Chicanonautica: Whatchcallus, Anyway?

by Ernest Hogan

I did a display of science fiction by writers of what I call the Latinoid Continuum and I used the term Latinx. There will probably be objections from some of my peers, so here’s an explanation:

The sign is for the patrons of that library where I work, and while we get my fellow Chicanos here, we also get a lot of others, African Americans, “whites,” et cetera. . . It’s in a public place and as inclusive as possible.

Also, not all of the writers featured are, if you want to get nick-picky, Chicanos. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is Mexico born and lives in Canada. V. Castro is a Tejana who lives in England.  Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology includes “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” one of my best stories, along with “Old Folks” by Scótt Russell Dúncan (note the accent marks–should I do it too? Érnest Hógan . . .) editor for Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow–Codex I (out now, buy it, read it, live it) and works by a diverse crew of writers from cultures transmogrified by contact with the Spanish Armada.

The x is still esoteric and controversial and not really known outside of college campuses and bureaucracies, but I consider exposing people to things from outside their comfort zone part of my job.

Once near the ruins of Monte Alban, I identified myself as a Chicano to a Zapotec guide. He had never heard the word. I tried to explain, but ended up leaving him thinking I was from Chicago.

In my career, I’ve found that it helps to use words that outsiders—Anglos (some take offense, “I ain’t from Angola!”), gringos, (et and cetera)— can understand. When dealing with more than one culture, declaring an official name never works. What usually happens, quite organically, is new languages are created.

New life and new civilizations. Chicanidad evolving into Xicanxfuturism. Talk about a concept that could cause trouble. 

The word Yucatan is based on one of the many Mayan dialects for “I don’t understand you.”

I’ve never been picky about what people call me. The internet thinks I’m a cyberpunk, though I’ve never been part of the movement. People have a hard time figuring me out, so I let them slap a handy label on me and go on with my business. These labels are usually insults or place-holders for something they don’t understand.

So what? Political correctness is for losers and I’m  a bizarre phenomenon. I’m lucky they don’t call in the military.

You usually don’t get called what you choose, you get called what your enemies call you, if they win, that is . . .

Chicano started out as a vile insult. Like the N-word.

The Navajo call themselves the Diné. The many Apache tribes call themselves variations on Ndé, Ndee, N’de or even Diné. Yes, they are related, but then aren’t we all? 

 

Do you have Neanderthal or Denisovian DNA? Or both?

Navajo and Apache are Spanishized versions of Zuni and Tewa Pueblo words for “enemy” and “cultivated fields in the valley” as in  apachu from the navahu’u.

We all call the Kanien’kehá:ka the Mohawks, a Dutch/English version of the Algonquian mohowawog, “man-eater,” cannibal, if you will.

So rather than arguing about what we should be called and what language we should be arguing in we need to form a united front. But first there will be a lot of fighting about it.

Meanwhile, I’m using Latinoid Continuum . . . 

ICE can’t tell Mexicans from Chicanos from Latinos from Latinx from Xicanx from brown from black from white. And a warehouse is being converted into a “detention center” not far from where I live. 

New languages, and realities, will be created in the process. 

Xicanxfuturism is the future!

Or as Jean-Luc Godard’s evil computer Alpha-60 said in Alphaville:  “Sometimes reality can be too complex to be conveyed by the spoken word. Legend remolds it into a form that can be spread all across the world.” 

See? Chicano really is a science fiction state of being.

Ernest Hogan, Father of Chicano Science Fiction, wants you to buy Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I, read it, and start building the rasquache future of our choice. His Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars story “A Wild and Wooly Road Trip on Mars” will be in Codex II, soon . . . 

 

Chicanonautica: The Surrealistic Burrito Western of My Dreams

 by Ernest Hogan

Once again, I’m waiting . . . for Codex II of Xicanxfuturism to come out . . . for the other shoe to drop on the world-transmogrifying moment of history we’re living through . . . for news about the precarious state of the publishing industry . . .

So, I do what I usually do, let my monstrous imagination wander, feed it the weirdness I see, let things happen.

Often I end up getting flashes of the Surrealistic Spaghetti Western of My Dreams, that I’ve decided to start calling the Surrealistic Burrito Western of My Dreams. It’s a better name for something growing in a Chicano brain. A collection of stuff wrapped in the tortilla of my twisted worldview.

