9.14.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Once again, I rely on a couple of reruns to fill the pages of Arrob@’s online wonderfulness—here, two recent dispatches from the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, where I usually hang my semiotic sombrero:
Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine continues to emerge as the premier treasure trove for stereotypes-seeking cultural studies workers probing the backstory for anti-Mexican loathing--enjoying a Trump-led renaissance these days.
The March-April edition of Prize Comics Westernhit the newsstands in January of 1950 and this issue has a treasure trove of findings for you, my fellow stereotype-hunters! Penciled by M. Bailey, the story has everything--gore, hangings, treachery etc.--most of it perpetrated by angry, racist gringo Californians hot on the lusty trail for gold, Mexican blood and more!
The star/victim of "Robin Hood of the Sierras" is Joaquin Murrieta, "bandit"/national hero/corrido-fodder from California history. More on Murrieta here. 
For more info on Murrieta, California history, and other alleged "rogues" of the Western era, look up Revolvers and Pistolas, Vaqueros and Caballeros: Debunking the Old West (Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture) by Cuban cultural critic and librarian Danilo H. Figueredo.
Comic scan source? The awesome Digital Comics Museum!Here’s the entire, lurid Murrieta saga, warts and all:
9.12.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
I remember the day clearly, the contours of the memory etched onto my synapses with a glaring lucidity.I am a new professor at SDSU in the Fall of 1991—recently of UConn, I have opted to leave my job there midstream and cast my lot with fun-in-the-sun Southern California.In the English Department at SDSU, my administrative coordinator was Barb Schloss, no one’s fool—she was a tough as nails, SoCal blonde, who liked things done the right way—her way! Picture Janet Leigh from Touch of Eviland Psychobut with the impatience of a German train conductor.
I strolled into the office, then in the bewildering Adams Humanities building, with my new syllabus for my first class at SDSU—at the time, I was into the cut-and-paste-look of 80s-era ‘zines and my syllabus looked more like an Austin, Texas rock poster than a proper college syllabus.
© MICAEL PRIEST. The Ramones& Aalon. Armadillo World Headquarters. 14 July 1977. 17.5"× 11.5".
I can’t find that syllabus in the sprawl of my office, but here is one, from a year later that captures some of that look and another, more recent, and online, that sought to capture that vibe.
Back to my story.So I walk up to Barb with my syllabus and she takes one look at it and is not happy. “English Professors don’t put pictures on their syllabi—I’ve never seen anything like this; English Professors don’t do art.” To this day, the words echo through my consciousness.
The short of it is that she refused to gum up her precious Xerox/Risograph machines with my semiotic (and in her view, semi-idiotic) drivel—I had to run down to Kinko’s and print them out myself.
That incident stayed with me the next year when I started to "do art."I resolved to only publish my art under the name Guillermo Nericcio García, my primo/cousin/artist-nom-de-plume and alter-ego.To this day I maintain a website for his identity.
With my traveling Mextasy show (see the earlier blog posting on Arrob@ below), I have since expanded the part of my universe that dabbles in art—if you are ever traveling (from London to Columbus, Ohio, to Manhattan, to Leiden), look for my “Dawg” tag on the walls and corridors of local dive bars.
All of this as a preface to a brief gallery of my posters that I maintain online.
Please go there and see the whole collection—here I will only reference some of my favorite posters with a line or two about their origins.
1. “Erik Estrada, Lady Magnet”
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2013).
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2013).
Right now I am writing a new book via email with Frederick Luis Aldama, whose prolific textual output makes Jacques Derrida seem like a slacker.The book is called BrownTV and is a theory-laced, illustrated conversation about Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and other Latinx bodies on the boob tube from the 1950s till today. One of the key figures I talk about in the book is heartthrob Erik Estrada—you can see the impact he had on me in this illustration.I love collage as an art praxis and am even fonder of vintage ads from the 1940s-50s.In my art, I like to juxtapose yesterday with the more recent past, always in an effort to foreground spectators, spectators that are always implicit, invisible, or absent in graphic representations of ethnic American bodies.You can see me toying with this above with Estrada the object of affection for gaggles of adoring white housewives, Stepford “dames” besotted with the brown vato’s hot, Latino charmingness.
2. “SPOCK, CHICANO! {MOCK NEWSPAPER HEADLINE}”
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2014).
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2014).
Here’s my description from The Eyegiene/Mextasy Poster Shoppe y Tiendita: “Yet another ridiculous mashup from the imagination of Guillermo Nericcio García--this time the half Vulcan, half Human Spock is revealed for what he was, a weakly ciphered fictional meditation on the mestizaje! That's right, Jewish-American actor Leonard Nimoy, the first primetime Chicano--ni de aquí, ni de allá!”Of course the description is tongue-in-cheek, but not totally.The appeal of the “half-breed,” of the alien mestizaje, in American pop-culture is fodder for current and future American Studies dissertations and books.
And lastly,
3. "Not Chicano #2"
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2008).
© GUILLERMO NERICCIO GARCÍA (2008).
