new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Chicanonautica, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 33
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Chicanonautica in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
It's the year 2015, and looking back at 2014, some interesting stuff has happened, and it has to do with the core Chicanonautic concerns. Seems that science fiction and fantasy – or at least the offical stuff from big time publishers – has discovered diversity, and is giving awards to women of color. Big news! The future and the universe are diverse!
Since I've been doing this for decades, and jumping up and down screaming to get people to notice, I have mixed feelings about it. I was diverse before diversity was cool.
I remember when all science fiction was considered trashy, and fantasy didn't quite get picked up on the radar. Getting published was considered a minor miracle, and if you made any real money, maybe you weren't really sci-fi after all.
Add the fact that you might be a Chicano or something weird like that -- well, I had a lot of people look at me like I was crazy and try to talk me out of it. I guess I got used to it. I never did expect much acceptance or cooperation. I figure I'm like movie monster, running amok until the authorities bring in the heavy firepower.
I was out to see if I could get away with things, and I managed to do it.
But the times have changed. Magazines like The Atlanticand The New Yorkerare publishing articles that would have been the stuff of fanzines when I was getting started. The masses eat up sci-fi franchises brought to them by multinational corporations that they know and trust.
Maybe a book or two gets bought now and then, but I don't see my writer friends and acquaintances getting rich.
I'm not getting rich either, but 2014 was a successful year for me. My multi-book deal with Digial Parchment Services' Strange Particle Press is going well. Editors doing “diverse” antholgies are getting in touch with me for stories. And academia has discovered me, so if I play my cards right, my books will taught on campuses all over. My readers, who have been called a “noisy minority” have grown up to be editors, publishers, and professors.
Seems like all the hard work I've been doing for decades is paying off, but I do wonder. I've been right here all along, stomping the terra, and it took this long to discover me. Haven't I been visible or noisy enough?
Maybe it's because I've always been an outsider, waging a guerrilla war for my own existence, that I'm uneasy about diversity in science fiction and fantasy being the coming thing. I don't know how to be in. I don't trust the Establisment. What if they decide that it's just a fad: “Diversity? That so 2014!”
But then, what if writers like me are the coming thing? Science fiction is busting out all over the place, in real life, with changes happening faster and faster. Is it more than a coincidence that this is happening simultaneously with the post-Ferguson racial strife?
The future is coming, and it's looking scary. It'll cause some freak-outs. People are going to need new visions to help them sort it out. Diverse writers with wild imaginations can do that.
Ernest Hogan is the author of the novels Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues. Watch for his story collection, Pancho Villa's Flying Circus.
The year is coming to an end, and is there ever a helluvalota stuff happening . . . but it's Christmas, and I should do a holiday greeting instead. So Merry Christmas, mi gente, from Coatlicue, AKA the Virgin of Guadalupe, with her connection to Mary, mother of Jesus.
Yup, it's Mama Goddess time!
It's totally appropriate, December 12 is Virgin of Guadalupe Day, and I wroteabout it a while back. But what I really want to celebrate is one of the Goddess' great gifts – tamales. They are one of the true markers of the season. You know you've got a bad case of cultural assimilation when you can go through December without a tamale fix.
I live in Arizona, far away from my family in California, so I miss my sister Linda's traditional tamale parties. I definitely have to do something about that. It's been too many years.
Meanwhile, I'm lucky to live in the Metro Phoenix area, where there are more Mexican restaurants per square mile than in parts of Mexico.
Also, my mother-in-law tutors English-As-A-Second language, and has often made connections with students who can supply homemade tamales. I remember this one time we made a buy in a college parking lot, after dark, like a drug deal. I wonder what the police would have thought if they spotted us?
My wife is good at scouting out the local restaurants so we can stock up on supplies for the season.
Ever the neomestizo non-traditionalist, I enjoy zapping them in the microwave, wrapping them in a wet paper towel to make for proper steaming.
I'm just an All-Purpose Heathen Devil, indulging in creative blasphemy for fun and profit.
I figured it could wait.
Then, Matthew Goodwin, editor of the forthcoming Latino/a Risinganthology offered to scan and send me not only the essay about my book, but another that he wrote himself. And they say that the social media is waste of time!
In his essay, “Virtual Reality at the Border of Migration, Race, and Labor” Goodwin proves that he knows what's going on in the wide-ranging, multimedia field of Latino/a speculative ficion in a discussion of three works: “Reaching the Shore” (1994) a short story by Guillermo Lavin, El Naftazteca: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000 (1994) a satellite television event by Guillermo Gómez-Peña (outtakes of it can be seen online), and Sleep Dealer(2008), the powerful film by Alex Rivera. Goodwin points out that The dystopian problems depicted in these narratives are not future fantasies but present-day realities and: The beauty of these artworks is that they imagine highly creative protagonists who use virtual reality for their own purposes and find some way to change reality.
Those things could also be said about my works.
In her “Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan's High Aztech” Lysa M. Rivera not only discusses my work, but getsit:
Reminiscent of Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo(1972) as well as Stephenson's Snow Crash,High Aztech is pure Chicano cyberpunk.
But what is Chicano cyberpunk?
At once an aesthetic and a survival mechanism, rasquachecomes closest to describing Chicano/a cyberpunk production, which also transforms a found object (in this case, classic cyberpunk) by repurposing it to speak for a cultural underdog . . .
Creative protagonists again, changing reality!
High Aztechcan be read as a science fictionalization of Vasconcelos's theories of mestizaje.
Yeah, I'm a proud mestizo, believer in mongrel power, and consider impurity a good thing. I consider myself to be a member of La Raza Cosmica, the race that encompasses all other races. I tried to express this in High Aztech.
As a Chicanafuturist text, then, High Aztechnot only explores the effects of technology on people of color but also imagines alternatives to those impacts.
Protesting isn't enough. And I don't see – as some of my peers in decades past did – technology as the tool of the oppressors. Grab the tools, use them to build your world.
Hogan's text functions as a Chicanafuturist narrative not simiply because it is SF written by a Chicano but more specifically because it adopts a critical stance similar to an Afrofuturist.
I was doing postcyberpunk back when cyberpunk was just beginning. Afrofuturists have told me that High Aztechinfluenced them.
For Hogan and others like him, the motifs and metaphors of SF are best suited to counterdiscource, not escapist literature.
Escapsim is not enough. Contemporary, corporate-generated sci-fi tends to create escapist modules for oppressed consumers to retreat into. In books like High Aztech I hope to give people ideas as to how they can change their assigned realities.
Learning to survive in heterotopia requires a new way of being in the world, and what better genre is there than SF to make this happen?
Heterotopiameans the modern, urban multi/recombocultural environment, NOT a utopia based on the philosophy of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy Magazine . . . you really do need to exist in new ways there. And like I've said, Chicano is a science fiction state of being.
And a friend has offered to buy a copy of Black and Brown Planets for me. I will review it here.
The world may once again be in turmoil, but I'm feeling great, ready to take it on!
Ernest Hogan's High Aztech will be re-released new, improved, ebook and softcover Strange Particle Press editions from Digital Parchment Services in 2015. Meanwhile, buy their new Cortez on Jupiter. And buy and give La Bloga authors for the holidays.
2014 just wants to keep on running me ragged. Things keep happening (besides the riots and the racial strife). Not only is the new Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press ebook of Cortez on Jupiterorderable, but the press release is available, so you can read about the impending soft-cover edition, find out where to write about getting review copies, and read quotes of wild praise for the book.
If that isn’t enough, Digital Parchment has started a new Ernest Hogan blog so they can promote their editions of my books. They also started an Ernest Hogan Tumblr. I’ll be posting stuff on both of them, so check ‘em out!
Which brings me to the main subject of this post . . . the writer Nalo Hopkinson, who teaches at UC Riverside, sent me a direct message on Twitter (most of my sales and gigs these days come through the social media) asking if I would be willing to lead a workshop “on writing Latino-focused SF/F/H,” because “The community has been asking for it.” Ever the professional, I asked if it was a paying job, and it is, so it looks like in February 2015 I’ll be teaching a master class (hey! I’m an expert in the field!) as part of their Writer’s Week. I will provide more details as I get them.
