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 . . . 

 

Hey, Writers with Wild, Latinoid Imaginatons!

 

  by Ernest Hogan

Are you a writer in the Latinoid continuum with a wild imagination? Then you need to know that the deadline for signing up for Papí Sci-Fi's Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom at the 2023 Palabras del Pueblo Writing Workshop is May 1st, and it's coming fast. 

 It's online, so you can experience it from the safety of your own home.

 Click here for more information, and to sign up.

Ernest Hogan is a very busy Father of Chicano Science Fiction this year.

Chicanonautica: Aztech: The Movie—Hecho en Mexico

by Ernest Hogan

First of all, it has nothing to do with my novel High Aztech. I’d seen things about Aztech: The Movie a while back, did some checking, but my novel doesn’t have any spaceships in it, so no Ellisonian lawsuit seemed necessary (Google “aztech,” and you’ll get a long list of businesses who use the name), so I went on to other business.

Then Daniel Salvo, a Peruvian science fiction writer, called my attention via Facebook to a poster with an image of the Grand Coatlicue constructed of machine parts that could be used as High Aztech. Hmm.

“Online gratis,” it said. There was as also a link where you could VER the film. I clicked.

The site seemed to be a Russian (“.ru”) video sharing site. Could be risky, but my curiosity got the best of me. I started the video. It was a low-res copy, but a widescreen and professional-looking production, and there was this impressive state-of-the-art space opera with Mexican characters going on . . . I was amazed.

Aztech is an anthology. Nine stories, ten directors, fourteen writers. They span the entire science fiction/fantasy/horror continuum. It uses meteors, the influence of dioses oscuros, and Mexican culture to tie it all together.

It even touches on postmodernism with one of the stories being about a the making of a movie with a similar theme.

Another story presents some impressive post-apocalyptic Aztecoid (shot in and around Teotihuacán) futurism of the sort that I’ve been doing for decades. Maybe it’s finally beginning to catch on.

And after the credits there’s an action-packed sequence about hackers using smart phones, the Internet, and cars to track meteors as they rain down on an urban Mexican landscape, that ends with a TO BE CONTINUED . . . (Yes, in English.)

An ambitious project that shows that Mexico can be a major science fiction producing country.

2020 is listed as its release date. It has played at a film festival and has a Facebook page.

I’m not sure why it’s having this freebie, low-res, online manifestation. COVID-19 has smashed the movie business. Also, I know what it’s like to have to keep one foot in the underground just to survive.

But the people who made this film, and want to make at least one sequel, don’t seem to be the sort to give up easily. I expect to see it in a hi-res, with subtitles for the Spanish-impaired, version on streaming services, and even theaters, in the near future. Be on the lookout!

Meanwhile, my computer doesn’t seem to have any weird viruses . . .

Did I ever tell you about the idea I have about one morning we all wake up to discover that the entire World Wide Web has been translated into Mayan hieroglyphics?

Ernest Hogan, author of High Aztech, Cortez on Jupiter, and Smoking Mirror Blues keeps finding it more and more difficult to tell where his life ends and the science fiction begins.

Chicanonautica: COVID-19 Kills X-Fic

 

by Ernest Hogan

 

For months I’ve been pimping the 2020 Extra-Fiction Contest from Somos en escrito, The Latino Literary Online Magazine, but now it’s my sad duty to report that, at least this year, it ain’t gonna happen. There weren’t enough entries, so it’s been canceled. Another casualty of COVID-19.

It shouldn’t be such a surprise. Even when there isn’t a pandemic paralyzing the world and disrupting our personal lives, it’s not easy being a writer from the Latinoid continuum. There aren’t many markets willing to publish us--I don’t keep saying that New York treats me like the most talented leper they have ever met for nothing--and with the virus grinding away at what’s left of civilization (do I even have to mention the election?), just writing is hard to get around to. If we aren’t just struggling to survive, there's the funk of lousy times drying up the creative juices.

Even the incredible Latinx imagination is taking some brutal hits in 2020.

Not that I personally have that problem. For me writing is the way I deal with adversity, the weapon I reach for when the going gets tough. My novel Zyx is coming along fine, getting too big--it just may be a trilogy--which maybe more salable . . .

But I know that I’m not like everybody else, and the creative work is work, hard work. Even I have trouble fitting it in around the day job and living in apocalyptic times.

The good news is they’re not giving up. The Extra-Fiction Contest will be back in 2021, which gives you plenty of time to write something. I’ve told them that if they need a judge, I’m available. And I’m still hoping to get my mind seriously blown.

