Chicanonautica: Chicano Art Interrupts This Pogrom . . . Program . . . De-Program . . . Re-Program . . .

by Ernest Hogan

One of the perks of being the Father of Chicano Sci-Fi is that people send me weird shit. And I love me some weird shit.

So, in the middle of this jam-packed bizarro summer, a small, slim, unsolicited package appeared in my P.O. box. It was from L.A. The handwriting, name, and address were all unfamiliar to me. I grabbed my Swiss Army knife and sliced.

It was a paperback book: Aztec Leisure Suit Or Brown People Under Fluorescent Light. Sounds like a Chicanonautica kinda thing. The author was Vincent Ramos. The front cover and the blurb on the back intrigued me.

Flipping through it, I found that there weren’t many words. Most of it was photos reproduced in full color on slick paper. They were of collages.

They fit perfectly with the title.

Collage is a good art form for Chicanos—do it myself on occasion—because we are collages.

Once at an event celebrating Latino science fiction, I met a brown girl who looked like she could still be in grade school. She wanted to be a writer and asked me and Rudy Ch. Garcia what the rules for being a Chicano writer were. We both immediately told her that there weren’t any. She looked confused.

You see, just being a Chicano is a do-it-yourself project. Rasquache!

I wonder -- what happened to her? Is she currently writing stuff that will soon astound the world? Or was she shocked into her senses and became a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or something else reasonable?

Weird, mixed-up, rasquache stuff makes me smile. It makes me feel at home—it’s not just where I come from, but what I am!

Some folks think I’m trying to be avant-garde, but we’ve been doing this stuff for centuries, since before diverse cultures got together in the marketplace of Teotihuacán, when we were smuggling the wisdom of the Centipede God and Giant River Serpents up from lost garden cities of the Amazon . . . 

This little book is a brain-battering barrage of conflicting symbols. Andy Warhol probably couldn’t handle it. It’s like a visual version of William S. Burroughs and Biron Gyson’s cut-up/fold-in technique and J.G. Ballard when he was writing The Atrocity Exhibition (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA) and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.”

Make art not war? Nah. Art is war.

That is, if you’re doing it right . . .

Someday scholars will study Aztec Leisure Suit, searching for clues to the arcane mysteries of Chicano (and its ever-mutating Siamese twin Latino Latin, Latine, Latinx . . .) identity as if it were an untranslated codex from a lost civilization. The problem is, we aren’t lost. We’re right here. We’re everywhere. 

Some people’s sensory arrays get overloaded when they try to focus on us.

“Ya got any ID?” they keep asking.

Good question .  .  .

Maybe I should carry around a copy, and when ICE asks who and what the quehquetza I am, I’ll hand it to them.

I wonder if their brains will explode.

Ernest Hogan is descended from Mexican circus performers who sometimes dressed like bullfighters.