Shifter, What You Think It Means

 Review: Emma Pérez. Testimony of a Shifter. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-55885-979-1

 

Michael Sedano

 

Speculative fiction writers expect a lot of imaginative cooperation from readers in exchange for a good story. Readers pick up a book like Emma Pérez' Testimony of a Shifter (link), expecting  at minimum, to be entertained and, in the best cases, provoked into discomfort by satirical elements inherent in "what-if" scenarios.

The story starts in 2058. Set in a place much like the United States, in a world where people are born male, female, or gender-shifters, into a racist classist society run amok in the hands of "the Impresario", a small-handed caricature of immense power and pedophilia.

 

Pérez does a good job restraining a satirist's impulse to pile on the parallels between the  dystopic leader of 2058, and a television impresario running for president of the u.s. in 2024. The parallels are telling and won't be missed even in a fast page scan.

 

The author's exaggerations don't stray far from actual events, like rounding up shifters, caging captives, separating children from adults. Read "immigrants" for "shifters" and there's nothing dystopic about the world of Testimony of a Shifter.

 

Viruses and an ongoing "woke war" have brown and black people, most of them shifters, on the losing end of health care and repressive law. One of the book's most horrid scenes depicts wholesale slaughter of ordinary people in the wrong place. This is a world where armed rebellion offers feeble opposition.

 

Pérez keeps the story compact. Coming in at under 200 pages, the novel threads plots about sexuality, power, armed intrigue, and magic. When one or another thread gets unruly, the author relies upon the testimony of the title to transition into new developments and twists.

 

Testimony of a Shifter comes from a prisoner, a captive of the assassination plot that unfolds with the Shifter, who begins the book as Ben but spends most of the plot as Alejandra, or Alex.

 

Poor Alex. She's not attractive--that's still a value in this dystopia--but Ben is handsome. Ni modo (he she is bilingual which is a crime), Alex has friends in the highest places of the revolution. Those friends don't explain much as they lead Alex into some deep caca, and she has no idea what's going to happen.

 

Readers find themselves as surprised as Alex as the rebellion unfolds before their eyes. It's part of the fun of letting the events take over, and, with this topic, allowing the author's license to envision what physical gender transmutation looks like:

The guards had a kid shifting on a slab of metal in the middle of the room, where they got on top of her and started doing things to her. Ugly sex things that she didn't want but, soon enough, she'd shift and become a boy with boy genitals. Then, they'd turn him over and someone else would get on the slab and do ugly sex things, and the boy genitals would shift back to girl genitals. The White Guards would repeat it again and again. The guards prodded and poked to see how many times they could get a shifter to transmute in an hour.

 

Readers coming to the novel for lurid sex things will find passages to titillate their imaginations, but not many. Testimony of a Shifter isn't for that reader. Readers looking for contemporary speculative fiction that entertains while engaging all manner of political and social responses find it in Testimony of a Shifter.

 

I'm not entirely satisfied with the book's revolution. Pérez' depiction of rebel leaders as cold manipulators has a feel of genuineness. I'm satisfied the Impresario gets a pocketful of justice. I'm not satisfied the repressive status quo simply replaces itself and the rebels achieve no substantive change. I'm dissatisfied the author opens a magical portal to a different dimension and that's the only way Shifters find peace, by disappearing.

 

Gente, we can't let it get this bad. You don't have to read Testimony of a Shifter to understand the necessity for decisive voting, but reading the novel doesn't hurt, either.

 

Review: Frankenstein Was Not the Monster

Review: Daniel A. Olivas. Chicano Frankenstein. Portland: Forest Avenue Press, 2024. (link)

Foto essay: Daniel A. Olivas and Desirée Zamorano in Pasadena CA conversation

 

 

Michael Sedano

 

Daniel A. Olivas has found a fountain of creativity in the classics. Olivas' stage play, Waiting for Godínez, calls upon Samuel Beckett's Godot for inspiration. The novel, Chicano Frankenstein, calls upon Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff while weaving in allusions to Faust and a taste of Tomás Rivera. 

Olivas and Desirée Zamorano talked mostly about the novel in a recent conversation at Vroman's in Pasadena. Theirs was such an engaging conversation I was ready to stand in the long line for a chance to get my copy signed. People who weren't there can get a notion of the 210-page book's background and the author's process in the edition's dozen ancillary pages, the Acknowledgements and Author's Note, and book club questions.

The character Faustina's surname, Godínez, offers a sly allusion to Olivas' play, but more so to the concept of faustian bargains, forsaking one's soul in exchange for personal gratification. That this not the character, Faustina Godínez, shows that one can know too much or look too hard. 