Somos en escrito is still doing great stuff. Check ‘em out.

Ernest Hogan is the Father of Chicano Science Fiction. His short fiction collection Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions is coming soon.

Chicanonautica: Zooming into Latinx Science Fiction

 by Ernest Hogan

Just a few weeks ago, I was on Zoom (again), on a panel with Cathryn Merla-Watson, and Matt Goodwin on Latinx Science Fiction: Genealogies, Foundations, Futures, as part of Cal State Fullerton’s Zines to the Future! exhibit.

Watch the panel here:

Then I rushed of to a multi-state road trip amid the pandemic, and election turmoil, which is another story . . .

Meanwhile, I’m struggling to keep track of where the real life ends and the sci-fi begins.

Ernest Hogan will be judging the Somos en escito Extra Fiction Contest again. The deadline has been extended to December 1^st. Latnoid writers, send your stories NOW!

Chicanonautica: Going Postmodern at the Canción Cannibal Cabaret

by Ernest Hogan

I was impressed with a couple of videos by Canción Cannibal Cabaret back in 2019. I put them on Facebook and Twitter. Then I forgot about them. The world blew up, you know, 2020.

Therefore, I was happy to hear about the book The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs by Amalia L. Ortiz. According to the back cover it’s “Set in a not-so-distant dystopian future . . . a Xicana punk rock musical—part concept album, part radio play.” Sounded like just the sort of thing for me to review here. And it seemed like a good thing to follow my José Torres-Tama trilogy.

Talk about a strange little book! There’s a lot going on between its covers.

Here’s what I said on Goodreads: “A helluvalot more than meets the eye here. The guerrilla woman with guitar, lace-gloves, and guitar is more than a mere cover girl. What we have here aren't just poems, song lyrics, performance texts . . . There's some world building that ain't just a backdrop for commercial melodrama. I see the influences of Guillermo Gómez-Peña/La Poca Nostra, José Torre-Tama, Gloria Anzaladúa, and believe it or not, Weird Al Yankovic. And the now ancient tradition of punk, with footnotes to keep track of the cultural references in a post-apocalyptic scenario that holds up a shattered mirror to our current reality and evokes a goddess while declaring the death of gender. Plus cannibalism, cabaret, canciónes . ..”

Along with other things. A lot of other things. 

There’s science/speculative fiction, some futuristic world building centered around La Madre Valiente, an iconic goddess-figure, a new Virgin of Guadalupe (who was an updating of older goddesses) has emerged from the wreckage of  the world to bring about a feminist revolution against the repressive State and lead the Fugees (the refugees, including all of the downtrodden, similar to Oscar Zeta Acosta’s cockroach people.) to a utopia that not only defeats the patriarchy, but declares that “Gender is Dead.”

It’s told in a series of narratives that provide the origin story for La Madre Valiente, and songs that act as manifestos.

At this point, I must remind you that the book was published back in 2019 (seems like at least a decade ago, doesn’t it?), before the protests that have El Presidente sending unmarked, unidentified, undocumented troops into our cities in name of “law and order.”

Could we see a real-life Madre Valiente soon? Is Portland’s Naked Athena a manifestation?

The sensibility is postmodern and punk. But then punk was postmodern, and now it seems to have become a venerable tradition—a “Punkera Scholar” with a Phd is quoted on the cover. The author/bandleader Amalia L. Ortiz sounds like an academic in her introduction. Would this make it postpostmodern? Postpostpostmodern?

Maybe it’s just cultural cannibalization.

I remember the original punk movement back in the last Seventies. How just about everybody—especially the academics and intellectuals were offended. My own generation, who just a few years earlier were offending their parents with long hair and acid rock, were disgusted by someone else’s rebellion.

Now punk, like the songs/poems printed in the book, has cultural references up the yingyang. I remember a lot of the original songs when they were first played on KROQ in L.A. If you're just reading the book without the music, you miss something.

I recommend seeing the music videos on YouTube; there’s also an hour-long concert that was livestreamed as a book launch event. While watching it, I found myself opening the book and following along, as if it were the prayer book for the mass of a new religion.

And who knows? That just may be what all this cultural cannibalization is leading to.

Ernest Hogan has always been proud of his cannibal heritage.

Chicanonautica: José Torres-Tama, Part One: ¿Que es Sci-Fi Latino Noir?

by Ernest Hogan

Back in 2012, Melinda Palacio got me in touch with José Torres-Tama. We talked about something about him for Chicanonautica/La Bloga. Somehow we never got around to it. Damnear a decade steamrolled by. We went from SB-1070 and Sheriff Joe Arpaio to our current dystopian/apocalyptic stituation. He got his Taco Truck Theater. I became the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.

