No Need to Call Your Friendly Neighborhood Television Repairperson! It's Just Your #BrownTV

"Don't touch that dial! Stay tuned for the magic of #BrownTV!!!" Next generation cultural studies focused on Latinas,...

Posted by William Nericcio on Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Calling All Hosts! Calling All Hosts! New Purveyors of the Mextasy Traveling Circus of Desmadres (Rasquache, Inc) Being Pursued!

#mextasy, a traveling #circusofdesmadres, seeking hosts for future invasions at your local school, college, university, museum, gallery, or library! learn more here: https://t.co/MssdoqMg6U

The Mextasy Traveling Circus of Desmadres is an itinerant version of #textmex + #browntv! pic.twitter.com/93j5QXBl6c

— William Nericcio (@eyegiene) May 3, 2021

What is Mextasy!? An Introduction to the Pop-Up "Circus of Desmadres" -- A Traveling Exhibition Coming Soon to a Gallery, Museum, or University Near You!

Updated October 21, 2020 | Last updated April 19, 2021

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling pop-up or gallery-based art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The traveling exhibition was originally curated by Leticia Gómez Franco for Casa Familiar, San Ysidro, California, and Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. Upcoming shows are UC Riverside (virtual via Zoom, thx Covid!) and the University of Detroit, Mercy (eventually). Recent exhibitions include shows at Iowa State University and the Nepantla Cultural Arts Center, Seattle, Washington--other noteworthy gigs include performances at Northwestern University, Wabash College, California State University, San Bernardino, and Franklin & Marshall College.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 American Library Association award-winning book with UT Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America. In addition to racist artifacts from American mass culture (the bread and butter of Uncle Sam's unconscious and the backstory for the resurgence in anti-Mexican, anti-Latina/o peoples presently), the show also features works that is "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious fusion of the Mexican/US borderlands/frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious artistic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Rafaella Suarez, and Izel Vargas.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here.

Save Cash + Snag a World Premiere Special Offer for Frederick Luis Aldama's & William Anthony Nericcio's New Book, Talking #BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen ... Pure #Mextasy!!!

Click to enlarge mucho mas bigger!

Posted December 29, 2019 | Updated 4-17-21

Crazy Sale! 

Going on Now! 

¡Venta Venta! 
 

  ¡Venga Venga!  

Hit the "Add to Cart" button above to purchase your own copy of Talking #BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen by Frederick "Fede" Aldama & William "Memo" Nericcio from the Ohio State University Press. Only $28.95 plus 99¢ shipping (Compare to $30 + $3.99 Shipping + tax on Jeff Bezos's evil Amazon portal!).

Here's the advance skinny on #browntv:

Talking #BrownTV
Latinas and Latinos on the Screen 

Frederick Luis Aldama & William Anthony Nericcio 

Like two friends sitting down in front of the television together, in Talking #browntv, Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio dialogue about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities, Aldama and Nericcio analyze the ways in which Latinx performers have been mediated—with varying degrees of complexity—on the American screen. A comprehensive review of the history of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Hispanics, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Latinx performers in television and film, Talking #browntv boldly interrogates one of the largest paradoxes in the history of American television: Why are there so few Latina/os on television, and why, when they do appear, are they so often narcos, maids, strumpets, tarts, flakes, and losers?

“Talking #browntv wakes the world to the urgency for televisual media to willfully recreate the complexity and diversity of our Latinx communities.” —Aitana Vargas, award-winning journalist for the LA Times, BBC, and CNN Expansión 

“My Dinner with Andre, except with two sassy Solons waxing wise and wacky on Slowpoke Rodriguez, Superman as Mexico’s savior, and other highs and lows of Mexican muses in American pop culture. Nomás falta the Tapatio on this intellectual popcorn!” —Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America 

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor and Director of LASER at The Ohio State University and the author, coauthor, or editor of more than thirty books, including Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (Mad Creek Books, 2018). 

William Anthony Nericcio is Professor and Director of MALAS at San Diego State University. He is the author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. 

Streaming Live Today via Zoom and Facebook at 11am PST! #BROWNTV with Frederick "Fede" Aldama and, Yours Truly, William "Memo" Nericcio

SDSU Press proud to co-sponsor this Latinx Studies event today with MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and...

Posted by San Diego State University Press on Thursday, April 8, 2021

Click to enlarge!

