Chicanonautica: Independence Daze 2025

by Ernest Hogan

On this, or all 4th of Julys, my wife and I had to get out of town, away from the neighbor recreational explosives, the national political meltdown (what’s a Chicano scifiista to do?), and excessive heat warnings. Off to Northern Arizona, and slightly cooler temperatures.

You never know what you’ll find. Like a pretty Catrina, abandoned in an antique store. Her powerful feminine essence still challenging our consumer society to satisfy her cosmic desires. Will our technology be able to do the job?

Now and then, peeking through the urban developments, visions of a world before the aliens invaded manifest.

Arizona, what are you? America? Mexico? Land of the Sinagua, the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the dinosaurian sea monsters?

In hidden corners, in places like Jerome, people say “We are all here because we’re not all there” and create their own cultures.

We keep finding references to things beyond this planet’s gravity well. Does Route 66 have interstellar offramps? 

Names and owners change. Human beings don’t last. Neither do the things they make. The tacos at the restaurant formerly known as Oaxaca are still great.

Tlaquepaque sells “art” to rich people while its decor conjures fantasies of another place and time. Can you buy mythologies?

Is there a market for mutations like psychedelic mariachis? We are all mutants, imperfect copies and recombinations. Sooner or later, your DNA snaps.

Don’t worry, San Juan de Hollywood watches over tourists. What are the differences between tourists and natives and immigrants and aliens? What you are depends on where you happen to be at the moment, and like borders, can be changed with a little paperwork.

Cowboys and Indians mix with aliens and UFOs. Sometimes you have to blend in with the natives.

Martian or Mayan? Do all aliens look alike to you?

Somehow, it’s all about the tacos. What’s eating you, America?

Ernest Hogan is dazed but working on the upcoming Xicanxfuturist uprising.

Chicanonautica: Arizona in a Battleground State of Mind

by Ernest Hogan

This was written a couple weeks before it goes up . . .

Arizona is cooking. We’ve had over 100 days of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a row, and there’s no end in sight. We’re set to break records again.

And that’s the weather, meanwhile, in politics . . .

I said that it was unusually quiet on that front. It’s a quiet we shouldn’t trust. Like in all those old movies I watched as a kid when the bad guys were lurking, and one young trooper would scream, “WHY DON’T THEY JUST ATTACK?”

Then he’d usually get an arrow or a bullet in the chest and all hell would break loose.

There were some signs of politics on that recent spontaneous road trip: 

In Flagstaff, there was an OLD JOE AND THE HOE GOTTA GO bumper sticker.

Then that shop in Sedona that was selling Trump T-shirts a few months ago now displayed fresh ones with the town’s name and flying saucers.

After a traffic jam, we ended up in Kari Lake territory. No mention of Vance, just TRUMP LAKE signs as if she were the running mate. Did we slip into an alternate universe?

In Prescott, there was a car emblazoned with COVID SHOTS KILL. One of those black, white, and blue flags flew over a “ Wellness Center.” The streets were full of neohipster-types and places advertising live music. I found myself speculating about Hipsters for Trump.

 

There were a few Trump flags in the ranch lands around Wickenburg. These were all in sparsely populated areas, and far less that we saw last summer.

Even with Harris’ surprise pop-up event that filled the Desert Diamond Stadium and raised a lot of money, you can wander all over Arizona, and not realize that there’s an election going on.

Plug into a news outlet, and it’s another story. Lots of stories.

 

Most change in a few days. Still, an electronic billboard in Phoenix flashed ARIZONA CONSERVATIVES FOR HARRIS. A Democrats for Lake rally was announced, but never materialized. Not much political talk in restaurants and on the bus.

Yeah, yeah, it’s kinda looking good for the future of democracy, but I keep remembering what Han Solo said in the original Star Wars movie from the Nineteen-Hundreds: “Great kid, now don’t get cocky!”

We keep hearing the same old racist border paranoia song the right has been singing since the Anglos invaded back in the Eighteen-Hundreds. There are young nonwhites who want Trump to set them free to asshole their way into being billionaires.

