Chicanonautica: Joaquín Murrieta in the Streamosphere

by Ernest Hogan

Joaquín Murrieta refuses to die. First Captain Harry Love cuts his head off and puts it on display, then his legend gets whitewashed into the character Zorro, strange Hollywood versions show up over the years, then Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales (with some help of others, I’ve heard) make him central to Chicano iconography in the poem I Am Joaquín. Books still come out. I keep having to write about him. And then there’s the recent The Head of Joaquín Murrieta on Amazon.

I’m not sure how to categorize it. Is an Amazon production “Hollywood?”

What is Hollywood these days? A place? A concept? How “international” and “independent” can it be with the prerequisite corporate connections?

Welcome to the Global Barrio. It needs heroes and mythologies as well as profits.

Details about the production are surprisingly hard to find, even with Google. Where was it filmed? Who put up the money? How did it come to be?

 I keep getting a whole lotta nada. As for what I could find . . .

The “creator,”’as they like to say these days, is Mauricio Leiva-Cock, born in Bogata, Colombia, and a graduate of Columbia University.

 

Joaquín is played by green-eyed Mexican actor Juan Manuel Bernal, who is dressed like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, only he wears a sarape instead of a poncho.

At first, I wanted to say it was made in Mexico (sure wasn’t the USA), but it didn’t quite look like Mexico. There were also some interesting pronunciations “cabrón” and “chinga.” Think we may have a spaghetti western situation here, this being another global streaming multilingual release. 

Amazon is becoming its own country. 

There’s also a knife-wielding Chinese girl sidekick who seems to have escaped from a Hong Kong martial arts film, an Irish Obi-Wan Kenobiesqe alcoholic renegade priest, Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, and blacks. Captain Harry Love takes the Darth Vader role, while the California Rangers wear blue uniforms like the U.S. Calvary and are his stormtroopers while looking like the guys who come to the rescue at the end of a helluvalotta Hollywood westerns. 

Then there’s a Tarahumara/Rarámuri psychedelic trip. And this Joaquín is an artist.

This is beyond spaghetti western, or even tortilla western. Maybe it’s a rasquache western, trying to wrench the genre out of the clutches of the white supremacists. 

It’s entertaining enough. Lots of dazzling visuals, action, sex, and blood. 

And the surrealistic ending suggests more to come.

It’s not historically authentic, but who really knows the true story? Was Joaquín an avenging hero, or a racist serial killer? Could he have been both? Questions that can’t be answered without a time machine.

But then, this isn’t history, it’s myth, and it’s evolving into a new technological and geopolitical environment. I’ve called it mythoteching. 

It’s alive and well in the Global Barrio–not a place, more an entity without a location or body . . .

Or a decapitated legend.

Or as Ishmael Reed has said, a new loa.

Ernest Hogan will be teaching Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom at Palabras Del Pueblo Writing Workshop, online May 20-21 and May 27-28. May 1st is the deadline to apply. Let’s take over imaginative literature, raza writers!

Chicanonautica: Aztlán is the Wild West

by Ernest Hogan

Oralé, buckaroos! Lost Trails 2: Forgotten Tales of theWeird West, edited by Cynthia Ward, with another story by me, plus a lot of other fantastic rip-snorters by some of the best damn writers around.

It's a follow-up to the first Lost Trails anthology, that included my story “Pancho Villa's Flying Circus,” an anti-steampunk romp that has gained a bit of a reputation.

You better grab them both if you want to stay on top of things.

This second volume features “Lupita's Hand,” an Aztláni western with gunplay and Aztec magic. It was inspired by the travels in Arizona and New Mexico, searching for my roots. Did I mention that I'm descended from Irish cowboys and Mexican curanderos? I'm as Wild West as huevos rancheros, another weird, rasquache product of Aztlán, as all Chicanos are.

It's an obsession with me. So much that I find visions of a sequel popping into my head. Maybe there's a whole world – or even a universe growing in there, while I gather research materials in the real west.

As a kid growing up in the fifties and sixties, I absorbed a lot of the Wild West through popular culture, though I do find Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour kind of dull. I prefer things like Jodorowsy's El Topo and Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke Down. I like my west weird as well as wild.

Mexicans and Indians help. Spaghetti westerns – my favorite is A Bullet for the General -- especially when they are bizarre and don't know it, are great. Just don't let it get all whitebread on you. For me Aztlán is the Wild West.

You see, the Wild West isn't history, it's myth, violent dreams spawned by the struggle to build a life in land snatched through generations of bloody conflict. Who are we? What are we becoming? Who are we shooting today?

Of course Hollywood and its corporate masters want to make it all suitable for Chinese videogame addicts and American tract-housing dwellers, but there's something about this land and its myths. They want to be wild. They have issues. And the real history is there: fermenting under the volcanic landscapes, mongrel ghosts with mythotecnic agendas that go way back, and reach into the future . . .

It's time to take back the Wild West, Aztlán, and let it be as weird as it needs to be.

Chicanonautica: The Wild West Ain't What It Used to Be

by Ernest Hogan

It's coming – the Anthology With No Name. Really, for now it's being refered to as the Diverse Weird Western Anthology. There are two volumes scheduled.

It'll be edited by Cynthia Ward and feature stories by La Bloga's own Rudy Ch. Garcia, Misha Nogha, Don Webb, and may other fine writers.

I'm sure somebody will come up with a snappy title.

Oh, yeah, I'll have a couple of stories in there:

My poststeampunk romp, “Pancho Villa's Flying Circus” (previously published in We See A Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology) will be in Vol. 1.

