Just Enough Time to Wish You and Yours the Mexiest of Christmases and a Happy New Year!

The shades of Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Lupe Velez, Ricardo Montalban, Speedy Gonzales (still alive, I think) join me in wishing all the visitors to the Mextasy blog the merriest and mexiest of Christmases.

Tons of #Mextasy Gigs on the Horizon (plus a lecture on Breaking Bad and Mad Men in Paris!)... The University of Arizona, Tucson; The University of Kansas, Lawrence; Cornell University, Ithaca; EHESS, Paris

Late 2015 and 2016 are gearing up to be a monster--with Textmex/Mextasy presentation/exhibitions and more on the horizon. Go to my vanity site here for all the links/dates

Opening Day Gala for #Mextasy Exhibition at Southwestern College, Chula Vista, Califas | October 14-November 9, 2015

From the Southwestern College Art Gallery #Mextasy opening bash! with art by @perryvasquez @ezrkk @mictlan_studios and more #ritahayworth also!

A photo posted by bill nericcio (@william.nericcio) on Oct 16, 2015 at 4:45pm PDT

Mextasy at the Southwest College Art Gallery, October 14 through November 9, 2015--Free/Gratis to the General Public #mextasy

Come on out for the opening ceremonies, Wednesday, October 14, 2015 at 12 noon!

More info here: 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153720669108653&l=229580d09d

Other prints for the show...

Mextasy with CECUT Artists @ Southwestern College! Gallery Opening, Wednesday, October 14, 2015 | 1 + 1 Show!!!!

More info to come!

Click to make mucho mas bigger!

#Mextasy Mural on Adams Avenue, Normal Heights, San Diego, CA 2015

#crowroyals #normalheights new mural off Adams avenue

A photo posted by bill nericcio (@william.nericcio) on Jul 18, 2015 at 10:00am PDT

Donald Trump's Nativist, Neo-Fascist, Hate-filled Attack on Mexicans Ends Today #Mextasy

My Mexican-American father took bullets and shapnel from Nazis in France, whilst my Mexican/Mexican-American mother repaired fighter planes in Corpus Christi, Texas, during WW II so that this neo-fascist, money-worshiping, draft-dodging* blowhard would have the right to open up his demented piehole with his anti-Mexican bullshit. Tapping into the darkest corner of the American soul, his rantings are laying the groundwork for a subterranean nativist orgasm of hate (not for nothing that he focuses on rape) that puts Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Latinas/os in danger. #nomextasy #mextasy

Watch Mextasy TV for more... SOON!

Be sure to read Gustavo Arellano's piece in politico.com on el Rey Feo...http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/donald-trump-mexicans-119849.html

*http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-vietnam-draft-records-secret-documents-deferments/story?id=13492639

My Mexican-American father took bullets and shapnel from Nazis in France, whilst my Mexican/Mexican-American... http://t.co/f2rl1CKpJQ

— William Nericcio (@eyegiene) July 13, 2015

Mextasy/Eyegiene/Technosexualities in Kentucky! Filmatics Film Festival @ UCSD!! Cinco de Mextasy @ Grossmont College!!! Latin American Studies/Technology/Race in NYC!!!!

The middle of the 2015 finds me hopping all over the place sharing new iterations of my dabblings in cultural studies/social theory (focused on Lacan, to begin with, at any rate), Tex[t]-Mex/Mextasy, my pop-up museum exhibition, Mextasy.TV, my new television venture with Miguel-Angel Soria (of Taco Shop Poets fame/infamy) and Carlos Solorio, and, last but not least, a new venture, focused on Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer that combines my interests, and doubles down with new heights of madness/desmadres!

April 23, 2015, finds me the guest of the Committee on Social Theory, College of Arts and Letters, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington for a lecture entitled ""Chicanosmosis and the Transnational Imaginary (Imaginary): 21st Century Mextasy In and Beyond the Ivory Tower"--Imaginary (Imaginary) is not a typo as part of my lecture will include a harangue against theory-laden jargon that only continues to alienate cultural studies workers from the great "unwashed" masses--with

Chaka Khan, Nericcio, and
Jacques Lacan, back in the day!

whom yours truly would rather party with in the first place! Those lovely locos in Kentucky are not so interested in my Mextasy show (forcing me to revert to my prior guise as a Derrida/Foucault/Sarduy mouthpiece), but I am sneaking in elements of it anyway for my presentation that will focus on Alex Rivera, Izel Vargas, y mucho mas more! Part of said rant includes verbal tracings of Jacques Lacan (not to be confused with 80s diva Chaka Khan, though the homonymics at play in their conjoined names will, hopefully, lead to mirth and deeply ciphered deconstructive nonsense!