Suddenly, the chaos caused by the current administration was amplified by COVID-19, like the impact of a dinosaur-killing asteroid. Was this the sociological equivalent of an extinction level event? What are artists, writers, and creatives of all kinds to do when we have to be quarantined like the beginning of some sci-fi flick? I hunkered down, and bashed away at my novel. Then, via the internet, things began to happen. Zoom, and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, pulled me into a new, evolving reality. You can read about this in earlier Chicanonauticas. Torres-Tama was part of this migration to another alien environment, after his event/presentation, we got in touch after his Dreamocracy in America event, and decided that it was about time we did that interview/write-up.

There was a flurry of text messages. Texting was something I had been resisting for years, but here I was again, being pulled, kicking and screaming into a future not-of-my-own making. He also sent me a lot of emails with attachments to documents and videos. There would be no lack of material here.

I thought a good way to begin was to ask him what he meant by “scifi Latino noir” as he describes a lot of his work. He sent me a series of images. Right away, we entered a different culture from the usual Anglo/Americano sci-fi, which tends to be verbal/cerebral, coming from the reasoning part of the brain, even when showing us monsters and exploding spaceships. Latinoid (pardon me if I feel justified in using my own term in this context) tends to be visual, sensual, art/image-oriented.

The images, interspersed with the text here (uh-oh, I’m combining the visual with verbal, making this into a multimedia experience . . .) were of his performances. There he is as various “alien” characters, the alienness is both sci-fi, and the Latinoid experience, the props reference religion and politics. These are not just pretty pictures, they mean something. Latinoid artists love to slather on layers of meanings. Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message, but with us messages are our media. No pure abstraction, art for art’s sake, “politics just distracts from the sort of stuff that makes rich patrons feel good and spend money”sort of thing.

After more communications at that same time that he was doing other things, like being interviewed on Nuestra Palabra, a program out of Houston from Pacifica Radio, and writing an Op-Ed piece on immigrants trapped in Louisiana ICE Detention Center for Colorlines, a social justice daily, as well as dealing with landlord troubles. “I do have my Activist Bat Utility Belt on because it's essential gear during this pandemic.” He texted me the following:

My “sci-Fi Latino noir” perspective was imposed upon me by a country that labeled me a “permanent resident alien” when I first entered its territory in 1968. To add to the “alien” theme, I was given a “Green Card.” So being an “alien” in this U.S. sci-fi reality was written into the script for me and for “other aliens” with such a designation in the so-called land of the free. This is the “alien” prism that launches my point of departure and perspectives here in the United States of Amnesia... JTT

Yeah, I understand. As a born-in-East L.A. Chicanonaut, I had a similar identity thrust on me, by the same society from the opposite direction. I see how an Ecuadorian with Quechua blood, growing up in New York, living in New Orleans, working as a writer, poet, journalist, renegade scholar, educator, visual and performance artist, an activist, and father, equals a powerful kind of sci-fi that is not just a genre of light fiction to entertain the masses as they go about the business of helping transform the entire planet into liquid assets.

We needed to talk more . . .

I’ve used all this space and I’ve been just introducing. I’m going to have to do like they did with the ancient, black&white Flash Gordon serials, and continue, in two weeks . . .

Ernest Hogan's day job at the Phoenix Public Library is back online, albeit in a newfangled “curbside service” model, where he wears a mask, and the public isn't allowed into the building. He's also writing like crazy, as editors and publishers get back to him. Buy Latinx Risng. Watch for big news soon!

Chicanonautica: Latinx Rising Paco Preview

by Ernest Hogan

Finally, it's here, Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx ScienceFiction and Fantasy, edited by Matthew David Goodwin. It's available in trade paperback, and ebook. Order now!

One reason you will want to is that has a story by me, “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails.” It tells how my character Paco Cohen, Mariachis of Mars, (who appeared stories in Analog, one of which, “The Rise and Fall of Paco Cohen and the Mariachis of Mars” will be reprinted in The 2020 Look at Mars Fiction Book in August!) got from the Lone Star State to the Red Planet.

Here's a preview:

Why did I leave Texas, and come to Mars? Why does everybody ask me that? Haven’t you ever been there? Or heard anything about it? 

Especially way-the-chingada back then when they were worried about who was Texan, and the whole Great Texas Identity Crisis broke out.