2015 and February are coming at us fast. I need to think about it, and take some notes . . . I could fill the time with funny stories about my weird career, but since this is a university thing, I should probably ask the communitythat Nalo was talking about what theywant. I’m assuming that a lot of you aspiring Chicanonauts read La Bloga.
So, what would you like to know about writing Latino-focused speculative fiction/fantasy/horror? Are there specific questions you’d like answered? Just what can I do for you?
I’ll be waiting for your comments . . .
Ernest Hogan has accumulated a lot of ancient Chicano Sci-Fi wisdom over the years. He’s willing to share it. Especially for money. Or food. Or cerveza. Oh yeah, feliz Día de Los Guajolotes.
It’s the end of October, and it’s happening on a weekend: Halloween and Los Días De Los Muertos, that I modestly proposed be made into a three-day fiesta in my novel Smoking Mirror Blues.
And we see her, popping up on the interwebs, and coming to your barrio soon -- La Catrina, the skull-faced lady with the fancy hat.
She first showed up in a zinc etching by José Guadalupe Posada somewhere around 1910, 1913-ish -- ¡LA REVOLUÇIÓN! Posada intended her as a caricature of the rich, catrina, in spanish meaning well-dressed, rich, fop, dandy.
The etching, and image, without the benefit of an internet or social media, struck a cord with Mexican culture, and became a popular icon.
Diego Rivera modernized her between 1947 and 1948, providing her with dress and feathered serpent boa in his mural Sueno de un Tarde Dominical en La Alameda Central -- originally in the Hotel del Prado on Alameda Park, but moved after the building was damaged in the earthquake of 1985 and torn down. It’s now in the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City, Tenochtitlán, La Capital Azteca. Rivera also made her an avatar of Aztec Mother Godess Coatlicue, adding another layer to her idenity.
Since then, she’s evolved. Today’s Catrina wears the sugar skull face make up, and is glamorous -- taking us back to the 18th century Scots meaning, enchantment, magic, and the fact that the word is an alteration of grammar, which in the Middle Ages refered to occult parctices associated with learning -- and sexy in ways not yet franchised by Hollywood and the fashion industry. It’s a different, subversive concept of beauty, similar to that of the Goths, whose style is being toned down and absorbed by nerd culture, that is in danger of becoming another corporate marketing strategy.
I keep hoping the nerds will see beyond the suburban bubble that they are kept in, get inspired, go wild, and scare the crap out of those who are trying to control them. Encounters with La Catrina can help with this, because no one can control La Catrina. She’s a goddess -- like her sister Santa Muerte -- the return of an ancient, elemental thing that cannot be tamed.
Have a weird and wonderful Dead Daze!
by Ernest HoganSeems I can’t do anything without it causing controversy. Though the overwhelming reaction to the cover of Digital Parchment’s new edition of Cortez on Jupiter had been positive, there has been some objection to Pablo Cortez being depicted as a futuristic conquistador.
I understand people’s reaction to the symbolism. The conquistador in his helmet is seen as a villain while the “pioneer” (originally from the French for “foot soldier” as in “peon”) in his coonskin cap is idolized a hero. But as my great-grandfather Hogan said about the Wild West, who the good guys and bad guys are depends on who’s in charge at the time.
I like the cover. It's similar to an idea I had when the first edition was in the planning stages. The conquistador I envisioned was more of an H.R. Giger monster, but this new one is more commercial -- doing the important job of catching the eye of cybershoppers and getting them to read the synopsis.
A good book cover makes people think, “What the hell?”
Also, in way, Pablo Cortez is a conquistador. He conquers, not Jupiter, but the society he lives in.
Like it or not, as Hispanics/Latinos/Chicanos/Nican Tlaca we carry conquistador DNA. Otherwise we’d be Indians. It’s our whole hijo de la chingada thing, or as my grandmother once so delicately put it:
“The soldiers would come into the villages, and take the girls away on their horses . . . and then they would be their wives!”
We live in a world they made -- especially here in Aztlán, where we walk in their footsteps, and the extermination of the natives was not complete, the difference between Nueva Hispana and New England.
As I wander like Don Quixote seeking adventures or like the Aztecs searching for the place to build their metropolis, I often feel like a doomed warrior on an absurd mission in an alien land. Though I do identify more with Cabeza de Vaca and Estevanico than Cortés, Pizarro or Aguirre.
Hmm . . . Was Columbus a conquistador? He was working for the same bosses.
It’s given me ideas that I may never get around to writing:
What if space explorers acted like conquistadors rather than idealistic bureaucrats?
What about a badass mestizo gunslinger who wears a conquistador helmet?
Or an Aztec anti-conquistador, going to Europe to deconstruct their culture?
Ernest Hogan’s Cortez on Jupiter is available for pre-order for a new Kindle edition with new cover and introduction. There will be a softcover edition, too. Stay tuned for details as they develop.
When I travel, I try to plug into the local media. It gives me clues as to what’s going on, and provides an alternative to my usual habits. And if the ol’ cerebro diabolico gets knocked into a new configuration, so much the better!
Sure, I could have gotten online at the Wired? Cafe in Taos, where we parked next to a guy who looked like a latter-day Quijote/road warrior on the run: His car was dented and mud-spattered. Mud seemed to deliberately obscure the license plate. His door was open, a muddy boot touched the ground as he used a hand-held device.
Screw it, I decided, I’m on vacation.
In these times of vanishing newspapers, I found local papers everywhere in New Mexico. There are even people hawking them at intersections.
In Pojoaque, I picked up a gratis copy of El Semanario de Nuevo México, “El Périodico de Nuestra Gente.” It’s a modern newpaper with a website, Facebook page and YouTube channel. It also had ads that offered discounts on consulta espiritual, limpias-baño de yerbas, lectura de cartas, aguas espirituales, talismanes, jabones y mucho más.
Unlike Arizona and California, in New Mexico, Latinos -- or maybe I should say Hispanics, are visible, almost a majority, as it should be since some families here have been around since before 1776. They blend with both the Anglo and large, diverse Native populations, but in a different way from the Hollywood ethnic-neutral androids. There are still stories about Hispanic criminals, but they are covered by brown news people. The us/them angle I’m used to seeing is lacking even when the subject of criminals, in the country illegally, comes up.
And there are Hispanic conservatives. (Actually, we have them everywhere, but somehow they don’t get mentioned much.)
Susana Martinez,the Republican incumbent governor, is a Hispanic woman. When she criticizes Washington, it doesn’t sound like she’s running against Obama. In Arizona, you’d think Obama was running for just about every office in the state.
Rio Arriba County Sheriff Tommy Rodella and his son were arrested by the FBI. “The pair were accused of civil rights violations, falsifying documents, and violating federal firearms laws.” Joe Arpaio would be proud.
There are more Spanish TV channels -- not just Univision and Telemundo, you can see Latin music videos, and catch a Chinese martial arts period pieces dubbed into español.
A PSA from the Santa Fe police kept popping up in which brown officers showed off shiny, new SWAT and riot gear, explaining how it's all to promote “diversity.”
Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, folks protested the upcoming NRA Police Shooting Competition because officers involved in recent fatal shootings were slated to participate (then backed out). “Many of those protesters have been affected by officer-involved shootings in the city. They say the competition is an insult to them and everyone else.”
Back in Santa Fe, the city council voted to decriminalize the “possession of less than one ounce (28 grams) of marijuana.” Which, of course, caused more controversy.
Looks like the near-future in New Mexico is going to be interesting.
Ernest Hogan is an Irish-Chicano whose family came from New Mexico. The new Kindle edition of his novel Cortez on Jupiter is available for pre-order.
by Ernest Hogan
In this era of the vanishing bookstore, I find a lot of books in antique stores. That’s where the title Rex Lee On the Border Patrol snagged my eyeballs. I yanked it off the shelf, eager to check out the cover, and was surprised. Instead of the six-guns and somberos pulp art there was a twisted view of a smoking World War One biplane and a guy falling to certain death.
