Chicanonautica: Carlos Castaneda’s Very Weird Shit

by Ernest Hogan 

 

I can’t ignore Carlos Castaneda. Not only was he a bestselling author from the Latinoid Continuum, a big influence on pop culture (the Force in Star Wars is based on power), and a lot of scifiistas. He also encroaches on my territory. So when I heard about Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, I knew I had to read and review it.

It’s a thick one and it took me a while, mostly because it kept giving me a lot to think about. I’d read a little, and have to stop and let my brain chew on the chunks of weird shit.

And what weird shit . . .

Telling women his semen would instantly give them shamanistic power. Having another man impregnate his wife so he could have a blond son (he was el Negro of his family). His “I am in Peru or Mexico" gag. Immortality. Travel to other dimensions . . .

I had always thought Hunter S. Thompson summed him up in a letter to Oscar Zeta Acosta: “Very weird. The old man really fucked the kid around, eh?” Only now it looks like don Juan didn’t exist. Just who was doing the fucking around here? I have to reconsider my thinking.

It’s that kind of book.

It triggers memories of the world since the Sixties. As the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, I have a unique perspective. Yeah, he wasn’t quite a Chicano in the sense of a Mexican choosing a non-Anglo identity. He was from Peru, but told people he was Brazilian–how do you think people saw him in SoCal? He was cut off (though largely by his own choice) from his family/tribal/ancestral roots, living between cultures, creating his own identity–that’s Chicano.

Also immigrants who can’t fully assimilate tend to become Chicanos.

I read his first two books back in the Seventies largely because they were unavoidable. They were entertaining. I didn’t consider them fiction. 

Since I find the idea of a know-it-all telling everyone what to do a turn-off, I went no further. Besides gurus were–and still are–crawling out of the woodwork.

I don’t believe in gurus.

Thank Tezcatlipoca for my built-in bullshit detector!

Also every Yaqui I’ve met who’s heard of him thought he was full of shit.

Sometimes his name comes up when people try to describe my work, though I’m probably closer to Oscar Acosta, but that’s still misleading.

Sometimes it’s easier to let people have their misconceptions of me than to explain my Chicano-is-a-sci-fi-state-of-being reality. It’s not really lying. What do you do when they don’t seem to be capable of seeing the truth?

Maybe I am un poco like him.

Unlike him, I am not a pathological liar. Apparently, he lied constantly. Ru Marshall did an amazing twenty-year job of sorting through this man’s work and utterances, cross referencing it with interviews with people who knew and encountered him and coming up with an epic biography that is, in my humble opinion, more interesting and fantastic than Castaneda's books. 

He lived writing fiction in his head all the time. So do I. I am painfully aware of where my real life ends and the sci-fi begins. I have no interest in making others live in my fantasies.

It is impressive that he got anthropologists at UCLA to give him a doctorate for a novel, though the fact that he was a rich, bestselling author probably breached the experiment. It’s not surprising that Simon & Schuster didn’t care any more than his readers did. Fiction? Nonfiction? They only care if the books sell. I’ve heard that there are people who read all his books then start over. They fill a need that I don't have.

I think.

This is all amusing, up until you get to the mysterious deaths and disappearances following his death, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see successful media adaptations. The chapter about the fucking around with Fellini alone would make a wild and crazy movie. In all, it’s a bizarre soap opera dealing with the Great American/Latinoid Spiritual Crisis.

The peoples of the United States of America have a strong lust for spirituality. It’s a product they keep trying to buy. It makes them prey to the manipulations of narcissistic sociopaths. We need to learn to recognize and resist them.

And stop electing them.

Be careful out there.

Ernest Hogan’s New, Improved Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom is not a cult. When he finds himself sounding like a guru, he laughs. Or is that the laughter of Tezcatlipoca?

Chicanonautica: The Hazards of Writing While Chicano

by Ernest Hogan 

I recently finished a novel and am thinking about what I’m going to do with it, how I’m going to market it, and to whom, which brings me to the uneasy subject of the hazards of writing while Chicano. Also, I need to send a tip of the Hogan sombrero to Daniel Cano for bringing up the subject here a while a back. It’s a subject I can’t seem to escape from.

Being tainted by the Billy the Kid/New Mexico Irish strain and having an Irish surname, it only confuses the issue. I outed myself as a Chicano in a letter to Asimov’s Science Fiction after Norman Spinrad, in his review of my novel Cortez on Jupiter, assumed that I was an Anglo. I still insist on calling myself a Chicano, because it provides a lot of information about me without having to go into a detailed bio. I don’t mind being published in Latinx anthologies, getting published is hard enough, and I can’t afford to get choosy. I’ve also been in an Afrofuturist anthology, no to mention all those white publications I’ve been in.