Faustina is the founding partner of the man's job. This powerful woman hooks up with an underling, who is a reanimated man. Faustina follows-leads the novel's quest to learn the reanimated man's forbidden past and meet family. It's the novel's idea of finding one's identity in a world indifferent and hostile to your presence.

 

Daniel A. Olivas and Michael Sedano at Vroman's

But that Faust has little to do with Olivas' Faustina Godínez. Olivas isn't after some remote connection to German opera. Maybe the author simply likes the name. Faustina's a powerful Chicana lawyer attracted to a handsome Chicano paralegal and doesn't let the disparity at work stop her. The  fact Faustina's paramour is a reanimated person has no asco factor in Faustina's erotic impulses, the man is just another male in Faustina's book.

For readers with a prurient interest in details, Olivas grants them euphemistic gratification in a "just us girls" scene.

 

Olivas plays on the asco factor to build the novel's agon, the villain is a conservative electorate intolerant of difference, diversity, inclusion. The U.S. president is a foul person fully in control of that electorate and she propels hateful ideas into the world. 

Then again, it's only a pinche book. Kick back and enjoy it. Chicano Frankenstein's a gem. A fast and easy read; don't turn it into a head-scratcher.

 

The monster of public fame, the Boris Karloff character considered to be "Frankenstein", does not resemble the man, Faustina's lover. The man is not a monster but an everyday person. There's no reason to be all asqueroso. The Shelley / Movie characters overlap with Olivas' the man character in that both have limb transplants, and they live as reanimated corpses, and they aren't named.

 

Pasadena and Oxnard provide the settings for a future world where hundreds of thousands of people have been brought back to life by industrial processes. Reanimated people provide cheap labor and are remarkably honest. They come with a full set of work skills but no personal history nor physical resemblance to their first-life selves. They're in every walk of life, looking like any other person. One of them could be the mail room clerk.

 

Faustina, the man, these are middle class Chicanos in love. They do cute things like share bath soap, debate pink or white conchas, get to know one another with bilingual cariño. The novel's a love story but if that were all, it wouldn't be as interesting and redundant, think "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." 

 

Desirée Zamorano and Daniel A. Olivas share thoughts on the novel

Faustina has no trouble with loving and bedding a reanimated man, but there's lots of prejudice against stitchers, and peor, the president of the United States wants to lock them up, the reanimateds, the stitchers.

 

"Stitchers" is the "N" word for gente like the man. Olivas hides the character's name just as Shelley's reanimated character stays unnamed. Reanimated tipos count for shit to the foul-mouthed president of the United States. The president hates reanimateds with the kind of hatred arch conservatives hold for people of color. This wingnut president controls both houses of congress and has already outlawed the regeneration industry. 

 

Olivas acknowledges the fun.

Chicano Frankenstein is not only a love story but a political intrigue. The action carries us inside the Oval Office where things look bad for decent souls. The author chooses this setting to have a character named Toma explain that Victor Frankenstein created the Karloff-in-the-movies character so it's a misnomer to call reanimated people "Frankenstein". Toma!

Olivas reserves some special vitriol for Big Pharma, and newsmedia come off buffoonish. These elements--corruption, prejudice, buffoonery--hang over our lovers' affair and right to happiness.

Local color adds solid facts to highly speculative fiction, while adding to the author's and readers' fun. Olivas, a Pasadena resident, locates action around the city's Norton Simon Museum, Vroman's bookstore, the lovers plan take-out from Urbano Mexican Kitchen, the man's habitual run takes him along Hurlburt Avenue to Pasadena Avenue. 

 

Chicano Frankenstein is speculative fiction that speaks for itself. I see no profit in finding metaphoric correspondence triangulating issues involving immigrants and LGBTQ+ gente, with the fiction of reanimated people. It spoils the fun to look too closely, despite the publisher's blurb that here's a "retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic that addresses issues of belonging and assimilation". 

There is a serious point about voting, however. The dead can vote and swing elections. That's the metaphor. The argument emerges, if the power hates you, take their power from them.

 

Daniel A. Olivas has a lot of fun with his story, explaining just enough for the willing suspension of disbelief that's necessary to savor fully Olivas the satirist's come-uppance to the conniving president. If it were summer I'd say this is a classic beach read, but it's Spring, a season of renewal, for reanimation. Sounds like a perfect season for reading Chicano Frankenstein.

 

Olivas is on book tour right now. He spoke to a packed house at Vroman's books alongside interviewer Desirée Zamorano, and Olivas will be in Portland soon. Check the author's website (link) for details.

