Chicanonautica: A Mexican Headless Horseman

by Ernest Hogan

I’m a pocho. Born in Eastlos, but raised in West Covina, so mi espanol es kinda wonqui. It’s like a reattached limb with nerve and muscle damage. As the Father of Chicano Sci-Fi, I consider it my sacred duty to struggle with Spanish. I can read it fairly well, but when it comes to speaking it, I’m far from fluent.

So I do my best to run the language through my twisted cerebro, hoping that someday before I die, I’ll be able to rattle it off without it being awkward.

One of the things I do is watch movies in Spanish. This has gotten easier in the days of streaming services. I used to have to tune to Spanish-language stations and hope for the best. Now on YouTube, Tubi,and others, I have access to more than ever before. Beats the hell out of the days when I had to channel surf (do people still do that?) and hope I could find something weird enough for me.

Cinema Mexican is often weird enough for me. Now I put a lot of it on my watchlists, and I'm delighted as well as educated.

Recently, I scrolled through my substantial YouTube watch list and found El Jinete sin Cabeza. A Mexican headless horseman from 1957? I went for it.

 

It starts out with a man being taken by moonlight to some ruins by a gang in skull masks and put on trial–there is a living, severed hand, though you can see the arm coming out of a slot in the table–and put to death. Pure poetry.

After a while the headless horseman shows up. He wears an all white charro outfit, and his head is covered in black cloth, so when he’s in front of a black background, his white sombrero appears to float over his body. A great effect, sure; you can see that it’s a black mask without eyeholes in the fight scenes, but the illusion works most of the time.

The plot is the hackneyed Scooby-Doo fake ghost mystery plot (how old is it? who did it first?), but the Mexican Gothic/Expressionist/Noir look and surreal touches send it off into another dimension.

I had caught part of it back in my channel surfing days. I was glad to see the whole thing, and to be able to Google it. Turns out, it’s by one of my favorite Mexican directors, Chano Urueta, full name Santiago Eduardo Urueta Sierra. He’s responsible for some of my favorites, like Blue Demon contra Los Cerebros Infernales, and the totally outrageous El Barón del Terror AKA The Brainiac. Besides horror/sci-fi and lucha libre, he made a lot of westerns that I have to investigate. He was also a writer and actor. Sam Peckenpah cast him in The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Urueta is one of the heroes of La Cultura.

I thank Quetzalcoatl for the technology that allows me to enjoy such things, and Tezcatlipoca for the weirdness.

Ernest Hogan will be teaching Chicanos how to conquer the science fiction/fantasy/horror megagenre at the Palabras del Pueblo Writing Workshop. It’s called Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom. Sign up, tune in, and learn.