2021 MALAS Cultural Studies Lecture Series: Thursday, April 8, 2021 || Live-streamed Public Lecture by Fede Aldama and Memo Nericcio || Talking #BrownTV

What are you up to next Thursday, April 8, 2021? What am I talking about? I'm Talking #BrownTV!

Decoding Latinx Dreams/Nightmares of Speedy Gonzales, Pepe Le Pew, the Frito Bandito, Breaking Bad & Narcos @ProfessorLatinx + @eyegiene

via Zoom https://t.co/tuq7x2ub6K pic.twitter.com/OA6ZKEHkd1

— talking #browntv (@browntv12) April 3, 2021

Check it out! The Book Trailer for TALKING #BrownTV by Frederick Luis Aldama and William "Memo" Nericcio! Televisual #mextasy!

 

Mextasy Limited Edition Poster + My Initial Lesson in Semiotics -- THE BORDERTOWN DRIVE-IN, LAREDO, TEXAS (an excerpt from my dissertation, The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas)

THE BORDERTOWN DRIVE-IN LAREDO, TEXAS 11x17 print, full color on glossy archival stock, shipped, folded once, via media mail. signed and numbered. The First Frame, Wherein the Semiotic Ineptitude of a Young Voyeur Leads to Misreading the Bull  It begins with this bull, the Bordertown bull. Waking up after nineteen years in a small South Texas bordertown--Laredo, Texas, USA, to be exact. Throughout my childhood I thought that the mural featured on the Bordertown Drive-In was of a giant mutant bull, terrorizing the countryside and being attacked by U.S. Air Force jets as a giant cowboy heatedly pursued from behind. I was wrong, of course. That is, I had read it wrong. The giant bull was merely a personal idiosyncratic creation, a misreading, owing to a mistake in perspective. Without the tools to understand the concept of perspective in an illustration, I had taken the mural at face value: giant drawing of bull = giant monster, mutant bull. That the animal was merely foregrounded and thus larger than its surroundings was, at the time, a concept as abstract as quantum mechanics or multilateral arms-control negotiations. The painting was misread. The mural in question faced out on the main strip leading out of and into Laredo and adorned the back side of a projection wall for the local drive-in called the Bordertown Twin Drive-In Theater. Some fifteen years ago, the Bordertown was a booming two-screen haven of movies, alcohol, and sexual abandon for auto aficionados, raucous families, and young adults on both sides of the Rio Grande River. But in the year 1988, that monument was slowly falling apart. No longer a haven for movie-goers, it was home to a flea market open on the weekends, where one could find various used articles, recycled furniture and a huge assortment of deserted, dated consumer artifacts that could have passed as trash in any dumpster. In the half-decade before the current period when the North American Free Trade Agreement and individuals associated with its passage were heralding the arrival of the New World Order, the Bordertown Drive-in was an icon for Laredo itself--a depressed market selling trash in various disguises as merchandise. But then again even trash is not trash in and of itself; trash is not a generic designation (trash for one may be treasure to another). Given the depleted economic resources of the city, even trash might be repackaged in some way so as serve a purpose or garnish a profit. Even the Drive-In had been repackaged as a pulga, as a flea market But let us not allow the caress of nostalgia to blind us from the present for I must report that the Bordertown Drive-In/pulga is no more. The Godzilla-esque bull has been erased from the space of Laredo--my photograph must proxy for the structure as a kind of ersatz visual relic. The structure was torn town and sold to the Wal-Mart corporation. On the site of the giant cow arose the specter of what is known as Sam’s Warehouse--a discount marketer of groceries and other assorted sundries. Gross sales of Laredo’s Sam’s Warehouse and Wal-Mart were so huge that just before his death in 1992, Sam Walton flew to Laredo to celebrate his profits. Walton was visibly weak and ailing as he greeted cheering workers and shoppers like some latter-day vision of Cortez. I would have included a picture of the store if I didn’t miss that old bull so much.

Order your own Bordertown, Drive-In #Mextasy Poster--order here with 99¢ shipping! After your purchase, email Memo Nericcio to memo@sdsu.edu and let me know if you want the poster signed and numbered or sent to you "clean." This is a limited edition poster--when 25 have been sold, that's it! ;-)

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11x17 print, full color on glossy archival stock, shipped rolled, via media mail