Description
Book SynopsisAn original, provocative, and highly entertaining deconstruction of familiar Mexican stereotypes in American popular culture.
Trade Review"Marvels! Rompecabezas! And cartoons that bite into the mind appear throughout this long-awaited book that promises to reshape and refocus how we see Mexicans in the Americas and how we are taught and seduced to mis/understand our human potentials for solidarity. This is the closest Latin@ studies has come to a revolutionary vision of how American culture works through its image machines, a vision that cuts through to the roots of the U.S. propaganda archive on Mexican, Tex-Mex, Latino, Chicano/a humanity. Nericcio exposes, deciphers, historicizes, and 'cuts-up' the postcards, movies, captions, poems, and adverts that plaster dehumanization (he calls them 'miscegenated semantic oddities') through our brains. For him, understanding the sweet and sour hallucinations is not enough. He wants the flashing waters of our critical education to become instruments of restoration. In this book, Walter Benjamin meets Italo Calvino and they morph into Nericcio. Orale!" David Carrasco, Harvard University
Table of Contents
- Nonhallucinatory Prefatory Palabras...
- Backstory: A Decidedly Odd Tale of What Happened When Hollywood Killed Vaudeville, Postcards Boomed, and the United States Invaded Mexico
- Seductive Hallucination Gallery One | An Interstice. Being the First of Several Summary Interruptions of the Drearily Semantic in Favor of the Deliciously Semiotic, a Frontera of Sorts
- Chapter One. Hallucinations of Miscegenation and Murder: Dancing along the Mestiza/o Borders of Proto-Chicana/o Cinema with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil
- Chapter Two. When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor
- Chapter Three. Autopsy of a Rat: Sundry Parables of Warner Brothers Studios, Jewish American Animators, Speedy Gonzales, Freddy López, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium; Parable Cameos by Jacques Derrida; and, a Dirty Joke
- Chapter Four. Lupe Vélez Regurgitated; or, Jesus's Kleenex: Cautionary, Indigestion-Inspiring Ruminations on "Mexicans" in "American" Toilets
- Seductive Hallucination Gallery Two | An Interstice the Second. Being a Second Archive of Visual Pathogens
- Chapter Five. XicanOsmosis: Frida Kahlo and Mexico in the Eyes of Gilbert Hernandez
- Conclusion: (with apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche) "Have I Been Understood? XicanOsmosis versus the Tex[t]-Mex"
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Credits
- Index
