Chicanonautica: ¡Feliz Dead Daze, Cabrones!

by Ernest Hogan

I’ll be on the road when this comes out. Another one of the searching for America things that my wife, the fabulous Emily Devenport, and her brother Michael Thiele, do every year in memory of their mom, the late Margaret Devenport, a road tripper extraordinaire. Sometimes new traditions are in order.

Hell, sometimes new civilizations are in order, but I digress . . .

Once again, it’s happening in the last half of October, Latino/Hispanic/Chicano Heritage Month (just for the record, for me, every month is pinche Chicano Heritage Month), the lead-in to Halloween, and los Días de los Muertos, and a midterm election that promises to be . . . well, let’s not go all Nostradamus here and just say somekinda transmogrification will be going on. The Wild West will be festooned out in chingaderas both holidazical and political. Lots to see, photograph, and write about.

Some folk get upset about mixing up Halloween and the Días, and we should be aware of the two very different traditions and intents they come from, but, like I suggested in Smoking Mirror Blues, it makes for a fantastic three day celebration–¡DEAD DAZE!--that has not quite materialized yet, but we can hope.

Yeah, yeah, calaveras and Catrinas shouldn’t be Halloween costumes, and we should try to keep Disney and other corporations from appropriating it all, but holidays, like cultures, change. The Dias de los Muertos we see nowadays, with sugar skull-faced mariachis everywhere, and proud Catrinas as embodiments of female empowerment instead of the caricature of vanity that José Guadalupe Posada intended, is not the way it was done back in the 20th century. The skeletons were a Mexico City/Tenochtitlán thing. In rural Mexico it was more of a quiet remembrance of loved ones with picnics in cemeteries. By the year 2000 Chicanos north of the border made it into the multimedia spectacle that it is today.

Who knows what it’ll become in the future? My social media feeds are full of postings by young people who are living the sort of things that were far-out wackazoid sci-fi when I was writing about them back in the antediluvian Ninties. Ha-ha, dude, where do you get them crazy ideas? Somekinda genetically-enhanced peyote? Ese, can ya sell me some?

On these road trips, I keep seeing sugar skulls and Mexican restaurants beyond the borders of Aztlán. Colorful decorated skulls are seen in hip coffee shops far from any barrio. La Cultura is reaching out, growing.

Is that an onramp to the Intergalactic Barrio I see in the distance?

Chicanonauts, Xicanxfuturists, Ciberbandidxs take note. You have to build the universe you want. Slavishly conforming to not-so ancient traditions is not enough.  Imagine! Create! Make!

Ernest Hogan will be back in Arizona soon. Once again, his books, High Aztech, Smoking Mirror Blues, Cortez on Jupiter, and Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song: 15 Gonzo Science Fiction Stories, are available through Amazon and now Barnes & Noble. Buy them and review them! You should vote too, while you're at it . . .