As I intend to utterly submerge myself into the rich, bourbon-saturated offerings to be found in Lexington, it's good that my next gig does not happen until the afternoon of May 3, 2015, when I will be hanging out with my aforementioned socios Miguel-Angel y Carlos, at the World Premiere of Mextasy.TV at the Filmatics Festival @ UCSD!  The screening is taking place at the loft which is one part events space and one part bar--the PERFECT locale for the debut of our madcap documentary television series. Here's the 'teaser' in case you have missed the 14,876 emails and Facebook postings I have shared to promote the beast of a show!

Mextasy Teaser (2015) with Los Hollywood, Leon Krauze, Sergio Arau, Oliver Mayer, et al from Tex[t] Mex on Vimeo.

The next event is on Cinco de Mayo or Cinco de Mextasy at Grossmont College, where I will be dragging my traveling Mextasy museum exhibition for a performance, reading, book-signing, schmoozing extravaganza!!!!   I can't wait to share the Mextasy circus here in San Diego after traveling with it all over the place at NYU, Brooklyn @ the Observatory, Boise State University, UTEP, Ohio State University, Adrian College, Richland College, and god knows what other wild locales!  More news to follow on the time and place for this San Diego mexycircus!



Last but not least, I am jumping on a red-eye for the Big Apple, NYC, for a May 14, 2015 lecture with Mark Dery, Naief Yehya, and a host of other Latin American cultural studies superheroes for the launch of Review 90: Latin America and the Technological Imaginary in the Digital Age, a publication of the Americas Society & the Council of the Americas!  The talk goes down at 7pm at the swank Americas Society headquarters, 680 Park AvenueNew York, NY.

I will share more details on this page with updates to this page! Here are some new prints for the Mexington, Kentucky folks--you can see the whole assortment of Mextasy posters here!

Mextasy, the Cavalcade of Desmadres (and Cutting-edge Latina/o Art) Pop-up Exhibition is Hitting the Road and Invading Dallas, Texas @ Richland College, Wednesday, February 11, 2015!

Holy cowboy boots, Dallas, the Mextasy exhibition is hitting Big D for a one-day exhibition, presentation, book- & print-signing, y mucho mas more at Richland College.  On February 11, 2015, Wednesday, at 4pm in Sabine Hall 118--the event is free, gratis, cheap, and open to all the fine citizens of the Fort Worth/Dallas Metroplex! The grandest Chicano in the NFL, Tony Romo, has been invited, but don't hold your breath!  The presentation includes an image-laden picture show with the fancy title of "Rethinking 'Mexicans' on TVs, Smartphones, and the Internet," but don't let that slow you down. I will signing copies of Tex[t]-Mex and my other books and shilling garish posters as well (at discount! ¡¡¡venta, venta...venga, venga!!!).

What is "Mextasy"--A Primer for the Richland College Mextasy Show, February 11, 2015

click to expand

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The show, originally curated by Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas, had its last exhibition at Boise State University, for the Third Cinema Research Group and El Consulado de México en Boise, Idaho on April 11, 2014. Its latest encarnation debuts for Richland College, 118 Sabine Hall, at 4pm on February 11, 2015.

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 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), the show also features works that "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious tattoo of the Mexican/US frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious semiotic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Izel Vargas, and Marisela Norte.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here. For more information and an interview with the curator/artist, go here.

An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Lorena Nava Ruggero, appears below. An other interview, focused more on the Eyegiene project, appears online on Agitprop.

LNR: What is Mextasy? Why did you create it?

WN: Mextasy is an art exhibition featuring outrageous stereotypes of Mexicans and other Latinas/os; additionally, it contains sculptures, drawings, photography, and other media that attack the notion of Mexicans as less-than-human in American mass culture. The show I opened along the Rio Grande river in McAllen (September, 2010) and in Laredo this December, Mextasy, is dedicated to the old motherland and my peculiar fatherland.