Confused, I turned to the front flap of dust jacket:
“Framed” by Dave Fitzpatrick, the powerful and notorious Texas border criminal, Rex Lee faces disgrace. A quantity of opium, “planted” by Fitzpatrick, has been found in the ship of the intrepid young flyer, and he is accused of being a smuggler. But, Rex’s father is a power in Texas politics and soon strong influence are at work to bear Fitzpatrick and prove the air hero’s innocence.
The book's hooks dug into my curiosity. Copyright date was 1928. And the frontispiece was more like I was expecting: a scene of stiff figures and awkward perspective in which a sombrero was sent flying by the impact of an all-Americano fist.
On the back cover, the publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, touted the author, Thomson Burtis as a real life version of the rootin’-tootin’, rip-roarin’ hero:
All the air lore and thrilling exploits of the author’s own experiences as an army flyer have gone into this red-blooded series of a daredevil young American who became one of the country’s greatest heroes of the sky.
Like a lot of writers, Burtis has a variety of other jobs: postal clerk, hobo, actor, writer, mutton-chop salesman, preacher, roughneck in the oil fields, newspaperman, flyer, scenario writer in Hollywood and synthetic clown with the Sells Floto circus!
Rex Lee is literally a cowboy with a plane instead of horse, back from the GreatWar, ready to take on the world. The western genre updated for the new century. He was like a lot of other pulp heroes of the time, a brother to the two-fisted heroes in Amazing Stories, that included Buck (called Anthony in the magazine stories) Rogers.
Though essential to the plot, drugs aren’t a big part of the story. The opium planted in Rex’s plane isn’t described. The effects of drugs on people or society aren’t mentioned. It’s like the film La Banda De Carro Rojo, based on Paulino Vargas’ pioneering narcorrido, with Los Tigres del Norte acting as a musical Greek chorus, where the drugs don’t make it on screen. Also like Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly, where Robert Aldrich had no trouble changing Mike Hammer’s adversaries into dealers of radioactive materials rather than heroin.
Drugs are just an excuse for daring-do.
And even though the book has the expected 1928 racism, Mexicans turn out not to be the brains behind the drug smuggling. There’s a stereotypical bandido from whom the hero rescues a pretty white girl -- she's also from a "good" family -- but the illegal operation is run by an Anglo American corrupt business/gangster (is there a difference between the two?) who takes over a border town, and brings in Mexicans to do the heavy lifting and thug-work
As it’s explained to Rex: “It’s a teeny little place, as you can see, but there’s something funny about it. Awful lot o’ spigs here, and hardly a single negro. Pretty rough sort of gang o’ whites and about half of ‘em don’t seem to be doing a thing to justify living.”
Like some folks here in Arizona have explained to me: “We won’t have crime if we just keep the Mexicans out.”
We still have Mexican bad guys, and all these years later, they aren’t evil geniuses. Maybe what 21st century pop culture needs is a Mexican supervillain, like Fu Manchu, who can take on the likes of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. It would be nice if we could be feared for our diabolical brains for a change.
Ernest Hogan is back from a vacation in New Mexico. He’ll now be blogging about it, and working on the new editions of his novels, and his first short fiction collection.
Once upon a time, before the Internet, I was turning in episodes of Brainpan Fallout on a floppy disc (remember them?) in a Mexican restaurant. I was careful not to get salsa on them. “This is like one of your stories,” someone said.
As a science fiction writer, I don’t try to predict the future. I just have a feeling for changes I see happening and wonder What If, and If This Goes On. When I first started projecting Aztec and other preColumbian cultures into the future, it was seen as far-out and esoteric. Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues weren’t considered to be very bloody likely.
Now, in Silgo XXI, people keep telling me that the news seems like my stories, especially when things preColumbian manifest.
Officials in Mexico City's governing body estimate that a decade ago there were about 50 Aztec revivalist groups in the capital. Today there are closer to 300, all part of a movement calling itself La Mexhicanidad, one of the fastest-growing urban subcultures around. Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard wants all city employees, from hospital workers to bus drivers, to learn the Aztec language Nahuatl in an effort to revive the ancient tongue, the city government said.
And more recently, in a piece that compared the Aztecs to the Nazis, and criticized multiculturalism: Imagine an alternative history where the Aztecs sail across the Atlantic Ocean to set up their pyramids of sacrifice in Paris.
And there are those who have given the Aztecs a New Age makeover, convinced that they were all really peaceful vegetarians, and all that talk about war and human sacrifice is just racist propaganda. You can see them climbing Teotihuacán and Mayan pyramids to recharge their energy on the Equinox.
More akin to my NeoAztecs and Aztecans is the Mexica Movement. Mexica being what the Aztecs called themselves. Their website is interesting, going beyond the Chicano Movement’s visions of Aztlán. All the native peoples of the Américas including the mestizos (a word they don’t like) are one people, the Nican Tlaca, and their nation is Anahuac.
The United States of Anahuac . . . hmm . . .
Other words they reject are Hispanic and Latino, which they consider racist nods to European cultures.I’d quote from them, but their homepage warns, in bigger letter than these:
ALL MATERIALS
COPYRIGHTED
DO NOT STEAL
They also have a page to help those who want adopt Nahuatl names. I remember how thirty years ago, I was excited at meeting girls named Xochitl. These days I run into a lot of Nahuatl and Mayan names on Twitter and Facebook. Welcome to my world.
Meanwhile, our culture here in Anahuac is going Aztecan. Young people are being sacrificed, by each other, and by militarized law enforcement agencies. I wonder what gods they are being sacrificed to.
Ernest Hogan is addicted to getting published and to committing acts of creative blasphemy. He’s found people who think it's amusing, and who help him. He has made sacrifices over the years, and now there’s no stopping him.
A while back, the subject of why there aren’t more Latino science fiction/speculative ficton/fantasy writers came up, and I don’t think we found a clear reason. It’s probably the same reason that we don’t see more Latino writers in general -- it’s usually not profitable, and we tend to end up doing other things just to survive. My father wrote, even published a few articles, but he had to work, keeping Flying Tiger Airlines’ planes flying to get the money to support his family. I imagine all Latino families have stories like that.
Another reason is that being a writer is something you are doomed to, like bearing the Mark of the Beast. I disagree with the cottage industry that claims anyone can be a writer if you just take their classes, go to their seminars and workshops, follow their rules and instructions. I don’t think that everyone should be a writer any more than we should all be bullfighters or astronauts. You gotta have the right stuff, cabrónes!
My idea of mentoring an aspiring writer is to say, “Okay! You wanna be a writer? Be a writer! Go do it!” Some of them do. Others need more help from me. If you need more help from me, you don’t have it. I feel like an old junkie listing to young hipsters saying, “I really want to get hooked, but I keep forgetting to take my shots . . .”
Encouraging people to be become writers is like helping them to become drug addicts -- a sort of Twelve-Step program in reverse.
I ended up a writer because I couldn’t quit. At age thirteen, I published a few letters in comic books, and I was hooked. From my typewriter to the world! What a thrill!
Lately I realize that I’m one of the most successful Chicano writers of my generation. If we narrow it down to science fiction, I’m number one!
It’s a cheap thrill I chuckle at as I work at my day job.
If I hadn’t had that taste of publication, I probably would have just done my creative stuff in private, like most Latinos. I ain’t no humble campesino toiling away in dignified anonymity -- if too long goes by without my being published, I get really depressed. And without thinking about it, I’m scanning for opportunities.
And I feel bad about my unpublished novels and stories.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, my career has a life of its own. It does things out in the world without my supervision. And these days, I spend more time managing it than writing.
And to think, once I believed I was a failure, after not being published in Nueva York, and only getting into print a few times a year (and not making much dinero at it). I got a full time job and slowed down -- or at least thought I was slowing down. Turns out I kept on publishing at the same rate as when I was knocking myself out.Also, it turned out that people actually read my novels and the weird, obscure magazines where my stories appeared. Some of them went on to become editors and publishers.
Now I’m working with a newfangled publisher in San Francisco, getting my novels ready for rerelease, and putting together a collection my short fiction.
All because I didn’t, and couldn’t, give up.
Still, I wish I was writing new stuff more of the time.