 

They come from living in Aztlán, looking through the veneer of corporate Americana into the forgotten history and the witch’s brew of battling mythologies and my imagination. The word decolonized doesn’t seem to be strong enough.

 

The fact that it all gets more post-apocalyptic, alternate universe-y, and surrealistic (I overuse the word, but it’ll do it until somebody comes up with a better one) every day makes it more intense.

Though I grew up watching the likes of the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, my favorite western is El Topo, so it ain’t gonna be no Johns Ford and Wayne kinda thing.

I mostly see things, take a picture—thank Tezcatlipoca for the camera phone— and imagine . . . mostly images, occasional fragments of scenarios like those wacko dreams that I can’t even begin to describe.

I’ve mentioned them to my wife and joked about writing a screenplay. (So many things in my life start as jokes!) But I can’t come up with a plot or characters (yet). Just imagery that amuses me no end.

Maybe if I added some elements of my Irish/New Mexican family history with my ancestors riding in a posse after and testifying against Billy the Kid, giving Pancho Villa a curandero cure, working in a Mexican circus. 

Like most Chicano families, our history is undocumented, mostly legend, full of holes that can be filled with glorious delirium.

Probably it will have to be more multiversal or surrealistic than post-apocalyptic. Time, space, realities . . .

Maybe it should be a novel, but only if I can make it so outrageous that no one dares call it magic realism.

Or maybe I should have the screenplay be nothing but opening scenes . . .

Fade in: The sun rises over a desert making twisted and decaying cacti into a tangle of bizarre silhouettes. The wind whistles. A flaming tumbleweed rolls past a Mayan pyramid in front of jagged mountains under psychedelic clouds. The camera pans to a close-up of the head of a person buried up to their neck. Ants swarm over it, feasting on the flesh. Bare skull shows in places. A dirigible painted like a feathered serpent passes by overhead. Cowboy boots decorated with art nouveau circuit patterns move in on either side of the screen. A stream of urine hits the head. The ants are undisturbed. The remaining eye opens. Cue Pepe Guízar’s Guadalajara, LOUD!

Ernest Hogan has been using radio.garden to listen to stations from parts of Mexico where Americans are told not to go. On one he heard songs with lyrics including “maquina del tiempo” and “no puedo teleporte.” Meanwhile, buy Codex I of Xicanxfuturism!

Chicanonautica: Plans For a Xicanxfuturustic Year

by Ernest Hogan

I’m a deranged optimist. I always expect the new year to be fantastic and make plans like a mad scientist. Muhuhahahahahaha!

Then 2026 kicks off the mother of all shit shows. It makes the Nixon years look like a joyride. I could list the horrors, but I’m sure things worse than anything I could recount here are probably going to happen before this goes up.

What the holy hell! I’m going ahead anyway! I’m crazy enough! I don’t want their myopic, dystopian apocalypse. I want the future to be better, full of the triumphs of human possibilities.

Fortunately, I’ve been involved in something that’s pushing for such a world.

I’m talking about Xicanxfuturism.

As the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, I’ve been at it since before the word was coined. It’s what Chicanonautica is all about. I’m realizing that it’s the story of my life.

Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I is out, and even as the world is being distracted by the global pendajada, it’s starting some strange rumblings in Aztlán and beyond. The overall mood of the book is rebellious. All those angry, creative Xicanxes . . .

Xicanxfuturism will help us survive. Or at least inspire us to try.

Codex II is coming soon, and I’ll be in it with both a drawing and a story: “A Wild and Woolly Road Trip on Mars,” featuring Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, and an episode to be included in an eventual novel.

Speaking of novels, New York isn’t interested in my new novel, Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin–in which a Chicano science fiction writer with a non-Hispanic name loses track of where his life ends and the sci-fi begins (hmm . . .) so I’m trying the small presses. Like I’ve said, I always keep one foot in the underground so when the shit hits the fan, I have a place to stand.

And it looks like the shit is hitting the fan.

There’s also that pile of unpublished short fiction that I’ve produced in the last few years. Time to weaponize my creations. The coming situation will demand different kinds of entertainment.

Believe me, as a child of the Sixties I've been around on the cultural revolutionary/evolutional merry-go-round a few times, we ain’t seen nothing yet . . .

The times they are a-changing, like that rock star who won the Nobel prize said. 1969 seemed like a whole other world compared to 1966. I feel that it will be similar–probably more extreme for 2029 and 2026. As a Xicanxfuturist/Chicanonaut, I can’t afford the bourgeois luxury of being apolitical. I am what the monsters want to eliminate. Just read my books and stories.

