Chicanonautica: Quetzalcoatl Attacks

by Ernest Hogan

I was recovering between cataract surgeries, going through movies on my YouTube list. There was Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). Beloved by some -- someone once compared it to my novel Smoking Mirror Blues. I had heard that it gets everything about Aztec culture and mythology wrong. 

On the other hand, it was written and directed by Larry Cohen, a master of schlocky movies.  I also love schlocky movies and the John Waters meme goes: “Get more out of life. See a fucked up movie.” 

And it turns out, it ain’t that bad.

Yeah, Cohen spent no time researching the Aztecs and Quetzalcoatl—he doesn’t know Aztec from Maya, from Huastec from Olmec from Kwakiutl. At one point the plot about a winged serpent being worshiped as a god by the Aztecs and used by a killer is explained in an actual museum using Pacific Northwest First Nations artifacts as a backdrop.

 

That sort of thing makes me grumble, but this ain’t no big deal high culture Academy Awards statement of Hollywood’s collective self-consciousness, it’s a low budget horror flick cooked up to wrangle quick cash from the Great American Public. They don’t know about PreColumbian civilizations, and don’t care. And those of us who do care are a, if you pardon the expression, “minority.”

Maybe someday my sense of humor will become so warped that I’ll find that sort of thing funny.

As it is, Q delivers the goods of the classic monster movie formula. There’s a monster flying around NYC, swooping down between the skyscrapers, killing people. The pre-digital special effects are charming, but we don’t see a lot of them, because they were expensive, so we get a lot of gritty cops and robber action on crowded Big Apple streets. 

The cops are David Carradine, who starred in the original Kung Fu TV show, and Richard Roundtree, the first blaxploitation hero in the Shaft movies. In keeping with the genre’s traditions, the black guy is killed, and the white guy gets the girl. 

There is one brown character. They must have cleared the Puerto Ricans off the streets for the filming. He’s the bad guy sacrificing New Yorkers and gets less screen time than the monster and comes off more like a raging psychopath than a religious/political fanatic. His motivations are glossed over.

 

Old school monster movie stuff.

I was reminded of another movie, 1946’s The Flying Serpent. I wouldn’t be surprised if Larry Cohen was “inspired” by it.  In this Producers Releasing Corporation, PRC for short, AKA Poverty Row production, second string horror star, George Zucco, plays a mad scientist who sends a serpentine feathered creature that looks like a cheap souvenir from a border tourist trap to kill people. The twist is he’s an archaeologist, and his victims are getting in the way of proving his theory that the Aztec came from New Mexico. Yes, the Aztlán theory!

The story features Azteca, New Mexico. Matte paintings show ruins the villain thinks prove his theory. There is no such town. There is an Aztec, NM, that does have ruins, but they don’t seem to be Aztec. There are places all over the Southwest/Aztlán named after the Aztecs and Montezuma, because the folks doing the naming couldn’t imagine the local tribes building them.

 

To give the mad archaeologist credit, a people named the Sinagua by the Spanish left Arizona after the eruption of Sunset Crater in Arizona about a thousand years ago. A couple of centuries later–after all they were on foot–the Nahua/Mexica/Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico. I wonder if they were the same people . . .

Also, it’s been a few decades, so maybe there should be a 21st century version of this story. A Chicano archaeologist with Aztlán nationalist sympathies finds a winged serpent and offers its services to the cause. Of course, there will Latinx law enforcement agents to save the day. 

Or maybe the archaeologist could be the hero . . .

Ernest Hogan is a Chicano science fiction writer who dabbles in guerrilla archaeology/anthropology.

Chicanonautica: Marvel Meets Maya

by Ernest Hogan

When I posted a picture of a South American merman-like creature from an anthropology book, Prehistoric Man in the New World on Facebook, Ed Hall told me I needed to see Black Panther: Wakana Forever. I was confused. 

Then I saw a photo of Tenoch Huerta who played Namor in Mayanoid regalia. Hmm . . . 

I waited until Disney+ streamed it. I enjoy the MCU movies but have mixed feelings about them. Back in the 20th century, Marvel was one of the underdogs of pop culture, and wasn’t as corporate, and closer to folk art. Now the entity is more environment than anti-environment, as Marshall McLuhan would put it. For me, it feels weird for these comics to have become the center of our emerging global civilization. 