The result of my imagination, a ripped-out, torn magazine ad for Brooks Brothers, a fat sharpie pen, and tape, Not Chicano #2 was the second in a series of graphic experiments that ended up in the traveling Mextasy exhibition.A blend of the obvious (no way those two gabachos are Chicano!), and, perhaps the more subtle (“not Chicano” a possible double double-negative in the Sartrean sense of the “ethnic-existential”), it remains one of my best-selling, most requested graphic inventions.
Watch this space for more to come in the near future at Arrob@.
9.06.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Just have time for a quick posting today on one of my all-time favorite Mexican/Hollywood superstars, Lupe Velez—as an added treat, I include a reposting of a February piece on Lupe from my Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, where I have been blogging since late 2006! That’s right—a decade of postings on “Mexican,” Mexican, and Latinx (Latina/o for the older set) artifacts.
One of my reliable sources of material on Hollywood Mexys is the Heritage Auction house—this morning they dropped this gem into my in-box:
Here is the posting on Lupe from February:"Give Us One of Those Latin Bombshell Dances": Lupe Velez Comic-Generated! Another Great Chapter in the History of Mexicans in American Mass Culture
Time and again I have tipped my sombrero to the remarkable treasures to be found at Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine, but now he has outdone himself with a post that jibes/gels/fuses with my #textmex and #mextasy researches/art/presentations and more.
One of his latest entries is a comic book from 1951 that fictionalizes the life and times of Lupe Velez--the 'Mexican Spitfire' that figures at the heart of my research in Myra Mendible's From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture(University of Texas Press, 2007) and in my ownTex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America(Quality Comics’ Love Secrets #41 [1941], reprinted from Love Confessions #9 [1951].)
Click the images here to be plunged into mexstatic semiotic pleasure or go to Pappy's blog to read the whole story. Read my interpretation of Lupe Velez's life story--her career in cinema and the tragic climax to her life––here.
Click the images here to be plunged into mexstatic semiotic pleasure or go to Pappy's blog to read the whole story. Read my interpretation of Lupe Velez's life story--her career in cinema and the tragic climax to her life––here.
9.04.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
It’s the holiday, so I thought I would throw up a lite posting documenting some of my recent findings as I spelunk dimly lit streets, old junk stores, and the internets in search of #mextasy.
What is "Mextasy?"
A few years after I published Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, Rachael Brown, an artist and professor at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas, asked me if I ever had thought of turning my book into a gallery exhibition. The answer was a resounding "no." I had spent 16 years bringing that magnum opus on Latina/o stereotypes to light—the last thing I wanted to do was to cart up my hoardings of Latina/o art and stereotypes artifacts and put them up in a museum.
Another thing: I am an English professor. While I was a cartoonist in high school, the Ivory Tower has inculcated in me the methodology of the scholar. Museums, galleries, didactics, and the like were mysteries to me. But I did it, and it was a success—here’s a short list of the universities where Mextasy has seen the light of day:
Not too shabby, right, for an English professor! Also, I think I owe Rachael Brown a ton of money.
Lately though, the Mextasy circus/bandwagon has slowed and my analog amassing of stuff has died down as well. But habits die hard, so I have continued amassing a digital online collection of semiotic stereotype-laced wonders. This includes negative Debby-downer anti-Mexican hate stuff like this sign from a Dallas restaurant:
Lately though, the Mextasy circus/bandwagon has slowed and my analog amassing of stuff has died down as well. But habits die hard, so I have continued amassing a digital online collection of semiotic stereotype-laced wonders. This includes negative Debby-downer anti-Mexican hate stuff like this sign from a Dallas restaurant:
and ultra progressive art by Latinx seers whose visionary canvases help us to, er, whitewash, the damaging violence stereotypes wreak on our tired synapses—here, for example, the work of Izel Vargas from the lower Rio Grande valley:
One of the newest places I have been amassing digital artifacts is on Instagram, where I have met scores of cool graphic artists. Here are some of my recent postings.
My good friend Bola Juarez discovered a treasure trove of original movie posters from the span of the 20th century in an old movie house in southern Mexico near Chiapas—I am going to be helping to mount this treasure find as a museum exhibition:
Here’s another shot of this awesome, amazingly preserved artifacts that document a slice of the history of cinema in Mexico:
Some of my most exciting postings are actually repostings of established and new Latina/o graphic artists from across the web. This one by Desirée De León, a 27-year old neuroscience doctoral student from Georgia is evocatively simple, moving, and beautiful:
Of course, also, I include the banal (and also beautiful). A couple of years back I was working with some crazy producers and cinematographers trying to develop an Anthony Bourdain-style travel/culture TV show called Mextasy—you can see a trailer here. The star of that show, in my humble opinion, is my cat, Wallace (who has his own hashtag #WallacetheCat). Here he is in a recent pose:
Last but not least, I do still occasionally collect real, analog artifacts that document the representations of Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, and other Latinas/os in American popular culture—some habits die hard:
9.02.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
An odd claim to fame (and infamy), my work in the Ivory Tower (and beyond) is associated with all manner of manufactured, invented, fabulous, and ersatz “Mexicans.” My first (and only, for now) book, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, does its best to analyze (and, in some cases, vivisect) all manner of invented Latinxers prowling around the infotainment corridors of the Americas—from Speedy Gonzalez and Charlton Heston (Vargas! in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil) to Salma Hayek and Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino, but not even “Mexican” at all, being of Spanish and Irish pedigree).