I hope that my gut feelings about the Project 2025 crowd–that they’re all a bunch of wannabe armchair fuhrers, with not enough junior stormtroopers to do the heavy lifting– are true, but I was so sure that Trump was going to lose in 2016. We need to be ready to navigate through chaos no matter what.

I’ve also realized that a president isn’t a human being, but an avatar of a deity that the country is evoking. 

Tezcatlipoca help me, I really need a vacation . . . 

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, is out searching for America again.

Chicanonautica: Arizona Beyond 1864

by Ernest Hogan 

It’s like good ol’ AZ can’t stand having the Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Iran get all the attention. Who would have thought that the Arizona Supreme Court was planning on setting off this bombshell? Right after Trump did his mealy mouth announcement about letting abortion be a states right deal if he gets his old job back. Ain’t that kind of jumping the gun? They either can’t wait until after the election, or they no longer feel God’s Chosen Candidate is going to be a shoe-in in November, or they’re now thinking that maybe their dreams of shredding the Constitution and establishing a fundamentalist nation are just more empty promises.

And suddenly, all these Arizona Republicans—even the loathed Kari Lake—are speaking out, declaring that maybe knocking Arizona back to 1864 is not a good idea. 

Could it be that a lot of the GOP don’t believe that DJT was chosen by God Almighty Himself?

I remember how about a decade or so back, a lot of Arizonans thought of the Republican Party as a cult—though they never used the word.  They were confused by things like satire. One woman came into the Borders where I worked, demanding her money back because a book she thought would be singing the praises of George W. Bush made fun of him.

“How am I supposed to tell if these books are serious?” she asked.

I turned the book over and showed the word “Humor” next to the price. It only confused her more.

Later, I overheard a guy explaining to a perplexed friend that Stephen Colbert wasn’t a real Republican—this was in the days of his original show. Guess a lot of folks took his fake conservative act seriously.

Now, I still don’t see much evidence that an election is going on in Arizona. Plenty in the media, but none in the streets. A year ago, people were waving their Trump flags, but now, nada.

I’ve yet to see one of those Trump Bibles, anywhere.

I have noticed that, even though the rest of the country laughs at Arizona, as a whole, it becomes more like it with every election. 

Could this be a preview of what will happen in November?

Or will it just get crazier? Like a sequel to Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way. Only instead of school girls reciting blood thirsty doctrines while a characters fantasizes about a Pope being put in front of a firing squad with such intensity that people around him can hear the gunshots, will there be angels in digital urban camouflage uniforms pointing Glocks at us and instructing us how to vote?

And who knows what will be happening at the border, and college campuses . . .

Meanwhile, we’ve got drones and missiles flying back and forth while everybody debates on the social media what it all means. 21st century warfare has evolved into big budget performance art with body counts.

 

I could swear I just heard Buñuel’s ghost scream “Cut!”

Did he just say, “Self-immolation?”

Ernest Hogan’s account of the Trump administration is in Our Creative Realidades: A Nonfiction Anthology,and Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song: 15 Gonzo Science Fiction is also available.

Chicanonautica: Otra Vez, The United States of Arizona

by Ernest Hogan

It was a weird, slow burn, festering away below the surface, and now it’s ready to burst open, unleashing a thick, sticky, toxic spray of poison all over the nation.

I consider one of my duties here to be La Bloga’s Arizona correspondent. I include politics in my beat, because whipping up paranoia about the Border and the Brown Menace is a perennial way to get elected here in the Grand Canyon State. And we’re seen as Norteamerica’s experimental laboratory for demented political ideas. Trump used the Border strategy to get into the White House, and other politicians across the land caught on.

There’s another, deadlier virus spreading. We are becoming the United States of Arizona. And it seems to be crossing borders. Another pandemic is coming.

This used to be a perverse kind of fun. And easy. All I had to do was report what was going on, and it was weird, funny, and I felt I was doing a needed public service.

Now it’s getting ugly, hideous, a bloody, pick and shovel self-defense job that I don’t dare quit.

