by Ernest Hogan
Had me quite a double feature the other day -- two DVDs courtesy of Barrio Dog Productions and Latinopia that blasted me from the past and slung me into the future.
First was América Tropical. I had seen it when it was originally shown on KCET -- L.A.’s PBS affiliate -- back in 1971 when I was still in high school. It blew my teenaged mind, and influenced how I would navigate my cartoonist/writer ambitions. This telling of how a mural by David Alfaro Siquieros was commissioned by an L.A. business man, then whitewashed of its controversial content, helped me focus my concept of what it was to be an artist. The way it created a cinematic time warp to connect the Chicano Movement of the Seventies with what was going on in the Thirties plugged me into history in a way I never felt before.
It also influenced my first novel Cortez on Jupiter. I found myself daring to dream about a Chicano artist taking on a hostile society in the future, and beyond this planet. And when I faced conflicts over my own controversial material, I wasn’t completely blindsided.
The
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