Stuck in Phoenix for another sizzling July, I’m glad I can retreat into the air-conditioning and get on SanFermin.com for vicarious enjoyment the Fiesta de San Fermín (better know as the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain, thanks to Ernest Hemingway). But more goes on at the fiesta than bull running and fighting. It is a religious and cultural event. And controversy spills out of the crowded streets into the rest of the world.
As usual, it started with a protest from PETA that has become the unofficial opening ceremony. Why not? Start by acknowledging opposing veiwpoints. Unfortunately, these productions have gone from making Pamplona look like the set of a surrealistic spaghetti western littered with nude human bodies and splattered with fake blood to timid displays that look like zombies celebrating Día de los Muertos.
In advance, Kate Laycy, a runner up in PETA-UK’s World Sexiest Vegan pagent, announced that, “I'll gladly bare my skin if it will expose the cruelty of the Running of the Bulls and bullfighting.” When the protest finally happened, there was a fully-clothed woman who looked like her, but I couldn’t tell from the one video I could track down. Maybe it was because she wasn’t wearing makeup. Maybe that’s what she meant by baring her skin.
Or maybe she was honoring the city of Pamplona’s official ban on the public showing of breasts. This transplant from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras has taken root in San Fermín. There have also been rapes, so the city has cracked down.
Last year they came out against fountain jumping -- in which people dive off fountains to be (hopefully) caught by the crowd. Though, fountain jumping and breast showing still go on.
A ritual has evolved where a woman rides a man’s shoulders (like a bullfighter being honored) and men crowd around to touch her breasts. This is every bit as brave as running with the bulls or bullfighting. Women who do this deserve to be protected.
Men should be caballeros and protect women from attack at the fiesta.
Or better yet, women should be caballeras, and protect each other.
Maybe in the future, Amazonesque caballeras will patrol the streets, ready to use martial arts and light weaponry to prevent rapes.
Those who offer their bodies to the bulls, are another story.
There were a record number of injuries and gorings in the encierros this year. It was the Revenge of the Bulls. Among those gored was American writer Bill Hillmann
Hillmann has just released a book, Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona, that he had written with Alexander Fiske-Harrison and John Hemingway (Ernest’s grandson). Headline writers had fun pointing out the irony. Later, he wrote a first-person account “I Got Gored in Pamplona. But I Will Run With the Bulls Again.” for The Washington Post. And now, no one can deny that he is an expert on the subject.
And of course, there was bullfighting. Juan José Padilla, Borja Jiménez and El Juli wowed the crowds. And despite what the protesters say, everyone know that the bulls die -- it’s done in public, in broad daylight, the press is there, and you can watch videos on the interwebs.
Some people are predicting the end of bullfighting in this century, with the “anti” movements in various countries. But the pendulum swings.
Spain has declared it an Intangible Cultural Heritage, and is petitioning UNESCO to add it to the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritiage of Humanity.
And even if it’s banned in Spain and Mexico, there are so many other countries.
Did you know that bullfighting is legal in France? They do it in ancient Roman arenas in Nîmes and Arles.
I wonder if it would ever be legal in the U.S.A, or at least, once again, Aztlán? Not far from were I live is the University of Phoenix Stadium -- it’s been used as many other things, so why not a bull ring? And we could set up a corridor for the encierros in the parking lots . . .
Ernest Hogan moved this year’s report on San Fermín to La Bloga to connect Latino culture with the rest of the planet. !Viva la Raza Cosmica!
While going over my notes from my latest road trip with my wife, I felt good. Damn, I almost said aloud, I’m really good at Americana.
But then, when I do it, and put it out for the world to see, it becomes Chicanonautica. Even when readers don’t now anything about me, my point of view comes through loud and clear. I can’t help it.
In a motel in Flagstaff, I channel surfed through an alarming number of TV news stories about racism. An election is coming, and The Border is becoming an issue again. Rumors of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and Aztlán secessionistas are being dusted off, and thrown into the hysteria mills. As one of the anti-immigration protestors in Murrieta, California said, “We want to be safe.”
I’ve seen it happen in Arizona . . . a few Spanish words, some brown skin, and -- PANIC ATTACK!
And with the gradual militarization of The Border, who knows what kind of back up would be called?
So I shouldn’t be surprised when someone finds it odd that I’d write about America as an American, even though I was born in East L.A., but I’ve always resented it when someone decided that I didn’t look “American” enough for them.
I had mixed feelings when I saw Oscar Zeta Acosta in an anthology of “Latin American” writers. It was nice to see him with all those classy foreigners, but doesn’t he get to be considered an American writer?
Do I get to be considered an American writer?
Acosta had to sue Hunter S. Thompson to get his books published. It’s still not easy for a Chicano to break into the white man’s publishing industry.
What would happen if a Chicano wrote the Great American Novel? Our families have incredible stories of the American Dream.
Hmm . . . Could the Great American Novel be about an illegal alien? Because, aren’t we all illegal aliens under the skin, kemosabe?
Naw, better let it drop. New York wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Another one of those brilliant ideas that “they” don’t know how to market.
Or are they just afraid?
Or maybe it’s just nostalgia for when American literature was hammered out by heroic, white, male alcoholics on manual typewriters, and U.S. immigration policies inspired the Nazis.
People wonder why I stick to surreal, pulpy sci-fi instead of going for proper literature . . .
Meanwhile, it’s time to check out the online coverage of La Fiesta de San Fermín AKA “The Running of the Bulls” in Pamplona. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises doesn’t do justice to what the Fiesta has evolved into. I’ve really got to get back to work on my futuristic bullfighting novel.
Ernest Hogan wishes a rapid and successful recovery to Bill Hillman, the American writer who was gored in Pamplona this week.
I’m developing some funny reactions when I hear or see the word “diversity” -- especially when concerning science fiction, speculative literature, or what ever we’re calling that twisted wad of imaginative genres today. It happened when I read Rudy Ch. Garcia’s recent La Bloga post. Before I knew it, I had tweeted:
I was diverse back when it scared the shit out of people.
Right away my friend Selina Phanara reminded me that I still scare people “plenty,” and Bill Campbell of Rosarium Publishing remarked that “I think it still kinda does.”
Yup. Diversity still does kinda scare the shit out of people. It's just that nowdays, it’s supposed to be a good thing, what we’re all working for in this here civilization. You can still be scared of it, but you have to grit your teeth and look brave.
Reminds me of some old job interviews where the interviewer would turn a shade paler and give me a forced smile. It was as if I was H.R.Giger’s Alien, drooling slime and deploying the inner jaws. It would have been hilarious if I didn’t really need a way of making a living at the time . . .
Long before everybody was talking about the need for diversity in sci-fi, people in the genre would go around congratulating themselves about how they were always promoting “tolerance” -- and you’d always be running into stories where caucasians would learn that people with green skin, that looked like giant insects, could be okay folks.
Tolerance ain’t so great. Ever been around people who were “tolerating” you? And trying hard not to notice the color of your skin? Talk about quiet horror.
After all the stories where the hero shoots first and asks questions later, the subject of tolerance usually came up when trying to sell sci-fi to a highfalutin audience.
So now there’s all kinds of talk about diversity and sci-fi, and since I’ve been tilting with this windmill for about forty years it brings back memories, and the desire to speak out.
Even back in the Seventies, diversity was considered desirable. It would bring prestige, if done right, so it doesn’t scare away the perceived predominately white audience. You couldn’t go too far. Make it like “mild” salsa . . .
Ocatvia Bulter, Samuel R. Delany and Steven Barnes would be interviewed and discussed, but somehow, their race wouldn’t be mentioned. Better not bring it up. The audience may be disturbed.
Diversity was desirable, but wasn’t considered profitable. The audience was seen to be white folks from the Midwest. And not everybody liked sci-fi. What would happen to the profits if they lost the racists?
Of course, it’s the 21st century now, a new millennium. The publishing world is in turmoil. Ebooks are rocking their universe, which is no longer centered around New York City and a white elite.
And when they go out to meet the audience, more and more of them aren’t white.
It scares them.
Kinda like I scare them. And for me, it ain’t fun until it gets scary.
In the next few years, where books come from and how people get them will change radically. Diversity will be necessary for survival in this brave, new global village.
Or will it be a global barrio? Or an intergalactic barrio?
