Chicanonautica: The Moon, Mars, and Chicanos

by Ernest Hogan

Earthlings are going to the Moon again, and it’s not just white male AngloAmericanos this time. And my feelings are . . . weird.

I was a fan of the Space Program ever since I went crying to my parents “there’s no cartoons on TV, just a big chile in the sky,” and my dad explained to me that it was John Glenn going into space, for real.

My little mind was blown. Reality and what was and wasn’t possible transmogrified for me. I was launched on the bizarre trajectory that I’m hurtling along today.

Just before Covid, Diego F. Jauregui, a 12F Fellow of the Smithsonian’s National Air Space Museum Space History Department, interviewed me. I guess it was to make up for a shortage of Chicano astronauts.

I never became an astronaut and don’t consider myself a poet, though Guillermo Gomez-Pena called me “ a Chicano SCI-Fi poet” and I admit that does describe me well though I don’t set out to commit acts of poetry on purpose—it seems to be in my DNA.

The crew of the Artemis II mission doesn't have any Chicanos, or Latinos, or even Hispanics, though they did take 58 tortillas, because they don’t make crumbs like bread. It has a Black pilot, a woman, and a Canadian who, though not Indigenous, has connections with the Anishinaabe and Manitoba nations.

Back on Earth, Chicano have been writing poetry about space and the future.

What would Ray Bradbury think?

Pedro Iniguez’ Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future won the 2024 Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry and has been getting recognition beyond what you’d expect for a book of poems. He’s also in Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I. 

More recently, Juan Manuel Pérez–another Xicanxfuturism Codex I contributor–has come out with a Bury My Heart Under the Martian Sky. Being the author of a series of stories about a Tejano mariachi on a colonized Mars (one of which will be in Xicanxfuturism Codex II coming soon, stay tuned . . .), I felt I had to look into it. Besides, it has a great cover by Kolega Soberanis.

I was impressed. These poems show that the days when I was afraid that there was some kind of conspiracy against nonwhite/nonAnglos getting out into space are over. They give a vision of a future from a Chicano viewpoint, with roots in PreColombian mythology, showing a relationship to the Earth and the universe that provides a needed alternative to the capitalist/colonialist propaganda that has dominated science fiction and the popular imagination well into this current century.

[Insert mariachi grito here]

Chicanos are creating new futurisms with the infusion of and creation of a New Chicano Dream.

I have a feeling Coyolxauhqui the Mexica and Ixchel Mayan goddesses of the Moon are smiling.

 

Ernest Hogan is doing his duties as the Father of Chicano Science Fiction while working on making his Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars stories into a novel, and waiting for Xicanxfuturism Codex II to come out as deranged leaders promise to destroy civilizations overnight.