 

Author Desirée Zamorano (link) holds the book about the man
who is Chicano but not Frankenstein.

 

 

Chicanonautica: Creating Pablo Cortez

 

by Ernest Hogan

 

I’m an artist as well as a writer. I started out wanting to be a cartoonist as a kid. People say my writing is very visual, cinematic.

I draw a lot. I’ve even painted. Recently, my mom texted me some pictures she took of one of my paintings. They illustrate this post.

It’s a big one. The biggest I've ever done. It’s not a great painting but has a helluva story behind it.

It was after the great Vietnam/Watergate crash. Gerald Ford was president. America was in deep funk. I was trying to find my way in world that didn’t seem to have a use for me.

I fell into the community college thing. Me and school never got along so good, but I was trying to make the student thing work because people kept telling me that education was the answer to everything. If I tried really hard I could get good grades, and it threw me into depression. I was a sad zombie student.

My art classes helped save my sanity. I got paint and ink all over my clothes, face and hair. Instead of dragging my easel into a corner to hide like everybody else, I would set up in the middle of the studio and make a spectacle of myself.

I was an artist. There was no doubt about that. But what could I do with it?

In a painting class the teacher gave us an assignment of doing a totally abstract painting. The teachers were all staunch modernists, who liked it when your art didn’t look like anything, and thought “storytelling” was a dirty word. I always “got” abstract art, and would even dabble in it as a kid, so I dove in.

The result is the painting in the photos.

First, I threw up a bunch of bright colors, knowing that my teachers didn’t like them. Then I splashed turpentine on the oil paint because they told me that it would just wash it off—note that the canvas still has paint on it. 

Then I dribbled paint mixed with turpentine and let it drip. The problem was it always dripped in one direction—down. How monotonous. In my frustration, I turned the canvas on its side, and kept turning it. The problem with that is that ended up creating a vertical/horizontal, architectonic grid.

The problem was the canvas itself. The rectangular shape. Those four corners. And gravity.

I had to come to limits of abstract expression.

If only I could paint in orbit . . . yeah, Jackson Pollock in space! That would be something!

Of course, I couldn’t do that, but I could write about it.

And why not make the artist a Chicano? No one had done that before. Why not test the limits of science fiction while I was at it?

It was another long, hard struggle, but eventually I came up my first published novel, Cortez on Jupiter.

My teachers weren’t that impressed with the painting, which was okay, because I wasn’t very impressed with them, or the fine art world. I don’t “get” these people who buy art, and don’t quite believe that they’re real. To me they’re like UFOs, Bigfoot, or El Chupacabras.

The question is now, what should I do with it? Maybe its connection to the novel will make someone want to buy it . . . My wife suggested we put it in the bigger house we may buy someday.

Maybe I should sign all four corners and scrawl instructions on the back to turn it regularly. Or it could be mounted on slow motor that would turn it . . .

There I go, testing the limits again.

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction is working on novel that he in composing like mural.

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: Ernesto Publishing Updates

by Ernest Hogan

For reasons I can’t fathom, my writing career has taken off  running during this quarantine. It drags me along, keeping me busy, and giving me so much stuff to announce that I have a hard time keeping up with it all. I need to remind myself that some people would love to have this kind of problem.

You may have already heard about Latinx Rising that has my story “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” wherein the reasons my character Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars’ interplanetary migration are revealed, and “Tomorrow is Another Daze,” based on the current world situation, free online at ASU’s Us in Flux, but that’s not all.

The 2020 Look at Mars Fiction Book is out with “The Rise and Fall of Pacho Cohen and the Mariachis of Mars,” the first story I wrote about the character. I really should get around to writing that novel about him . . .

That catches us up to what’s available now, but I’ve also got some coming attractions!

Strange Particle Press has been “VERY pleased to announce” the upcoming release of Nine to Eternity that will feature my slapstick space opera, “The Great Mars-A-Go-Go Mexican Standoff.” Yeah, I wrote it to see if I could get away with using the word Mexican in the title of a science fiction story. There are also great stories by eight other writers, including my wife, Emily Devenport. Stay tuned for details.

And now there’s Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. It’s got a never-before-published story, “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” that was inspired by my travels in New Mexico. There’s a Kickstarter campaign to help pay us authors.

If that weren’t enough, Strange Particle will also be putting out Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions, a collection of some of my most outrageous short fiction that will set synapses sizzling.

 

So, look out! Here comes the future.

Ernest Hogan is also working on a novel Zyx, Or; Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin.Hhhhhhhhhhff

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!