As much as I hate to use an overused quote from Star Wars, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

In the old days the Republican hacks would start howling about it earlier. This time it was there, but not the main event. 

Then Trump got hit with the indictments and stumbled. Other predators, smelling blood in the water, moved into the murky power vacuum. 

The lawsuits over Arizona’s ex-governor Doug Ducey’s disastrous shipping container border wall have been dismissed, but the damage is still there. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s buoy barrier down the Rio Grande will stay in place thanks to a federal court. Then there’s Tom Horne, Superintendent of the Arizona Board of Education, doing his best to do away with bilingual education . . .

Meanwhile, more undocumented people are crossing border, triggering the usual hysteria, and giving me a flashback: A few elections ago (I have trouble sorting them out, and am disturbed that what was written long ago still rings true–things have only gotten worse) there was group of anti-immigrant speakers making the rounds at political rallies and getting lot of time on TV news. They had a token black, to prove that they weren’t racist. He ranted about how Mexicans were going to sneak across the Border, kill and eat Americans.

I wonder what he’s doing these days. Could he be running for office?

 

And while I don’t want to give election-denier Kari Lake any undue publicity as she keeps losing her lawsuits–I want her to become a bad joke and be forgotten, as she deserves–I can’t help noticing that she looks older in every photo I see of her. Politics does tend to cause rapid aging. You’d think an ex-cheerleader/news anchor would be doing something about it. If she doesn’t end up looking like a mummy soon, it could be because of an Elizabeth Bathory-type rejuvenation process.

Better watch out for reports of missing virgin’s blood . . .

And lately I’ve been having these visions of a convicted Trump back in the White House, wearing an ankle bracelet, issuing revenge by executive order.

So, stay tuned, gente, I’ll try to make it more coherent than this, but then maybe not. To misquote Star Trek, “I’m a sci-fi satirist, not a journalist.”

 

LAST MINUTE UPDATE: As I was getting ready to post this, the news about McCarthy ousting broke. ¡Chingao! It's worse than I thought . . .

Ernest Hogan’s Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions is coming in 2024.

Chicanonautica: Sheriffs Amok

by Ernest Hogan

I was sure that, by now, Arizona would be ablaze with weird politics of concern to the La Bloga audience, but I was wrong. It’s kinda quiet. A certain ex-president seems to be losing his mojo. A certain election denier keeps losing court cases and blaming bizarro conspiracies.

Then I found out about the constitutional sheriffs movement, where Arizona is ground zero.

NPR did a good job of explaining the movement. In short, it consists of sheriffs across the country who believe that a county sheriff’s authority should supersede that of the federal government, including the president. They have an organization, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Eight Arizona sheriffs are members, along with 300 of the nation’s 3,000 sheriffs. Resistance to mandates to stop the spread of Covid-19 gave them a boost, and they side with the election deniers and have white supremacist connections.

Their name is misleading. There is nothing in the constitution saying that sheriffs have such powers. They also are required by law to take an oath to support the constitution, like the one I had to take–the words include “preserve, protect, and defend”--to become a school janitor and work for the public library.

Yeah, the upcoming election is gonna be messy.

A problem I see is that sheriffs are go-to heroes in pop culture, not just westerns both period and contemporary, but horror, and science fiction. 

Yeah, reality is often quite different, here in Maricopa County, Az, we had Sheriff Joe Arpaio “America’s Toughest Sheriff” who ran on talking like John Wayne, and bragged about defending the border, even though it’s 30 miles away as the crow flies, and 79 to 48 depending on the route you take. 

These “constitutionals” are following his example.

To be fair, the likes of Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff with left/radical political ambitions. I also remember a guy named Tank Barbera, in L.A. County, who said he’d abolish the Sheriff's Department if elected. None of them won. Probably didn’t fit the stereotype.

This was in the Watergate years, when one of my college teachers said, “I keep expecting to see people wearing crossed ammunition belts.”

In open-carryArizona, I wouldn’t be surprised if ammo belts became fashionable.