The problem is the word Chicano carries some complicated baggage. I once tried to explain it to a guy in Mexico, who ended up thinking I was from Chicago. East Coasters who only run across it via Hunter S. Thompson and cop shows get the idea that it refers to a cannibalistic tribe that cruises around in lowriders selling dope and looking for virgins to sacrifice. Chicanos also aren’t traditionally considered literate, let alone writers. My very existence tests the limits of a lot of imaginations.

Editors tend to like my work, but their bosses see “Chicano” as a limited, barrio market. It’s like going up to bat with two strikes against you. And then they still feel that you have to be careful when writing about “those people” because “they get offended.”  Besides, they’re looking for bestsellers that will start franchises and be considered for TV and movie adaptation.

The pendejada is that I don't write for a small group of barrio intellectuals. I see my books as selling like crazy, shaking the world. I’ve got fans scattered all over the planet. Also in the last couple of years, I've had inquiries for the TV/film rights to all three of my novels and one of my short stories, so this may not be delusions of grandeur on my part.

So, what do I do with a novel about a Chicano science fiction writer who loses track of where his life ends and the sci-fi begins?

Should I call it science fiction emphasizing the extrapolation on the development of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology into the Singularity with an alien invasion and a Swiftian satire on 21st century U.S.A. for laughs? Or speculative fiction? In ten years working in a bookstore, and more than that in a library, no one has ever asked to see any speculative fiction–does anyone know what it is? Dare I try to pitch it as a mainstream bestseller? Can a Chicano do that?

Let’s give that a try: “It’s a modern day Don Quixote with elements of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In the traditions of T.C. Boyle, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick.”

Uh-oh. I swerved into sci-fi territory again.

That’s a Chicano thing, though, always sauntering off where we aren’t supposed to be. 

But then where am I supposed to be? Who says I can’t be a writer? And why not sci-fi? Ain’t the whole fonqui rasquache enchilada of La Cultura of the Latinoid continuum–my beat, home turf, barrio, whatever--full of weird stuff? And doesn’t that qualify as “write what you know?”

I guess the best thing to do is just do, be as Chicano as I can, go stark raving cucuy on their asses.

Stay tuned chamacos, it’s gonna be fun!

Ernest Hogan a Chicano writer, a writer who is Chicano, and a lot of other things. 

 

Chicanonautica: Mexico City in Shades of Noir

by Ernest Hogan

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has all my respect. She is one of the most successful Latina writers of her generation. Her knockout novel Mexican Gothic was a New York Times bestseller, and is being developed for television. Everything I've read by her is great.

She's also prolific. Her books come out so often I can't keep up with them. Please forgive me. I live under a monumental mound of books and am easily distracted.

I deliberately tried to get ahead of the game with her new one, Velvet Was the Night. I got me an electronic ARC from NetGalley. It's not coming out until August, so this is a chance for you to pre-order it to make for a grand finale for your summer reading binge. 

Yes, it's another winner.

Charging further into bestseller/big-time territory, this one leaps out of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror megagenre into the more mainstreamy noir. It transplants the genre to Mexico City, which I suppose would make it negra (that translates to black for you Spanish-impaired out there), which creates some problems. The French started calling Hollywood crime films with dark attitude noir since the Fifties. Maybe we need a new term for what’s going on now--I suggest ultraviolet: the invisible light that makes scorpions glow in the dark.

 

Velvet Was the Night takes the noir tradition to new places besides CDMX. It takes place back in the Seventies, the time of hippies, and commies, and gangsters getting mixed up in dirty and deadly Cold War politics. But this isn’t a literary history lesson. The real-life nightmarish situation is the background for the story of two young people: a young thug who goes by El Elvis, and a thirtyish secretary who likes American pop music, movies, and Mexican romance comics.

Yes, we have a Tarantino-esque mix of old-time pop culture along with the sex and violence.

The characters are great, and a bit larger-than-life. The setting gave me Mexico City flashbacks--I could smell the streets . . .

It’s just the thing to take you away from the dwindling pandemic and current political shuffle to deal with the new situation. And not just for the Latino lit crowd. Recommend this to your Anglo friends as a page-turning beach read.

If they like it, recommend Mexican Gothic. Also, her earlier books are being rereleased.

Who knows, maybe after a few years New York publishers will stop thinking that books by and about Latinxes won’t make money.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Ernest Hogan’s work will be in two upcoming anthologies: Nuestra Realidad Creativa / Our Creative Reality and El Porvenir, Ya! Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl: A Chicano Science Fiction Anthology.