In case you don’t remember (nobody seems to to remember anything these days, history becomes myth before you know it) I have a hard time convincing my daughter that I wasn’t born on Mars-- he whole Texas secession thing was largely the work of a billionaire/politician/entrepreneur named Billy-Bob Paolozzi who, quasi-legally, in the name of the Second Amendment, acquired some nuclear weapons.“If nukes were outlawed, only outlaws would have nukes, besides, I’m just a concerned citizen looking out for the security of my property and/or country!” Billy-Bob forced what used to be the United States of America to let Texas go, and declared himself interim President/CEO.

It was a hell of a time to be young man full of talent and hormones and urge to fuck and fight, scream and shout, and do something that would shake the world, or at least make for an exciting weekend.

 **********

Ernest Hogan's career is running wild in the quarantine. Looks like Chicano science fiction writers are essential workers

Chicanonautica: Zooming into Susto Futuro

by Ernest Hogan

Along with COVID-19, there is another pandemic sweeping across the planet. A new technology is coming for us, sneaking into our lives. Maybe it'll take over if we don't watch out.

I'm talking about the internet video meeting. I know, a lot of you have been doing it for a while. I'm old and don't keep up with all the latest chingaderas, like computers, the interwebs, smart phones. I tend to get into them after it's become impossible to live in the latest version of society without them.

Somehow I never get consulted when a new version of society is installed. It's usually—BLAM!--your life is different now, get used to it. I keep getting future shock, or maybe these days we should call it Susto Futuro.

So there I was, minding my own business, sheltering in place, staying home, trying to finish my novel, when I hear from Balitronica Gomez, wife of the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. He was going to do a “Creative Conversation to Save America” for something called Dreamocracy in America, “a take-no-prisoners time-traveling transdisciplinary tour of America that picks up Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey into the American character where he left off” led by Victor Payan and Pocha Peña. I would have to download something called Zoom.

I had heard about Zoom. Schools were using it, along with business people in the lockdown. I didn't think I needed it, but in this case, I was willing to do the download and registering thing.

Even though I'm a sci-fi dude, me and technology have an uneasy relationship. Sometimes all I have to do is touch some newfangled gizmos to release a new kind of chaos into the ecosystem.

It seemed okay, but there was some snafu stuff when I tried to log on. I shot some panicky messages to Balitronica, and somehow I was able to experience Guillermo's performance.

Guillermo was his usual, wild, brilliant self. I was also impressed by the way he has managed to make himself comfortable in this brave new environment.

Not only was he on the screen doing his thing, but we—the audience—were there. It's not like a live performance. He could see us, we could see him, but no eye contact could be made. At the same time, we became part of the performance. We could see each other and see into everybody's home. Things happened in the background. At one point my wife came in . . .

I see how we may be doing more of this in the future.

A couple of weeks later, another performance artist, José Torres-Tama was doing one. Since I was already an experienced Zoomer, I signed up for that one, too.

Unfortunately, my talent for attracting technical difficulties reared its ugly head. I kept getting messages telling me about a Password Error, and  nothing I could do fixed it. I couldn't get on.

I sent a message to José, apologizing for incompetence.

He said there was no problem. I could watch the recording the next day. Which I did. Again, step into the future. I did feel that I missed out on something by not being one of the tiny people on the screen.

José then texted me, an electronic conversation that resulted in an interview that he and I have been trying to arrange since 2012. I will translate that into a Chicanonautica post very soon.

Meanwhile, Scott Duncan Fernandez of Somos en escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine asked me if I would like to be on an panel for Weekend of Words, a virtual literary festival. It would be put on by something called the Shuffle Collective. The subject would be, “Chicano Scifi: Speculative Existence.” It would also happen through Zoom.

Yeah, some glitches made me a few minutes late, but I managed to stumble my way on to join my fellow Latino writers Kathleen Alcalá, David Bowles, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Rios de la Luz, and Armando and Scott Duncan Fernandez from Somos in a grid of tiny screens.

It was a blast. Even though we were a diverse group (the Latinoid continuum is vast), we had a lot in common. Even though a lot of us had corresponded, and knew each other through Facebook and Twitter, this felt more direct.

We all agreed that we are not magic realists. I got a chance to say, “Any magic realism from a sufficiently technologically advanced culture becomes indistinguishable from science fiction.”

I must have done well, because Scott from Somos wants to interview me—on Zoom.

Maybe I'll eventually get the hang of it, and shake my susto futuro.

Ernest Hogan's “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” the origin story of Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, will be in Latinx Rising, coming out in June, pre-order now!