So collecting (I say it is curating not hoarding) Mexicanesque and Latina/o artifacts takes up tons of my time and crowds most of the alleyways of my imagination.
Case in point and the object of my current obsessions: EL DORADO.
A B-star to be sure in the stable of ABC’sSuper Friends, 1980-82 (think The Justice League of America with hyper foul and cheap limited animation, aka crapimation), El Dorado never appeared in a real comic book—instead, he was an add-on walk-on for DC’s Saturday morning superhero drama.
Take it away wikiworldia: "El Dorado was created solely for the Super Friends cartoons and has never appeared in a DC Comic. He first appeared as minor character in animated shorts that aired in 1981 season and later in Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Showas a full-time member. El Dorado spoke English with an accent, sporadically substituting common Spanish words or phrases, such as adding words like ‘rápido’ and replacing nearly every instance of 'yes' with 'sí.'"
Imagine some peculiar, animated grandfather of Dora the Explorer and you’ve got the right picture. Debate rages regarding his superpowers but they seem to be limited to teleportation and projection using the magic of lovely red cape. No Superman, El Dorado’s main power seems to be his Mexican accent, his uncanny ability to disappear and, for ABC at the time, tap into the growing 'Hispanic' demographic.
Watch for the flash of him toward the end of this clip right after the “Apache Chief,” fodder for a future Native American blog poster!
Sharing secrets time.
...the fun thing about a blog is that it combines the intimacy of a diary with the privacy of an Amsterdam red light district window (aka, no privacy, and, also, a fair amount of exhibitionism)...
...the fun thing about a blog is that it combines the intimacy of a diary with the privacy of an Amsterdam red light district window (aka, no privacy, and, also, a fair amount of exhibitionism)...
My current El Dorado is to add El Dorado, the Super Friend plastic action figure/ersatz "Mexican," to my traveling Mextasy exhibition/museum pop-up show/circus of desmadres. If any of you out there are friends of #Mextasy (search the hashtag on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) and want to send him to me as a surprise gift and want the figure (and yourself, can you say "selfie"?) added to the Mextasy show, write me at memo@sdsu.edu
09.01.16
WILLIAM A. NERICCIO
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
Director, MALAS, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, San Diego State University
One might want to say here that the cultural critic is speechless, that the spectacle of Mexican-loathing Donald Trump flying into Mexico to meet with the President of the land he has built a campaign hating leaves one with little to say save for grunts, maldiciones (that’s "cussing" for my monolingual readers), and high blood pressure. But speak we must even as we lament spilling more ink on a nauseating "short-fingered vulgarian" with a plagiarizing wife, sci-fi hair, and fascist-fueling rhetoric.
Visual critics were some of the first to drop semiotic vitriol on the twin idiots of the North American stage—Peña Nieto presently polling with an approval rating in the 20s and pendejo Trump, the darling of the sheet-wearing set. Here is a random sampling—I am in debt to the Guardian for some of these images.
All over the twittersphere, resurrected images of the Trump “pendejo” meme appeared fast and furious during the day yesterday whilst his Trumpness flew to Mexico—prelude to a ghastly anti-immigration festival he staged last night in Arizona:
Visual critics were some of the first to drop semiotic vitriol on the twin idiots of the North American stage—Peña Nieto presently polling with an approval rating in the 20s and pendejo Trump, the darling of the sheet-wearing set. Here is a random sampling—I am in debt to the Guardian for some of these images.
All over the twittersphere, resurrected images of the Trump “pendejo” meme appeared fast and furious during the day yesterday whilst his Trumpness flew to Mexico—prelude to a ghastly anti-immigration festival he staged last night in Arizona:
The twitter feed of Mexican political cartoonist Luis Cuesta, was particularly engaging between his Dumb and Dumber riff...
...and his pointed cartoon underscoring the perilous position Trump and Peña Nieto share with regard to the American (that’s the United States and Mexico, sportsfans) populace:
Of course illustrated exposés on the Donalds’ idiocy has come fast and furious over the last year—some of the best coming from Latina/o artists. Some of the most pointed political Trump cartoonery (buffoonery meets cartoons) has come from the pen of Lalo Alcaraz, writer, artist, troublemaker, and key contemporary American satirist. Alcaraz is like some cool blending of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift, some untoward fusion of Charles M. Schulz and Che Guevara. In both his political cartoons and his daily comic strip, La Cucaracha, Alcaraz unleashes a flurry of illustrated scalpel cuts—his blend of wit and progressive politics (think Mad Magazine meets The Nation) exposes the fetid underbelly of Trumps’ support network, the phalanxes of multicultural hating Americans who have felt muzzled by political correctness. Alcaraz helps us see and deal with the spectacle of Trump-adoring neo fascists, closeted racists yearning to give voice to their hate.