Hollywood and the surviving publishers will follow, not lead.
Ernest Hogan is a Chicano science fiction writer, an unlikely thing to be, but he really had no choice.
A strange phenomenon has been popping up. Hispanics -- as the U.S. Census Bureau calls them -- have been changing color. Talk about unexpected mutations.
Slate used George Zimmerman as an example of the New Whiteness.
An estimated 1.2 million Americans of the 35 million Americans identified in 2000 as “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,” as the census form puts it, changed their race from “some other race” to “white” between the 2000 and 2010 censuses . . .
It reminds me of what I call the Brown Shift in Mexican comic books, which is especially noticeable in westerns (or should they be called norteños?): Mestizos become white, Indians become light brown, and whites look like they should glow in the dark.
Note these Mexicanas confronting gringos in Frontera Violenta, No. 1114:
And blue-eyed Solitario, killing a classic bandido in El Solitario, Jinete Sin Fronteras, No. 50:
It also gets me flashing back to when I was going to college back in the Seventies. I hated filling out forms (and still do) because my reality never fit their spaces and boxes. There was always a nice box for Hispanic but the word was always followed by (Spanish surname only). The only other choices were White, Black, Asian and Other. It pissed me off. So depending on my mood, I’d put myself down as Black, Asian and even Other.
I never put myself down as White. I’d been called a nigger enough times to know that would be pushing things a little too far.
Though people often think I’m white, and complement me on my tan. One said, “I thought you were Jewish -- you’re so smart!”
Whether I’m light- or dark-skinned depends on who’s looking at me.
But do we now have a choice? Can we become legally white?
I imagine a gun-totting Arizona vigilante approaching someone who fits the profile of an illegal alien:
“Do have any I.D.?”
“Sorry, but I consider myself to be white.”
Can Afrolatinos become white? The diverse mestizo gene pool often has people from güero to negrito in the same immediate family. Would a parent or sibling declaring New Whiteness make you white, too?
When La Raza Cosmica meets the New Whiteness, Chicano truly becomes a sci-fi state of being. Or what Chester Himes called the “absurdity of racism.” Or in the words of Ishmael Reed: “it’s not a ghetto -- it’s a galaxy.”
And I’m reminded of Joseph Goebbles once said to Fritz Lang: “We decide who is Jewish or not.”
Ernest Hogan trying to get things done as it gets hotter in Phoenix.
The one-hour hop from Phoenix Sky Harbor to Ontario International Airport is always sci-fi. The landscape from Arizona to California is mostly naked desert with scattered signs of civilization, like a colonized Mars. Could my character, Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, be down there? I really have to finish that novel . . .
The fabled Santa Ana winds were kicking up dust storms around the airport as we landed. Didn’t I just leave Arizona? Later I heard that the wind flipped a big-rig truck on the freeway.
Suddenly, I was in the Mission Inn in Riverside, a Mexicorama-looking hotel consisting of improvisations on Spanish colonial roots. It’s a cluster of ornate bell towers, festooned with flowers, ancient Mexican cannons, and squawking caged parrots. There are also supposed to be ghosts. I felt like I was in steampunk alternate universe, waiting for the next Zeppelin to Tenochtitlán.
All for a Day of Latino Science Fiction.
The hotel had cable, which I’ve been unplugged from for a few years. I channel surfed for signs of Nueva California Latina. The news looked like it was from another world -- Planet L.A. -- of and about Hollywood androids -- a lot of them still bleach-blondes, but more leaning toward a white-washed version of the Post-Racial America delusion. They reported the NBA firing Donald Sterling for racist comments as if it were a moon landing.
Reality is hard to grasp in California -- often folks have to settle for some kind of kinky sci-fi.
I was relieved when Rudy Ch. Garcia called. He and Mario Acevedo were in a bar down the street. Soon the cerveza and nachos rituals were running full blast, especially when Michael Sedano joined us. That, along with the breakfast the next morning with Jesús Treviño got us loosened up and ready for the panels.
The University of California Riverside is the fifth most diverse campus in the U.S.A. Lots of Latinos, blacks, Asians. This was the Nueva California I was expecting. The audience for the panels were just as diverse. They were also lively and responsive.
On young woman asked if there are any traditions for writing Latino science fiction. I told her that no, it was all too new. It’s up to you to create Latino science fiction, kids.
Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita, authors of Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 joined us, saving this from looking like an all-boys club. Once again, I’d love to hear from Latinas who are writing science fiction, fantasy, or just far-out fantastico stuff.
I met science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, and fellow Mothership:Tales from Afrofutuism and Beyond author Jaymee Goh, and had her sign my copy.
In the afternoon the subject was shifted to media in honor of Jesús Treviño donating his annotated scripts for episodes of Star Trek and Babylon 5 he directed to the university.
As with writing, Latino science fiction in the media is just beginning.
Trailers for two the web mini-series Lost Angeles Ward and Generation Last showed racial conflict in futuristic context and an ecological apocalypse that was shot in Mexico. Both took issues on directly rather than created escapist fantasies.
One difference between Anglo and Latino science fiction is that making it to the future is something that can’t be ignored. The future isn’t a given, it will have to be fought for. And if you don’t fight for it, you might not get there.
Science fiction can be a strategy for survival. When the going gets tough, release that incredible rasquache/mestizo imagination.
Even silly mid-century movies like Santo Contra Los Marcianos and El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras are about surviving in the Atomic Age. How are we going to survive in the Information Age?
A grad student mentioned “future-oriented cognitive estrangement” when dropped into a strange, new reality. We need more visions of more futures. That’s futures, plural. Let the Others in, see from their points-of-view.
Latino science fiction can lead us to this -- and beyond.
Yeah, this one-day event was more productive than a lot of three-day conventions that I’ve been to.
And it was well worth revisiting California, that is still like a surreal, artificial construct designed by Frank Zappa and Philip K. Dick, though now Tezcatlipoca seems to be directing.
La Bloga readers may find my Mondo Ernesto serialization of Brainpan Fallout -- a Nineties experiment that went from the Phoenix area coffee house giveaway Red Dog Journal to the infant internet and gained me fans in strange places -- of interest. The main character/narrator/hero is a young Chicano.
And I think I’ve finally gotten rid of all those pesky typos and mistakes that often ruined the jokes. Not that anybody’s complained, or even noticed them all these years.
I didn’t really think much about sneaking in a Chicano -- I had done it in Cortez on Jupiter. I had also researched The Red Dog Journal’s audience, going to the coffee shops, poetry slams, marijuana-choked parties, listening to their conversations. I was trying to create pulp fiction for them. They were predominately white, but considered themselves to be anti-racist, so why not?
I believe that audiences need to be challenged. Since then, as a bookstore clerk I’ve seen how genre readers get bored with the same old routine. They have their habits, but need things stirred up now and then. Maybe the adventures of Flash Gomez in the 20th century would do the trick.
With 20/20 hindsight, Flash was the prototype for the Chicanonaut: A Chicano going out of bounds, crossing the borders of his barrio into strange new worlds.
He wasn’t based on anybody in particular, but after it was going for a while, I saw a Univision news story about young Nueva York bike messengers. One of them said, “Llámame Flash.”
Brainpan Fallout is also an example of my groping for Afrofuturism, or at least an alternative to the all-white future that was still the default setting for most sci-fi. There are black characters involved in cyberpunkish activities, but with their own agendas. This was long before the current postcolonial trends.
I’m glad I had the chance to go mad scientist after things crashed for me, and like Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, that “Everything that was literature has fallen from me.” I recreated myself in my own image, and took the chance to offer some advice to the younger generation as a vato who’d been around on the countercultural merry-go-round a few times on what to watch out for when they finally get flung into the gaping jaws of their future.
It’s also good for some laughs.
Ernest Hogan is busy drawing and writing about luchadores, and preparing to talk about Chicano sci-fi at the University of California Riverside for their Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program.
by Ernest Hogan
¡Guao! I’ve been doing this Chicanonautica stuff for well over three years. About time I pondered just what I’m doing, and what the hell Chicanonautica is, anyway.
I feel like a calaca in a spacesuit here. Just what is this all about?