And “Lupita's Hand,” a fantasy of Wild, Wild Aztlán (previously published in Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention) will be in Vol. 2

Another reason I'm enthusiastic about this anthology: I was one of the inspirations for it. Editor Cynthia Ward wrote about fantastic westerns on Facebook and mentioned “Pancho Villa's Flying Circus” among others, and wouldn't it be great to have an anthology of such stories? Over the next few hours, there was a FB discussion that ended in a deal being made and Diverse Weird Western coming to unnatural life. This is what the social media is for, muchacho/as!

This is part of a larger trend, an extension of the Great Genre Meltdown of the '00s: the western is back but not in a traditional way. Used to be if you tried to mix anything fantastic or sci-fiish with the western, editors would automatically turn it down, saying that they didn't know what to put on the cover and the audience would be confused. Now publishers are experimenting with supernatural and steampunk westerns. And they don't seem to have any problem coming up with cover images.

I see an opportunity here for Chicano/Latino/Hispanos and writers of other cultures. The western is American mythology, though it has threatened to go global ever since the invention of the spaghetti western. Every generation recreates the western, updating the myth for its own needs. And do we ever have needs in the 21^st century.

As Marshall McLuhan said in The Medium is the Massage: We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.

And Star Trek and Star Wars are just Bonanza in space drag.

This is a time for new visions. Let us take this genre about clashing cultures and blow the subrban minds, give them new ways to live imaginatively. Let's blow the old stereotypes wide open. How about westerns for the recombocultral era of Postcolonialism, Afrofuturism, and Chicanonautica? Let other cultures into the new frontier! Go wild!

I'm hoping for things like Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. Only wilder.

Ernest Hogan is descended from New Mexico Irish vaqueros and Villaista curanderos, lives in Arizona, and often listens to Tejano radio stations through iTunes when he writes.

Getting your only unpublished story published

Last fall I posted A taste of 3 Chicano spec stories, with the openings to three of my unpublished spec-fiction works, including, "How Five-Gashes-Tumbling Chaneco Earned the Nickname." Last week it was announced that WolfSinger Publications will include it in their Diverse Weird Western anthology (title, TBA), edited by Cynthia Ward. It will be about my tenth traditionally published piece of fiction.

For me, this is a great accomplishment because it's the last(!) of my oldest unpublished short stories, not counting a collection about Weird Ronnie [one of which won first prize in Britain] that you might yet read one day. This leaves me with only two newer ones seeking homes in print.

That accomplishment doesn't make me special, but it should send a message to all writers to not give up. To revise. To improve their art. To send stories out. To not give up, no matter how unprivileged you might rightly feel.

The setting that inspired 5-Gashes

I might be a little special in the number of genres I've covered: sci-fi, magical realism, fantasy, alternate-world, detective, children's fable (in Spanish), historical fantasy, fabulism and horror. You can find out about them online.

Among the twenty-one authors in this WolfSinger volume will also be stories by Kathleen Alcalá and bloguero Ernesto Hogan. Closer to publication we'll provide more information, especially the title, pub date and availability.

I wrote How Five-Gashes-Tumbling Chaneco Earned the Nickname as an experimental piece that I call "cross-genre mestizo/Mexica/alien/Diné/folklore/SF/F." It's a prosing rollercoaster that blends "Western," Spanish, Indio, Mexican and mestizo histories in a way that White-Guy-Rides-to-the-Rescue stories never imagine. It's got Juan de Oñate, Grand Canyon shamans, lost journalists, pumas and jaguars and, well, you can still get a taste of it, or wait for the anthology.

From Editor Cynthia Ward about this anthology: "Ah, the 'Western frontier' was full of brave white American pioneer men killing the native inhabitants, who didn't realize the land they'd occupied for millennia belonged to the newcomers.  It was full of heroic white American gunmen shooting each other in high noon standoffs or over cattle. Those few characters who didn't fit the above templates were generally, helpless Mexican peasants; treacherous Mexican bandits; or the occasional rancher's wife, school marm, or prostitute. Omitted from the history lessons and the movies and TV shows were--the whole wide world. For this anthology, we’re looking for stories about everyone else, stories that reflect the complex historical realities and diversities of the North American 'Western frontier.' Stories about marginalized and under-represented groups."

About the editor: "Cynthia Ward writes science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction. With Nisi Shawl, she co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Guide (Aqueduct Press)."

About the publisher: "WolfSinger Publications is a micro-press company, of on-line magazines The Lorelei Signal and Sorcerous Signals, as well as the print compilation, Mystic Signals. WolfSinger also publishes short novels, preferred genres are Science Fiction and Fantasy, and will consider any genre except erotica and children's."

Caravana 43 coming to your area

The CARAVANA43 of Ayotzinapa families and students are touring many cities throughout the U.S. in the coming weeks, telling their stories and experiences surrounding the disappearance of the 43 Mexican students, presumed murdered.

Caravana43 will travel in three routes, as well as make multiple visits to Washington, DC. It began March 15 and will continue until the end of April. The first visit to D.C. is today, March 20th.

The route is complicated and the information on their site (like the tour itself) is a work in progress. Here you can find the information--links, emails, phone, dates, sites--to connect to people and events in your community. Please help and welcome them in whatever ways you can.

– – – – –

Es todo, hoy, because it's a spring Friday afternoon out on my front patio in Denver, drinking with whoever shows up today to charlar.

RudyG

a.k.a. Chicano spec-lit author Rudy Ch. Garcia, author of two unpublished short stories--one on time travel, and the other, a cross-genre mestizo/Mexica/alien/Diné/folklore/SciFi/Fiction tale