Also, the tendency to make Atlantis Mayan by latter-day mystics bothers me. Nobody offers any solid evidence of an Atlantis/Maya connection. Though amusing–Augustus Le Plongeon’s Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx is fun, but he provides no conclusive evidence. I file this stuff with hollow earth and ancient astronaut crapola.

There’s a meme going around with Plato saying, “Atlantis was a metaphor . . .”

Fortunately, the film’s conceptualization crew had the good taste not to even use the A-word. This Namor lives in Tlalocan— a lost colony of Maya mutated by a vibranium meteor for underwater living. It actually works—they did some research and the Mayan decor is gorgeous. 

There is, however, a problem.

Tlalocan is Nahuatl, meaning “the place of Tlaloc” the Aztec rain god. That’s Aztec, not Maya. A different culture and language. This is like mistaking French for German.  A Mayan equivalent would have been Chactenango, Chac being the Mayan name for the rain god, tenango meaning place.

I also feel uneasy about DisneyMarvel’s attempts to appeal to the worldwide “Latin” (not just Chicano) audience. If you hadn’t noticed there’s been a whole lota corporate takeover of pop culture this century. I miss the days when our superheroes and mythologies weren’t corporate intellectual property.

For a long time, before the other streaming services, DisneyMarvel has been releasing its movies globally, in all kinds of languages. I guess they don’t have any preColumbian culture scholars working for them. Their reaching out to black and “Latin” audiences is a search for wider audiences and bigger profits, not the empowerment of “minorities.” 

I suppose they could do damage control by having Namor, who’s supposed to be centuries old, fighting the Aztecs as well as the Spanish, forming alliances, learning languages . . .

And also, Africa and Latin America both have folk/superhero traditions of their own . . . 

Other than that, it’s not a bad flick. The special effects are spectacular, as expected these days. It follows the epic/operatic formula of the genre, building up to a long, climactic battle where you can get up and go to the bathroom without missing any plot development, and after it all, reassurance that the sacred franchise will continue for your worshiping pleasure.

I’m already forgetting the parts that didn’t irritate me. 

Environment versus anti-environment, as Prof. McLuhan said. 

Someday soon, selected parts of our superhero mythos will be reedited into the holy book of the future, like the King James Bible.

Meanwhile, I recommend watching Santo Contra Blue Demon en Atlántida and Mistero en Las Bermudas for a little variation on this theme.

Ernest Hogan will be teaching a class, Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom at the Palabras del Pueblo Writing Workshop, for all you Latinoid writers who dare to let loose your rasquache imaginations.

Chicanonautica: Dazed and Bemused in Mayach, Mu, and Atlantis

by Ernest Hogan

I dug into this one expecting amusing bullshit, something to get me dazed and bemused in the quarantine. I wasn't disappointed, but I also found myself enjoying it and had my mind blown a few times. I was also inspired.

Maya/Atlantis: Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx by August Le Plongeon, first published in 1896, reprinted in 1973 as part of Steinerbooks' "Spiritual Science Library," is one I had heard about and finally found while on a used bookstore crawl. The glue that bound the paperback cracked and broke as I read it. I finally had to stick it back together with duct tape. I've got a feeling that I'll be referring back to it.

Le Plongeon, who had long, pointed white beard like R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, expounds a theory that the Maya are as old as Atlantis and Mu/Lemuria and that they colonized Egypt, Babylonia, and India before recorded history. He doesn't provide much convincing evidence. The introduction had pages peppered with Mayan hieroglyphs in attempt to convince the reader that he knew how to read them. There are a lot charts comparing the Mayan language (which he, like the Mormons, makes the mistake of thinking as a single idiom, but is actually a system of related dialects) to other languages that seem impressive, but then I don't know all those languages . . .

Strangely, he never presents any Mayan text with a translation that could be compared. Not even the story of Queen Móo, which he claims he got from a series of murals, that are reproduced as drawings that look like Mayan murals, but I would have been more impressed by photographs. He and his wife spent from 1873 to 1884 in the Yucatan studying the ruins. They were the first to photograph Chichén Itzá, but didn't the take pictures of the Queen Móo murals

As someone with a lifelong obsession with pre-Columbian archaeology, I must admit that Mayan art and hieroglyphs hold a certain fascination. They get the imagination going . . .

Le Plongeon writes "This is not a book of romance or imagination; but a work—one of a series—intended to give ancient America its proper place in the universal history of the world." Then declares that "Maya—not India—is the true mother of nations." It looks like his imagination went wild on him.