Some of you may have seen it in a brief premature manifestation -- but that was just me, as usual, stumbling into a new frontier like the slapstick comedian that I am at heart. “One small step for a Chicano --” BANG! CRASH! TINKLE! “I meant to do that . . .”
I had discussed things with Rudy Ch. Garcia, and had the idea to cover the intersection of Latino culture and science fiction/fantasy/the fantastic, and report on developing situations in my home state of Arizona, which has proved to be a constant source of inspiration.
Then I had this drawing (yeah, I’m also an artist, to complicate things) I called “Calacanaut” of a calavera in a space helmet tricked out like a hot rod. Seemed like a perfect icon/alter ego/public persona for this gig.
Chicanonautica seemed like good catch-all label for this free-form rasquache/mestizaje/recombocultural party.
I’ve always been a Chicanonaut, boldly going where my insatiable curiosity led me, even if the dominant society -- and sometimes, even my fellow Chicanos -- didn’t think it was my barrio. Folks keep setting up their borders, and I keep wandering across them, searching for more of my cosmic barrio.
I can’t cross a border/frontier -- frontera, in Spanish means both border and frontier, in direct conflict with Americano Wild West mythology -- without bringing my identity, my skin color, my ancestry, with me. I had no idea that it would be such a big, fat, hairy chingada with Nueva York publishing gangs when I started out to be a writer.
But lately, things have been changing. The publishers who have been marketing sci-fi to nerds for the last few decades are discovering that not all nerds are white boys from the Midwest. Some adjustments need to be made. Suddenly, the imagination and the future are everybody’s intellectual property.
We are in an age of postcolonialsim and Afrofuturism. I’ve got a feeling that Chicanonautica will fit right in.
Besides, I’ve found Chicanonautica to be a good strategy for navigating our transmorgrifying world. I recommend it to you writers and artists struggling in the brave new realities. Go forth, have adventures, report back.
Those reports will read like science fiction.
Ernest Hogan is a Chicanonaut and doesn’t care who knows it. BANG! CRASH! TINKLE!
by Ernest Hogan
When I wrote about Disney’s The Three Caballeros a while back, Tom Miller, author of On the Border and Revenge of the Saguaro told me I should look into the Roy Rogers movie, Hands Across the Border. He didn’t know if the State Department had anything to do with it, but there was Chicanonautica material there.
I've always liked the Roy Rogers universe. It’s full of happy trails, and animals that are so intelligent you expect them to talk. It also takes place in time warp: stagecoaches coexist with trucks, jeeps, and atom bombs. It’s a kind of 20th century American dreamtime where the past is upgraded for the newfangled reality. And it often gets downright surreal.
Hands Across the Border is so surreal it should be considered a precursor to the acid western subgenre.
It begins with a song, “Easy Street.” Roy sings it while riding into the town of Buckaroo, as he passes signs saying: CHECK YOUR CARES HERE AT THE CITY LIMITS AND RIDE ON INTO PARADISE and BEWARE TRAMPS, MOUNTEBANKS, GAMBLERS, SCALLYWAGS AND THIEVES THERE IS ONLY ONE PLACE IN TOWN WHERE YOU ARE WELCOME OUR JAIL! All while the lyrics declare that he doesn’t need money, and “Have you ever seen a happy millionaire?”
Did Sheriff Joe Arpaio ever see this?
Roy’s a saddle bum, or migrant worker, looking to earn his keep by wrangling horses and singing. And he does a lot of both as he saunters into a plot that's mostly an excuse to lead into the songs. Trigger accidentally kills the owner of the ranch, then encourages Roy to convince the owner’s daughter to keep the ranch from getting into the hands of the Bad Guy. Animals often act as spirit guides in the Roy Rogers universe.
Like The Three Caballeros, the story doesn’t directly have a “We gotta make friends with Latinos to defeat the Nazis” theme. Duncan Renaldo -- later know as The Cisco Kid on television -- is the ranch foreman, who orders around the Anglo cowboys, but nothing is really made of it. If there was any guidance from the State Department, it’s in the musical numbers. This really kicks in at a fiesta in the Renaldo characters’ town -- they don’t mention which side of the border it’s on.
There are muchas señoritas at the fiesta. Or at least Hollywood starlets in the appropriate regalia -- at least one was platinum blonde. And here we find a serious connection to The Three Caballeros, one of the señoritas sing “Ay, Jalisco, no te rajes!” song by Manuel Esperón, with Spanish lyrics by Ernesto Cortázar Sr. that was originally released in a 1941 film of the same name starring Jorge Negrete. Hands Across the Border was released on January 5, 1944. On December 21, 1944, The Three Caballeros premiered in Mexico City, featuring Esperón’s music with English lyrics by Ray Gilbert, making it into “The Three Caballeros.”
Cultural appropriation? The State Department in Hollywood? Or is this tune just that catchy?
The Mexicans in the town are supposed to help the ranch train the horses for a “government contract” in some way, buy it’s not shown. The military and the war aren’t mentioned. This is a spectacular race/torture test that the horses -- Trigger included -- are put through that includes explosions and a “simulated gas attack.”
I don’t think poison gas was used in the Second World War. What war are these horses going to be used in? We’re in the time warp again. Is this an alternate universe? On does it take place on a future, terraformed Mars?
This leads into an incredible finale. The opening song declares “We don’t have to flaunt our egos, amigos.” For about fifteen minutes there’s an all-singing, all-dancing recombocultural mashup of cowboy songs, Mexican Music (including an English translation of “Ay, Jalisco, no te rajes!”), and jazz on a stage with crossed Mexican and American flags, and a white line to represent the border. There’s also a violin and a female singer that sound like theremins. And three guys in dresses.
It’s as if Guillemo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra were doing a time travel gig in the Forties
With Latinos becoming the majority in California, and elections coming up, maybe double features of Hands Across the Border and The Three Caballeros should be encouraged.
Ernest Hogan had a Roy Rogers lunch pail in grade school. He lives in the Wild West, where life constantly reminds him that reality is stranger than science fiction.
It sounds like the scenario for a pre-apocalyptic horror/comedy: abandoned chihuahuas breeding out of control, terrorizing part of Arizona. The fact that I first ran across it on a Pocho.com story didn’t help my credulity -- this could be the stuff of satire. But I found the story in other outlets, local television, and even Time.
Some people I told about it laughed, and doubted that tiny dogs could be a real threat.
This brought back an unsettling memory.
Once upon a time, my wife and I worked for a cleaning service. We’re both writers, so getting money can be rough. In this job we were sent to homes and never knew what we’d find. We learned a lot about the private lives of folks who can afford to hire help . . . like the mysterious Mr. Lopez.
Chihuahua skull:
His condo was gigantic and looked like it had been the location of month-long drug orgy. We dutifully scrubbed the cocaine/snot residue off of the glass tables, emptied all the ashtrays and hash pipes. Did I mention that Mr. Lopez was a lawyer?
He left instructions for us to clean the sliding glass door, inside and out. The problem was we would have to open it. That would expose us to Mr. Lopez’s dogs.
They were smaller than chihuahuas, and fluffier. We never got a good look at them. They were in constant, rapid motion in that closet-sized yard -- two blurs of long hair and sharp teeth.
The tree trapped out there with them had all the bark chewed off it.
When they saw us, they launched themselves at the sliding glass door slamming into it at face-level. Arf! THUNK! Arf! THUNK! Arf! THUNK! And they did not stop all the time we were there.
The outer side of the door was a thick smear of dog saliva. Yeah, it needed a good cleaning, but no way were going to open that door. And we didn’t.
Mr. Lopez, who neither we nor our boss ever saw in the flesh, was not pleased. He did not pay for our services. He was a lawyer.
Emily and I still wonder what the hell those dogs were, and where he got them.
But then, this is Aztlán, and we have some strange dogs here, like the chihuahua, and the xoloitzcuintli.
Diego Rivera holding a xoloitzcuintli:
The English-speaking world calls the xoloitzcuintli the Mexican hairless. They still have trouble wrapping their tongues around Nahutal. It may be a while before the xoloitzcuintli becomes as popular as the chihuahua, since it’s not what Western civilization considers beautiful.