Meanwhile, keep your head down, watch each other’s backs. Rev up those imaginations.

As the Popol Vuh says:

Such was the defeat of the rulers of Xilbalba. The boys accomplished it only through wonders, only through self-transformation.

Ernest Hogan is alive and well and living in Aztlán. Tezcatlipoca is whispering in his ear. Seventy years old and ready to go wild.

Chicanonautica: 2025: A Road Odyssey: Impressions of NorCal

by Ernest Hogan

In the Quality Inn in Tulane, California, I woke up from a dream where a secret society gave me an award for Cortez on Jupiter. Wondering what it meant, I made my way to the breakfast room that was full of Indigenous-looking, Spanish-speaking construction workers. Is California being reconstructed, too?

After a while a few Euro tourists showed up. Maybe they were Scandinavian. I couldn’t understand a word they said.

Being a born in East L.A., a SoCal guy, NorCal has always been strange. The cooler weather and different cultural mix throw me.

A cluster of Tikis that seem to want to become totem poles in this climate,

a dead pizza joint waiting to be studied by the archeologists of the future,

painted metal monsters—the farm business being hijacked by whimsy.

Then, a true enchanted forest gem, Kaweah Coffee Roasters! The art had a raven theme—kaweah meaning crow or raven cry. They have a great selection of eye-catching T-shirts and the coffee is good.

Sequoia National Park—was also “free” due to the government shutdown.

After the park, high in the mountains. Near an ice-cold river, we were all so dazzled that we hadn't noticed that the Prius had almost run out of gas, and the electricity was almost out. And gas stations and towns were sparse. Luckily, the gal working at Borden Cavern took mercy, and when her shift ended, went off and came back with a can of gas!

There are heroes out there.

Next morning, there was live international polo in the Tulare Quality Inn’s breakfast room.

Back in our room MSNBC explained that bailing out South America is preventing China from taking over South America.

Then we took off northwards across the Central Valley farm/ranch country and were soon in Coalinga.

First there were all these banners with a cartoon horned (yeah, I know that most people say “horny”) toad, high school’s mascot. They also have annual horned toad races.

An antediluvian gas station was being refurbished.

After getting out to take a lot of pictures we discovered that it was part of the R.C. Baker Museum.

It takes up several blocks.

One of those places that’s almost as good as having a time machine.

We’ll probably go back some day.

Checked out thrift shops in Carmel and other towns.

The ghost of Philip José Farmer left a copy of his novel Flesh in a place that was a combination thrift store and shrine to Koringa, La Femme Fakir, who not only hypnotized reptiles, but fought in the Resistance against the Nazis in World War Two–I imagine her having Mandrake the Magician-type adventures.

I also found a copy of Elena Zelayeta’s Elena’s Favorite Foods California Style, and some other treasures . . .

Next morning we went north on Highway 1 into the fog,  stumbling into what Em calls “fabulosity.”

Fantastic murals and art in Pacifica and Santa Cruz:

a giant octopus,

mutant mermaids,

ceramic fish.

Emly said, “It feels good to be in Liberal Land.”

Skeletons ran wild in Pacific Grove for Halloween and Día de los Muertos, and Phil Farmer’s ghosts left a copy of Finnegan’s Wake. (His “Riders of the Purple Wage” was inspired by Wake.)

Later Emily said, “The tech bros like Trump because they think he’ll let them make their murder robots.”

“They also think he’s promised them Mars,” I replied.

This triggered visions of Mars crowded with murder robots. Maybe that could be worked into the Cornelius/Duke/Theremin story . . .

It was overcast all day. No need for sunglasses. Not at all like Arizona. Like Venus in a 1930s science fiction, as Farmer once described.

There are lots of Priuses in NorCal.

And no cell service zones. All those hilly coastal regions.

The first two rooms they gave us at the Oceanside Motel in Ft. Bragg weren’t cleaned, and there was no working heat or air-conditioning. They said the cleaning woman had walked out.

Then through a wet, misty forest to the 101.

They had great huevos rancheros and a lot of murals of cows.

Ferndale, “A Victorian Town,” had a colonial downtown, and lots of skeletons, and a theater doing The Rocky Horror Show.

Eureka had lots of murals, and more dispensaries than liquor stores, but then they are pretty close to Oregon, and Sasquatchlandia.