by
Ernest Hogan
Some
of my paranoid--or should I say socially aware?--friends warn me that
“they” can listen to you through your phone,
even if you’re not talking to somebody. If anybody were listening in
they would probably be confused, unless they have been studying me for a long time. What a strange idea . . .
This
was in the back of my mind when I was talking on the phone with José Torres-Tama.
I
mentioned Maricopa County's former sheriff, Joe Arpiao, who's reign of terror,
Tent City Jail, and defense of a border that’s over a hundred miles
out of his jurisdiction was tax-supported performance art designed to
keep his voters happy. That got us off and running, with Torres-Tama
riffing on questions I had sent him. The conversation was freeform.
We
then touched on defining Sci-Fi Latino Noir, and got into the whole
images vs. word Latinoid vs. Anglo conundrum. The term “Gringo
Sci-Fi” popped up--as a myopic, monolithic vision. This led us into
the subject of his Taco Truck Theater performance, light, color, the
images he had sent . . . A hybrid experience. He used the word
"hybrid" a lot . . . A
mestizo/latino/chicano/rasquache thing . . .why not go stark, raving
science fiction while we're at it?
This
was beyond words; you need images, light, colors. Special
lighting is set up for the Taco Truck Theater performances that are
usually done outdoors in church parking lots. The lights are ready
before sundown, so they are invisible. As it gets dark, the
special effects appear.
So
what influenced him?
The
first thing he mentioned was The
Twilight Zone.
Not the current manifestation or the reboot from a couple generations ago. He meant the original, black&white show created
by Rod Serling, that was a fixture in reruns for decades after the
original run. He was impressed by Serling's narrative subtlety. How he
would “tweak what we know and take it a little more into the future,”
making an allegory that comments on the present. How “our realities
are sci-fi” and “science fiction is being able to see the
surreality of reality.”
He
also mentioned Ralph Ellison, The
Time Tunnel,
Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, Land
of the Giants,
the movie of Fahrenheit
451,
2001,
and Flash Gordon. Quite a mix. Material that allows his performances
to invent a characteristically Latinoid complexity of images.
His
sons, Darius, and Diego, perform with him. They are also fans of the
current pop culture centered around Star Wars, and superheroes. “We
all have superpowers,” he tells them. “Being bilingual is a
superpower.”
We
all need to recognize and use our superpowers--that include humor, as
in “No Guacamole for Immigrant Haters” in these times when the
United States of Amnesia wants us to forget everything, and the
COVID-19 pandemic has caused devastating shutdowns in Mexico City and
New Orleans. Artists’ incomes are being wiped out. The “pandemic
pause” he calls it.
Only
he’s not pausing. He’s charging full-speed ahead even though the
economy is crashing. Besides releasing and updating Los
Cortaditos on
YouTube, he has participated in Dreamocracy in America’s events on
Zoom with the likes of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, writing op-ed pieces,
and even writing a novel that’s sure to cause a sensation.
Because
we need alternatives to the United States of Amnesia’s “plantation
news” and have to decide “what normal do we want to go back to?”
While
people are braving the pandemic to protest racial injustice,
violence, and murder, José Torres-Tama, in the tradition of Luis
Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, and Garcia Lorca bringing actors to
perform for workers in the fields, is bringing the Taco Truck to the
people in new ways.
So
even though the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities perpetrated a brutal
cultural deportation and disappearance of immigrants in post-Katrina
New Orleans in their 2018 Tricentennial history book, José
Torres-Tama and his sci-fi Latino noir will bring back the forgotten
past, and make way for a better future.
Arrooooooo!
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