Granted, the Nahuatl name translates to monster dog -- so the Aztecs didn’t think it was cute either. You mostly see it in news stories about ugly dog contests.
Something I’ve found interesting is a resemblance to the chupacabras, or at least the Texas blue dogs that in the last few years have been photographed, killed, and called chupacabras. It has the same purple-grey, hairless skin, though it's bigger, with larger fangs. The news stories keep coming in, but what are they, and where did they come from?
Stuffed chupcabras:
Once again Pocho.com put me on the trail to a possible answer via the Houston Chronicle: “Houston animal control officials said they have heard of people trying to breed dogs that look like so-called direwolves from the TV show Game of Thrones.”
Homegrown mad scientists are out there, doing their damedest to make sci-fi into reality. Some of them probably live in the barrio.
Meanwhile, in my neighborhood, there are más y más badass chihuahuas strutting the streets.
But then, Aztlán is the land of the Chichimec -- a generic term the Aztecs used like barbarian that literally translates to dog people, the strangest dogs of all.
by Ernest Hogan
Arizona is weird. People ask me why I live here. I just dig that weirdness.
I also found my wonderful wife here. She digs the weirdness, too. She took the pictures that decorate this post. Ah, the romance of decaying cacti! So freaking beautiful! Beauty should be strange or not at all.
So no one should be surprised that the Arizona state legislature came up with a not so beautiful monstrosity like SB 1062, that expands “exercise of religion” and “state action” to protect businesses, corporations, and “people” from lawsuits after denying services based on a sincere religious belief. Like, if you happened to believe that homosexuality is an abomination, and some sodomites wanted pay you for whatever you do for money, you could tell them to go take a hike. What ever happened to good old-fashioned capitalism? I wonder what such an entity would think if they knew that I’m an all-purpose heathen devil who practices creative blasphemy?
Governor Jan Brewer vetoed SB 1062. These times they are a-changing. She hasn’t hallucinated about human heads being found in the desert lately, and she told CNN: “I think anybody that owns a business can choose who they work with or they don’t work with. But, I don’t know that it needs to be statutory.”
Believe it or not, there are gays in Arizona. A lot of them work in service-related industries. Couples are making wedding plans, and going to California to get married.
There are also a lot of Arizonans who have trouble with people who are different from them. That’s why all the English Only, and anti-immigrant noise. These same people interact with and are served by gays every day, but they can’t tell.
These are the folks who came to Arizona to get away from it all. And they haven’t escaped, they’re just in denial.
Meanwhile, three mountain bikers reported seeing a reptilian humanoid near Tucson: “all of a sudden we see this long figure walking across the trail. He is maybe about 6-foot tall, very very skinny, and it had an awkward gait, like a monkey . . . or a man with a disease, almost robotic, kind of.”
But the creature may have not been male. There are species of lizards that are all female, reproducing through parthenogenesis. Like the New Mexico whiptail lizard who “performs a type of pseudocopulation where two females will act out having sex as if one was a male.”
So, look out Arizona, there is no escape. The lesbian lizards of Aztlán are out there, heading for your place of business, seeking your services.
Ernest Hogan is La Bloga’s Arizona correspondent. He also writes science fiction. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.
Oh yeah. Buffalo Bill has set up shop in Paris. Like a persistent ghost . . .
The Wild West show and the dime novel were the origins of the western genre, which in the beginning was all about explaining just what are all these white people doing in this untamed country? After making his name killing buffalo, William Frederick Cody became the star of dime novels and pioneered the Wild West show: a chimera of theater and the circus that is also an ancestor of performance art.
McNenly’s book is a fascinating account of this business/art form with political consequences. It focuses on the native performers and their transformation from menaces to commercial attraction/myth figures. Faced with the deconstruction of their world, you can’t blame some for preferring show biz to the Office of Indian Affairs’ “civilizing” policies on the reservations.
As Short Boy, put it in 1911: I wouldn’t go back to the reservation for a new rifle and cartridges enough to last me the rest of my life . . . He enjoyed fighting American soldiers “even with blank cartridges.”
In 2004, Kevin “Kave” Dust, who worked at the Euro Disney (with Mickey Mouse) explained: I am protected through the medicine man and my strong tradition. I am still here, still proud, and still alive.
Native Performers in Wild West Show was a rather surreal read for an academic study. It has me rethinking my own Wild West environment, and wondering about futuristic developments.
It also gave me the urge to re-read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. South America’s myths and traditions about native tribes is different than those of the North. No heroic wars romanticized are by popular culture and the entertainment industry. Still, there are parallels to the bizarre world of the Wild West show . . .
The Storyteller of the title is Saúl Zuratas, called “Mascarita” because of birthmark on his face that, along with his being Jewish, makes him an outsider in Peru. He is driven away from civilization and becomes obsessed with the culture of the Machiguenga Indians: “Do our cars, guns, planes, and Coca-Colas give us the right to exterminate them?” He doesn’t want them made into “zombies and caricatures of men, like those semi-acculturated Indians you see in Lima.”
Disgusted by acculturation and assimilation, he wishes that Machiguenga could remain isolated, and their culture preserved in a state of purity. Instead of creating a mestizo identity for the modern world, he goes native, becoming a storyteller for the tribe.
But still, civilization is out there, creeping through the jungle . . .
Meanwhile, in Arizona, I see postmodern Americanos looking for the same kind of purity and spirituality that’s missing in their lives. They often find themselves in the hands of snake oil salesmen. Sedona is an inside-out Wild West show, with high-priced psychics instead of simulated Indian attacks.
Eventually, the entire world could be a Wild West show, but who will be the natives?
If you look at the rodeo coverage in the Navajo Times, these days, a lot of the cowboys are Indians.
Here we are, the year 2013. Are we futuristic yet? What’s a Chicano writer to do in this new spacetime configuration?
I began and ended Chicanonautica last year with the whole Mayanoid apocalypse bruhaha. Glad it’s over. Unfortunately, part of the fallout is that a lot ignorant pendjos are dismissing the Maya as stupid people who predicted the end of the world when it didn’t happen. Actually, the Maya never predicted the end of the world . . . I’ve said it before. Why do I have this feeling that we’re going to need some genuine ancient Mayan wisdom to get through Baktún 14?
I reviewed a lot of books that were of interest to La Bloga readers. I will keep doing that. Despite Junot Díaz getting a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, the traditional, New York-based publishing world is not presenting a lot of Latino writers to the world. Who knows what they’ll be hawking in this post-Harry Potter, post-Twilight, 50 Shades world? And their days as the center of the publishing universe are numbered.
What would global culture be like without the Hollywood/New York axis?
Then there was the Spic vs Spec thing that Rudy Ch. Garcia started. I still say that Chicano is a sci-fi state of being. That goes for various forms of Latino and Hispanic. Did you know that according to U.S. Marshals, “Hispanic” is a skin tone? Welcome to dystopia. Se habla Spanglish.
Funky aspects of La Cultura continue to be my obsession. I will write about Mexican comic books, luchadores, narcocorridos, spaghetti westerns, Spanish-language UFO literature, and other glorious manifestations of Latin creativity. I probably should do more about music and food, which will probably conquer the world eventually.
2012 was another nonstop political firestorm with a lot of flaming caca aimed at La Gente. 2013 promises more of the same. Here in Arizona, Joe Arpaio is still the Sheriff of Maricopa County (where I live!), and we have a lot folks who are hysterical over Barack Obama’s re-election. Just going about my business here is going to present me with a lot material for fiction and nonfiction, and it’s going to be so strange that it’ll be hard to sort out the science fiction from the journalism.
Someday I may have to dedicate a book to the politicians of my home state.
One thing I’d like to do more of are Aztlán travelogues. If I can find any excuse for my wife and me to go off wandering these deserts and mountains, and to report back about the weirdness we find, I’m going to take it. It would be nice to be able to retire and do that kind of stuff full time . . .
And of course that will require funding, so expect more shameless self-promotion. Buy Cortez on Jupiter and Smoking Mirror Blues! High Aztech is coming! Support the Ernest Hogan Defense Fund!
