitting that these visual memes appear here:

Chief Justice Antonin Scalia--Sir Dago Red!

What a conundrum! My name is William Anthony Nericcio--mostly Mexican, but a significant part of me is Sicilian as well! So what am I supposed to do with that literalist wanker Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia that W. put on the Supreme Court--a guy that makes Clarence Thomas appear Leftist? I guess I will let the story speak for itself.

Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007

Key sections of Tex[t]-Mex owe their debt, if not their birth, to the writings of French post-structuralist guru Jean Baudrillard who died this week in Paris--a BBC obituary is here and a GuardianUK online piece appears here--kudos to my colleague Joanna Brooks for the headsup and the lowdown. Best known for his writings on the simulacra and the processes of simulation, Baudrillard was the go-to theorist to cite when I was trudging up Buffalo Street hill in Ithaca at Cornell in the mid-80s--if the Cars and the Talking Heads were the music of that moment, then it was Baudrillard spinning the LPs of theory at that time. With Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Barthes and Lacan, he was part of the theoretical French wave that infected a whole generation of humanities professors in the United States--that post-structuralist influenza was as heady as absinthe. Here's a selection from my book's introduction wherein I signal my debt to Jean--rest in peace.

What obsesses me, what urges me to bring these words to your eyes, is the network of signs in the U.S. mass media that do yeoman's service representing the various peoples, cultures, institutions, and corporations usually totalized, homogenized, and smelted under the classification "Mexican" or "Latina/o."

But these signs (as semioticians, poststructuralists, and others within the cultural-studies mall have taught us) are not representations of anything approaching reality.

Reality is a Utopia, a dreamy conceptual substance favored by politicians, demagogues, and aesthetic-overdosed humanists. In analyses of Mexicans as well as "Mexicans," we are trafficking as much with mass culture as masked culture—here please call to mind speculations on Mexican subjectivity from the once-lucid Octavio Paz in his Labyrinth of Solitude.

So I want to guarantee that we will not spend the time we have here together trying to take off this mask, to resuscitate the essential figure of some "real Mexican." If that were possible, we could just change the channel or turn off the television every time someone like Freddy López or Speedy Gonzales (or "Manuel" from the BBC's Fawlty Towers) appears and, by doing so, halt the dissemination of these extraordinary ethnic tropes.

"Real Mexicans"? "True Latinas/os"?



We ought not to linger in that snake pit. And we have 1980s Euro-wunderkind Jean Baudrillard, among others, to thank for graciously saving us some ink. Baudrillard's critical "spankings" rate a second glance, especially those moments in "The Precession of Simulacra" where he surmises that "it is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process."

Good enough. Most of us want little more than to even the score, set things right, heal the rift, "restore" objectivity, and so on. But this will not do.

The germ of this book was a vendetta I had for an animated Mexican mouse by the name of Speedy Gonzales; but, in the end, I had to let the anger go. Baudrillard, holding forth again, says: "It is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum." Look behind Speedy or beneath Freddy López and one will not find Mexican-hating illustrators or Latino-loathing puppeteers (ok, maybe one or two; we are talking about animated "Mexicans" created in California). More often than not, one will find someone working sine dolo malo, "without fault, without an intent of evil," as the Romans used to say. But not always without fault—the autopsy of a rat that appears within the pages of this book features enough innocent villains and guilty angels to populate a Hollywood B film.



And, to be frank, it is not just "Africans" (screen "Fresh Hare" here) or "Mexicans" that come off badly when it comes to mechanical reproduction of ethnic types—check out these cute gringo kids from my private collection of "ethnic" types (in particular, look closely at the boy on the right, who has been digitally processed so much that his "skin" takes on the texture of a Pixar-born(e) computer-generated-image offspring of a CGI wet dream by the in vitro-cloned hybrid child of Mengele, Geppetto, and John Lasseter).



So, I promise: we will not labor to discover the true "Mexican," nor will we seek to restore the essential and true Latina/o phenotype and rescue "our" representation from the clutches of a manipulative mass media; rather, I want to try something much more modest and not at all perfectly organized—my one genuflection to the niceties of organization was to order my chapters somewhat chronologically in the order that they were conceived. This may lead to some grumbling from the peanut gallery regarding the Lupe Vélez's entrance in the later galleries of this labyrinth of horrors, when chronology and history would place her first—but doing so would upset the gods that have ordained this critical effort, and it is to them I must pay obeisance even before the needs of you, my gentle, indulging reader.

Chicano Art, Outsider Art, Martin Ramirez and Richard Rodriguez

Tex[t]-Mex features two "Seductive Hallucination Galleries" that serve as print-artkives for stereotypes, grotesqueries, anecdotes, and ephemera I have run across, and, on occasion, some down home, ad-hominem rage. One of the targets in the second gallery (p.174-80) is Richard Rodriguez, poster child for all things Chicano--at least as far as PBS is concerned--and our own Chicano curmudgeon narcissist. Here is an updated digital montage portrait of Rodriguez that appears in my University of Texas Press book:



But give credit where credit is due: Rodriguez writes like like he's made a deal with the devil and I might (I said might) have to say as much in print when the second edition of this appears.

Case in point? Turn your clicking mouse here for a thoughtful and probing meditation on Chicano outsider artist Martin Ramirez. Ramirez, a sample of his art appears below, spent much of his life inside an insane asylum, where, speechless, he produced an oeuvre of work that is just now getting its critical day in the sun. More on his work is available at The Fleisher Ollmann Gallery and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Lalo Alcaraz | La Cucaracha | The L. A. Times

Hot off of touting The Los Angeles Times for mentioning my humble tome, now I have to ride them like an underpaid dominatrix for the idiotic decision to stop carrying LA CUCARACHA, Lalo Alcaraz's daily comic strip. It would like the The Columbus Dispatch dropping Peanuts in 1973! Utter madness! Click here for the skinny.

UPDATE
The tide has relented! The LA TIMES has changed their minds and restored La Cucaracha to their daily fish-rap! Sadly for a few feline-fetishistic types, poor Heathcliff has fallen on the sword so that Chicano/a antics can live. RIP Heathcliff!