Chicanonautica: Pandemic Nostalgia With Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files

by Ernest Hogan

 

Is it too early for pandemic nostalgia? Please excuse me if it is. I’m a sci-fi vato, a mutant for whom the future never comes soon enough. I get high on future shock. 

Also, I’m a futurista because I’m not allowed to exist in the present. Just ask whatever bureaucracy is watching over us right now.

The chaos of the last few years has had me running myself ragged keeping up with it transformations. Nothing like a global monkey-wrench smashing into everybody’s business to do that. Suddenly, the word surreal is in news reports. The pandemic did that.

Now we are under the delusion that it’s over, but Covid ain’t gone. It’s just going through some mellower mutations. Even though a lot of people want to forget it ever happened, there’s wisdom in the meme, “That which does not kill us, mutates and tries again.”

Note that you also see the word mutation in news reports these days.

Back in the thick of the lockdown, Guillermo Gómez-Peña started reporting on it on his radio show/podcast (the terms are becoming interchangeable–the internet is absorbing radio), Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files.

I tried to be a loyal listener at first but turned out I was an essential worker and ended up in a bandido bandana and an orange, glowing vest running stuff out to cars in the library parking lot instead of finishing my novel in the summer of 2020. I also learned about Zoom, thanks to Guillermo and his wife, Balitronica.

Recently, Facebook reminded me about Mex Files, so I binged what was on the website.

¡Guao!

Not only does it deliver the Mad Mex’s harrowing, transborder Covid experiences that outweird the latest science fiction, it provides an excellent introduction to his work and the incredible world of performance art.

How can I describe it?

There are similarities with my work–Gomez-Peña and I both arrived on this planet in 1955, him in Mexico City, me in L.A.  we overlap over Chicano territory. He writes, and also performs, which takes him to interesting places. Art and politics cohabitate. It’s often funny but is more than satire. Alternate realities aren’t just described—they come to life, threaten to alter our world.

Sometimes it gets sci-fi (Chicano is a science fiction state of being) but is never restrained by the limits of the genre. 

And it adapts well to different media, live performance, gallery and museum installations, film and video, and radio. 

Sometimes it’s like bizarre comedy skits, other times it’s music that has been altered. Still other times, it’s honest accounts of fantastic experiences. 

And it’s not all nonstop dystopian bring downs. Often there are flashes of the kind of utopias we could create if we could just let La Cultura ride free on new technologies.

Where does the sci-fi end and the real life begin? Or should I say magic realism? Or is magic realism from a high tech society indistinguishable from science fiction? Is it all performance art?

Our bizarre times are masterfully captured here. I know that a lot of folks just want to forget it. Some would erase all the memory, the history. But we need this knowledge. 

You think the last few years were something? Just wait for the future. How long before 2020 is considered the good old days?

We need the wisdom of the Mad Mex to help us navigate the weirdness.

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction has been in touch with Guillermo and Balitronica. Expect some wild stuff soon. He also highly recommends the documentary 100 Ways to Cross the Border.

Covid Chronicles, Ekphrastic Edition, Santa Barbara, CA

 Melinda Palacio

    Artist Colleen Kelly has built an art installation in her front yard in Santa Barbara. The pieces quickly came together. She used a dead birch tree as the front end piece with hands reaching skyward, as if reaching for something thrown off a New Orleans Mardi Gras float. The dead tree with various blooms symbolize climate change. Not only is there a visual component to the exhibit, but a audio one, where natural sounds and children's voices can be heard. Kelly mentioned that the sounds blend in with the neighborhood. Blue bottles, pomegranates painted an exceptional dark shade of red, cloth flowers and fruit and eggplant are in all "bloom" from the dead tree, hence the installation title, Ghost Trees in Bloom. While dead trees offer great perches for falcons, owls, and hawks looking for lunch, the exhibit invites the living to interact with unseen spirits. There's a playful aspect to the visual quality of the mournful work, especially in the chairs. Everyday, Kelly moves the chairs around, making the installation fluid and fresh while most of the decaying pieces remain static. Kelly wanted to make sure to document the installation with photographs and video in anticipation of the day the artwork needed to come to down and passerby's could no longer see themselves reflected in the big mirror to east end of the sprawling piece. But there was one component that was missing. She envisioned a poem printed to the left of the mirror. She asked me to write the ekphrastic poem, based on her art installation for Ghost Trees in Bloom. Here's what I came up with. 

Somehow the Ghost Tree Still Blooms 

Melinda Palacio

Please take a seat, plenty of room.

If you listen as if holding a conch to your ear,

We are still here, laughing 

In the space between the wind.

Me, Momo, and them.

We laugh and cry, think of before times,

When us kids played around the Birch tree,

We ran carefree and free from worry and 

Changes that came slow like molasses

Nana poured on our cakes, and then

Faster than the speed of tomorrow 

Crashing down like yesterday.

But we didn’t think Mother Earth 

Would change, pack her bags.

Nana says everything changes, but

Somehow the ghost tree still blooms happy,

White hands and limbs reach skyward.

They jump up joyous as if in church.

Take me, lift me, free me from this blue bottle.

Somehow the ghost tree still blooms blood red 

Pomegranates. Red like the time

Momo skinned his knee.

Before fires and water

Washed away our house,

We kids used to swing from the tree,

Leaves and fruit on green grass.

Now only white ashen tree bones remain.

Somehow the ghost tree still blooms 

All our favorites, Nana’s too:

roses, pomegranates, eggplants.

If only we would have paid attention,

Our ghost tree might have company,

a home that’s more than your

Reflection in the big mirror.

The beauty of you.

You in a temporary shelter.

Green grass gone.

Take it all in before the

Wind overtakes you.