And of course, I’m starting the year with a stack of unfinished business, and new projects that all are stark, raving Chicanoid, because I am who I am. I’m working on novels, a collection of my short stories, new short stories -- and no doubt the unexpected will come crashing in, sending me off in some new direction.
The Maya considered 13 to be a lucky number. We’ll see . . .
Ernest Hogan lives in Arizona. He is a Chicano with an Irish name. His writing is considered science fiction even when he is describing the world around him.
This is going up on December 20, 2012, so Happy New Baktún Eve! Yeah, I know a lot of folks are expecting asteroids, comets, polar shifts, flying saucers, zombies and other madness, but not me. I’ve been through this End of the World thing a few times, and I also know something about the Maya, so I’ve got a few things to say.
Back in the Nineties, I was desperadoing it on an awful temporary job. One of my co-workers had a kidney infection, the other had the Grim Reaper tattooed on each of his skeletal arms. Mr. Kidney Infection went on and on about how he was at an all-day lecture by a “Navajo shaman” who said the world was coming to an end in a couple of months, stating astronomical fantasies out of 20th century pseudoscience rather than Diné cosmology. Mr. Grim Reaper disagreed: “The Bible says the world’s gonna end in the year 2000.” I did my best to stay out of it.
Then there was the whole Y2K thing. Doesn’t anybody remember that? I wonder what happened to all those generators and gas masks people were stocking up on?
And, of course, there’s already a backlash. “If the Mayans say they could predict the end of the world, how come they didn’t see their own demise? Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!” By the way, it’s Maya, not “Mayans.” Maya are the people. Their stuff is Mayan. Talking about “Mayans” just shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The culture of the Maya fell due to drought, small pox, and European invaders, but they did not die off. There are around seven million of them living in southern Mexico and Central America.
I’ve been to Mayalandia. Once you get down to the tropics, deserts give way to jungles, and the people are small and brown with faces out of Mayan art. They often speak the local Mayan dialect instead of Spanish. The names of towns and streets are heavily Mayan.
Also, there are Maya in the United States these days. People who think they are smarter than the “Mayans,” have their heads too far up their butts to recognize the Mayas cleaning toilets and mowing lawns in their towns.
What we have here is a case of classic snake oil in postmodern New Age packaging. You didn’t hear about it until the Seventies and Eighties. Before that, the fact that the Mayan calendar ended at Baktún 13 wasn’t considered a big deal. 13 is considered a lucky number, so why not end it there? The alternative would be to keep computing the calendar forever. But the snake oil salesmen got ahold of it, and folks just seem to love hearing that the world is coming to an end.
You don’t have be factual. You don’t have to be accurate. The popular image of the “Mayan calendar” we’re seeing all over the interwebs is really the Aztec Sunstone.
So get over it. It’s just a new baktún. 144,000 days. About 394 years. Plenty of time.
Why aren’t we celebrating beginning of Baktún 14, or the restarting of the Long Count cycle, the Sixth Sun? What’s the matter? Don’t you want a future? Happy New Baktún, cabrónes!
Manuel Ramos’ post, “Golden Age for Writers?” got me thinking. Rudy Ch. Garcia’s “If not the Golden Age of latino writing, no importa” made me feel that I had to say a few things about the subject. After all, I’ve had such a long and glorious career . . .
Back in the Seventies, in the wake of the Chicano Movement no one encouraged me to become a writer. Teachers, and other people in authority tried to talk me out of it; they warned me that it could lead to a life of poverty -- they were right, but I did it anyway. The struggle has been epic.
These days I’m amazed at the subculture of support that has developed for wannabe writers. When I was starting out, it was me against the whole pinche world. Today’s aspiring writers lack that certain quixotic fighting sprit. They -- and their potential readers -- are the poorer for it.
When I started out, I didn’t make a big deal out of my ethnicity. Just getting published was hard enough. Also, I figured that it shouldn’t matter. It was the early Eighties by the time I started selling stories. Hadn’t the world advanced beyond that?
Apparently, it hadn’t.
Because of my name from my New Mexico Irish connection, folks in places like New York assumed I was a white guy.
“You’re really brave -- writing about blacks, and minorities, and stuff -- they get offended, you know!”
Not being one to try to “pass,” I let my Latinodad be known, and it turns out it was an issue. Nobody ever said it plainly, but once they realized they were dealing with a Chicano, the New Yorkers all started acting funny, uncomfortable . . . Then there was the guy who refused to shake my hand or even talk to me -- and the other one, who saw me and took off running.
Suddenly, “the audience” had a problem with me. I shouldn’t have been surprised when nobody in New York would buy my novels -- for years. They would politely flatter me, then tell me how their readers just don’t buy my stuff. Sure, there were some who thought I was some kind of genius, but they were a “noisy minority.”
I used to take it personally, but now I see that this was the time when the New York publishers went under corporate control. Working at Borders, I saw that modern fiction consumers were programmed to buy entertainment modules produced by multinational corporations that, as one woman informed me: “will keep your mind off things when you’re waiting at the airport, but if you lose it and can’t finish it -- it doesn’t matter.”
That is now changing, thank Tezcatlipoca.
I just kept on writing, and sending stuff out, and getting published now and then by small presses and various weird venues. I like to say that I keep one foot in the underground so I’ll have a place to stand.
So I didn’t get rich. I’d starve without a day job. But I’ve had a career. My novels and short fiction have earned me a reputation, so these days, I usually get published as the result of an editor getting in touch with me.
Things are better in the 21st century. And it’s not just my stubbornness and the fact that I'm not afraid of poverty -- the interconnected social and technological revolutions are a big factor.
Before I plugged into the social media, a lot of people thought I was dead. It was lonely in the old days. You could publish something, then nobody would notice, and you could disappear. Now you can hang in there, like a guerrilla in the interwebs.
So it ain’t as bad as it was. Though I often think that if my writing brought in more actual money, this age would seem a lot more golden. Then I remember that the Aztecs didn’t value gold the way Western Civilization does. They though it was pretty, but it was the excrement of the gods.
Ernest Hogan had been called a “precusor of modern Chicano spec lit,” “Vintage Gonzo Chicano SF,” and “a mad, Mexican Hunter S. Thompson,” among other things.
So here we are. 2012, and the Mayan Calendar -- that may actually be the Olmec Calendar -- are coming to an end. October’s coming to an end too. And you know what that means . . . Halloween . . . then los Días de los Muertos . . . put them together, and you’ve got Dead Daze!
And these are going to be extra special Dead Daze, because my novel, Smoking Mirror Blues, will be FREE from the Amazon Kindle store from October 31st to November 4th. That’s Halloween, both Days of the Dead, and an extra Saturday!
Sunday, it goes back up to $2.99. There are those who would say that continuing this to Sunday would be blasphemy. Then there are others who would relish the blasphemy of buying Smoking Mirror Blues on the Sunday after Dead Daze.
I’m also offering snippets from the novel and its reviews, as well as suggestions for music to read it by on Facebook, Twitter, and my blog. Come on down, and join the party!
Like I’ve said before, I think that Dead Daze is a good idea. Let's make it a real transborder event, taking it beyond the hipster holiday that it has become.
Can we remember our dead loved ones, celebrate our cultures, and let loose our imaginations all at the same time for three fantastic days? I think we can, and should.
Or as President Malcolm Jones says in Smoking Mirror Blues:
I think it's a very American phenomenon -- the creation of a new culture and new traditions out of those that are coming together in Southern California.
And we’re seeing interesting developments in Mexico with megaofrendas becoming larger than life walk-thru environments. What will happen when cyber and robotic technologies are plugged in? I can hardly wait!
Who knows? Maybe some recombocultural celebrating can help solve our border conflicts?
Welcome to the Global Barrio! Next stop, the Galactic Barrio!
Ernest Hogan’s novels Smoking Mirror Blues and Cortez on Jupiter are back from limbo as ebooks. His recombocultural classic High Aztech will be ebookized soon. Tezcatlipoca whispers into his ear.
View Next 7 Posts
Suerte, 'Nesto in your 13 adventures.
You two got a place to stay in Denver, whenever. A back patio to compose on, a front patio to imbibe una Negras.
RudyG
Good to know. I'll take you up on it sometime.