Meanwhile, other elected officials are using unenforced, unconstitutional English Only laws to get rid of bilingual education.  

There is also a reversal of the pop culture trope, where the sheriff is a bad guy, usually backed by corrupt, rich landowners. Hmm . . .

Is the country becoming a spaghetti western? In real life you don’t get the entertaining shootout where, by the grace of the writer, the right people get killed. 

And now, the writers are on strike.

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, author of High Aztech, Smoking Mirror Blues, and Cortez on Jupiter has written a lot of stories this year. Stay tuned for news of where and when you will be able to read them.

Chicanonautica: Hockey-Pucking Through the Arizona Midterms

by Ernest Hogan

Following the midterms in Arizona has been like chasing a hockey puck, being batted around, bouncing off things, not knowing what will come next.

 

Since my last column:

A federal judge “ordered that a group monitoring Arizona ballot drop boxes for signs of fraud stay at least 75 feet away from ballot boxes and publicly correct false statements its members have made about Arizona election laws.”

Maricopa County’s sheriff warned political leaders “not 'to incite violence or riots' with false claims, sent extra police to polling places, and barricades went up around elections offices.”

There was a break in at Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Katie Hobbs’ headquarters. When suspicion was cast on Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari “Trump in a Dress” Lake, called an Emergency Press Conference in which she showed fake picture of a man in a chicken suit breaking into her headquarters, and attacked the press.

Lake told a reporter, “I am going to not only be the governor of Arizona for four years, I’m going to do two terms. I’m going to be your worst fricking nightmare for eight years.” Her transformation from smiling news gerbil to fire-breathing politician is complete. She’s always screaming hallucinatory nonsense. Maybe there’s something to that wild rumor that she’s hooked on datura enemas.

A suspect in the Hobbs HQ break in was arrested and wasn’t politically motivated.

An envelope with a hateful letter and a mysterious white powder was found at Lake headquarters but was thrown away. Police couldn’t find any powder in two other letters.

 

 

And the race was still close. 

My scifiista mind conjured up a scenario where I’m trying to sneak across the new border from recently seceded Lakeian AZ into California, so we don’t lose our Medicare and Social Security. Would the fact that I was born in East L.A. make me a citizen of the new United States? Would my Arizona marriage be recognized?

Early on Election Day, there was some trouble with the tabulators at some polling places. The glitch was fixed by noon. Kari Lake snarled about “incompetence.”

Except for that, it was a quiet Election Day. No incident at the polls. 

There was a lot of talk about a Red Wave, but even though races were tight all over the country, it didn’t happen. Trump-backed candidates–particularly, celebrity-physician Dr. Mehmet Oz–lost.

The next morning, Michael A. Cohen of MSNBC stated: “While we still don’t have the final results, Democratic losses will be nowhere close to the historical averages.” After a day of agonizing doldrums, more results came in:

Democrat Mark Kelly kept his Senate seat from extreme Republican Blake Masters. Democrat Adrian Fontes beat Republican Mark Finchem for Secretary of State. Hobbs is the new Governor, but the Attorney General race is a toss-up.

On the national front, Ron DeSantis kept the governorship of Florida, and is being hailed as the new hero of the Republican Party. Trump got mad.

Lake supporters marched around the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, trying to reenact the Biblical Battle of Jericho.

What does it mean to La Bloga readers? Well, I have noticed that there was no reaching out to Latinos in the last few weeks of the election–even after Lake made an awkward Spanish-language ad earlier. Democrats Hobbs and Kelly both made ads showing them as being tough on “the border.”

Yeah, I know that it was strategic, because it comes down to winning over those peculiar folks who can vote fascist or socialist depending on the prevailing mood, but it stings that a lot of our fellow Americanos still see us as a problem, instead of a solution.

And on the other hand, Proposition 308, that approved in-state tuition of all qualifying students regardless of immigration status, passed.

Meanwhile, a zombie-like Trump has announced his run for the presidency in 2024 . . .

Ernest Hogan, Father of Chicano Sci-Fi, works hard to keep his fiction stranger than the news.