Mextasy is more than a representation of ecstasy about or for Mexico; it is about the sensuous tracings Mexican culture leaves both sides of the border. More existential state than archive, Mextasy speaks to the living organism of Mexicanicity as it moves between the bodies of Mexico and the United States--an overt and covert delicious miasma that arouses as it excites, excites as it provokes. ¡Que viva Mexico!, within and without its borders.

LNR: How does Mextasy parallel your book?

WN: Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America features over 200 illustrations, with 16 pages in full color; many of these illustrations are stock representations of Mexicans (the sleeping Mexican, the bandit Mexican, the hot, Latina femme fatale). However, the book also includes original art, digital, photographic and hand-drawn, created by me. You know English Professors are known more for tweed and pomposity than their Picasso-like skills--for that reason I publish all my art under the name of Guillermo Nericcio García, what my name would have been if I had been born 10 blocks south of where I came into the world in Laredo, Texas--a bordertown with Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

LNR: You're primarily a writer, but this is an art exhibit -- what was it like to create this kind of "content"?

WN: I have been drawing since I was three--I made my own comic book with my sister before I was ten; after that, I was the political cartoonist for my high school newspaper (most infamous drawing? of Vice-Principal Shoup as a zeigheiling facsist for his punitive pedagogy--I was almost expelled and the nuns at St. Augustine tried to censor the paper).

LNR: What will you focus on in your lectures in Texas (I noticed two speaking engagements at libraries)?

WN: I will be focusing on my ongoing forensic work on American visual culture--so I will be dealing with the image of Mexico in the United States but also with our changing optics-obsessed culture in general--from Avatar in 3-D to the IPad, we are living through a watershed moment in textual reproduction where the turn to the visual (the semiotic) is accelerating at a mind-blowing pace. Next year, my new book appears with the University of Texas Press; it is entitled Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race--parts of my talks will be drawn from that work.

LNR: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

WN: I love visiting South Texas--it is like a return to my roots; and though Northern Mexico and South Texas are in cultural chaos right now, the fallout of the Narco Wars hitting this locale hard, I think its important to remind yourself of where you come from. You would think that Southern California and South Texas are the same, but they are like worlds apart.

PAST MEXTASY EXHIBITIONS

Other recent Mextasy exhibitions include shows at (pre-boycott!) the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at La Casa Cultura Latina, the Centro Cultural de La Raza, in Balboa Park, San Diego, California; at Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Department of American Studies, University of Michigan; in San Ysidro, California (as Xicanoholic) at Casa Familiar; in McAllen, Texas at South Texas College's Pecan campus Art Gallery; at Laredo, Texas at the the Laredo Center of the Arts; additionally, it had an April 8, 2011 opening at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa; and a run at the Fullerton Public Library with Gustavo Arellano hosting! September 2011 saw Mextasy invade San Antonio College for a Tex[t]-Mex reading/signing and an exclusive South Texas MEXTASY exhibition. In 2012, Mextasy was sighted at Ohio State University; at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario; at theFront, San Ysidro, California; and in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado for the Ethnic Studies Department. Western University, London, Ontario has also hosted a show, with other exhibitons and presentations at Adrian College, UCLA, and Boise State University.

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | Revised again, September 2011 | 

Once again on Thursday, April 10, 2014 | and, still once again, October 4, 2014 |

and, once again, if you can believe it on February 4, 2015.

Teaser Trailer for Mextasy, the Television Series, Now LIVE on VIMEO via BLINDSPOT.TV

The first trickle of news concerning Mextasy, the TV show, is finally coming to light after a year of pre-production work with the geniuses of Blindspot.TV, a production team based in Mexico City, Miami, and Madrid.  A collaboration with Taco Shop Poet fave/Producer Miguel-Angel Soria, and Carlos Soloria, of Travieso Films fame, Mextasy seeks to rewrite the history of Mexican-American, Mexican, Latina/o, and Hispanic representation with fast-moving, filmed short stories that showcase the best writers, actors, singers, scientists, dancers, painters, and more, that just happen to be Latina/o in the United States (and beyond! Future episodes, Mextasy@Madrid, Mextasy@London, & Mextasy@Cannes, are on the drawing board).  Our website at Mextasy.TV is still bare bones, so the best way to follow our exploits is to like our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/MextasyTV

Click any of the images to screen the trailer--directed by Osiris Luciano!