But I can't dismiss it as trash reading for amusement under lockdown. As a science fiction writer and sociopolicital travesio, trickster, humble acolyte of the Smoking Mirror and the Ancient Coyote, I see some bizarre gems floating in the snake oil.

I like the idea of Mayach being the Mayan name for the Yucatan. It isn't clear where Le Plongeon got the word, but it's a nice one. He offers Egyptian meanings, because the Maya, who he says were "mighty navigators" according to the Ramayana (guess I'm going to have read it again). He refers to "The Maya colonists who carried their conceptions of cosmic evolution to India," and claims to have "traced step-by-step the journey of the Maya colonists, along the course of the Euphrates." Also, they were "worshippers of the mastodon, god of the sea, whose image adornes their palaces, sacred and public buildings."

I have to mention that there doesn't seem to be any Mayan art depicting ships of any kind.

Oh yes, he also claims that the last words that Jesus spoke on the cross were Mayan. And not just any old Mayan. "He spoke pure Maya."

Then there's the issue of the banana.

Don't take my word for it, here's David Hatcher Childress from Lost Cities of Ancient Lemuria and the Pacific: "They are said to be one of the few foods that mankind can live completely on. Yet, the only other seedless fruits, such as naval oranges and seedless grapes are genetically engineered. Someone, somewhere in the remote past, cultivated bananas into the amazing plant that it is today."

We don't know who invented the banana.

A prehistoric, seafaring Maya/Atlantis/Lemurian empire would be a likely suspect.

According to Le Plongeon, the name Maya, "was given to the banana tree, symbol of their country."

If you go far enough south in Mexico, into Mayach, tamales—that essential pre-Columbian food, are wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks.

All this would make Chicanos--and the all Latinx variations--the true children of "the mother of nations."

To quote Le Plongeon again: "Can it be that all these are mere coincidences? If they be, then let us present more of them."

Ernest Hogan is holed up under quarantine, but his imagination is merrily running amok.

Chicanonautica: Our Myths Recovered

by Ernest Hogan

I meant to read David Bowles' Feathered Serpent/Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico much sooner, but I'm a writer, so I live under a mound of books that grows larger all the time. Also, the last few years have been hectic—do I really have to catalog the
Trumptopian madness?

It hasn't calmed down. In fact the last few weeks have gotten crazier. All the more reason to dig this book out one of my many, teetering to-be-read stacks. I was glad I did.

I became a mythology fan in grade school, back in the Sixties. The peplum, or sword and sandal genre caught my childish attention. Movies like Hercules in the Haunted World and Jason and the Argonauts left their mark on my sensibilities. And then I would find books.

But then these were usually Greco-Roman, occasionally Norse. Sometimes they were from Egypt, "Arabia," Asia . . . distant lands.

By the time I was in middle school, I found out about the Aztecs and Maya, in the public library; also my dad had books on archaeology. My mind was blown. There was something different about these stories. And the people looked like me.

Hell, the were my ancestors! This mythology was mine.

I wondered why there weren't any movies about them. I had a lot to learn.

This began my life-long obsession with preColumbian cultures. It shaped my world, and made me a Chicano in mind and spirit as well as genetics.

It wasn't easy.

I had to hunt down books in libraries and used book stores. And they were never easy-to-read editions.

These were often adult, scholarly works full of dull academic prose. But the subject matter compelled me. A lost world, shattered by colonialism. Someone had to to gather the fragments, reassemble them, bring them back to life.

I had often watched my dad get interested in something, go to the library, check out a stack of books, and in a few weeks become an expert.

I became a teenage researcher, a scholar. Also an writer and artist.

Today's kids don't realize how easy they have it. They just have to read Feathered Serpent/Dark Heart of the Sky and they have an excellent introduction to preColumbian cultures and mythology, and an entertaining read at the same time.

 

It goes from the creation myths, the hero twins of the Popol Vuh, to the Toltecs and Maya, the Aztecs (others are mentioned, ancient Mexico was multicultural), and the grand tragedy of the Conquest. The stories are separate, but they are presented as a mosaic and bring a shattered world back together again. A miracle or sorts.

I'm sure it will inspire young Chicanos/Latinos/Lantinxs/Latinoids, make them sure of their identity, and send them off to study their mythology.

The book is a remarkable accomplishment. David Bowles should be considered a true Chicano hero. He makes me feel like a slacker.

Ernest Hogan wrote this review at home, while the library where he works was closed due to the Coronavirus.