Chicanonautica: Can a Chicano Be Mainstream?

by Ernest Hogan

Intercepted conversation from an unidentified source:

Ernest Hogan: Victor? What the fuck? It's 4:24 AM, for Tezcatlipoca’s sake! 

Victor Theremin: I'm feeling restless. Could use some writer talk. 

EH: I thought I turned my phone off . . .

VT: You know I have access to outlaw technology.

EH: What? There's video, too? I haven't downloaded any apps for that.

VT: I’ve had my hacker friends download stuff to your phone.

EH: I wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s an invasion of my privacy.

VT: Is there any such thing as privacy anymore?

EH: Uh-oh. I nearly woke up my wife. I better go to the living room . . .

(The sound of footsteps, soft impacts, profanity.)

VT: There is so much to think about right now.

EH: As usual.

VT: Actually, cabrón, there's a helluva lot more than usual.

EH: Yeah, I guess you're right, with COVID, and all that political and other pendajas going on.

VT: Precisely! This is the end/beginning of new eras! And you know what that means?

EH: What? You on a beach somewhere? Why is the sky purple?

VT: It means that us Chicano science fiction writers are gonna have to rethink everything, and reconsider what we've been working on! 

EH: I know it happened to Emily.

VT: How is your wife?

EH: Restless. Eager to get on with a new phase in her life.

VT: See? There a helluvalota that going around.

EH: Just what is a helluvalota?

VT: Quit trying to change the subject.

EH: Can't help it. You knocked me out of some heavy REM sleep.

VT: I tell you, something is happening. Something planetwide. More than the pandemic, or politics, something affecting everybody’s brains . . .

EH: There you go again, losing track of where the sci-fi ends and the reality begins.

VT: I keep telling ya, it doesn’t matter these days. 

EH: Could be. I’m thinking about pitching my next novel as mainstream.

VT: What? The one with the AIs, aliens, and a character based on me?

EH: Yeah.

VT: Uh-oh, looks like you’ve gone over the bend.

EH: I don’t know. I just realized that it’s actually a modern day retelling of Don Quijote, and what could be more mainstream than that?

VT: I always considered it to be the first psychological sci-fi novel.

EH: About senile dementia?

VT: The final frontier.

EH: The problem is when I try to come up with things to compare my stuff to in the pitch, I have a hard time coming up with recent, popular sci-fi. 

VT: You’re solidly in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick . . .

EH: Today’s sci-fi audience doesn’t remember them.

VT: Stick with sci-fi, Ernie. The truth will out!

EH: It might work better if I said I was like Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ishmael Reed.

VT: Like the modern reader remembers them.

EH: I know the post-Twilight/Fifty Shades of Gray audience doesn’t like to think when they read, but I keep hearing that the mainstream audience is bigger than genre. And I really would like to take the chance to actually make it big before I go back to tin-cupping it in the underground.

VT: What, you think you can be the Chicano Vonnegut?

EH: Better than being the Chicano Kilgore Trout.

VT: I thought I was the Chicano Kilgore Trout!

EH: I’ve been busting my ass as a Chicanonaut in Scifiilandia, where I’m treated like the most talented leper they've ever met, and I’d like it all to amount to something.

VT: And how has the mainstream world treated you?

EH: I still have trouble convincing them I exist. And they still give me the bum’s rush. Or take off running when they see me. And this is all before the realize I’m a Chicano.

VT: Ever thought about where sci-fi ends and the mainstream begins?

EH: A lot lately. When I shelve books at the library, I keep running into books that look interesting in the General Fiction section, and when I take a look they have science fictional plots, only they don’t have the entire universe, or even multiverse in danger, like they insist on in commercial sci-fi these days.

VT: This is the age of genre meltdown, besides, genres are just marketing gimmicks, and high-brow conceits like magic realism and speculative fiction are just pretensions for readers who want to feel intellectual.

EH: In my ten years as a bookseller, not one customer ever came in asking for magic realism or speculative fiction.

VT: So, whatcha gonna do, ese?

EH: Think I’ll keep all my options open. When trying to sell the book, I’ll start at the top, go for the dough, and if that doesn’t work out, I still have one foot stuck back in the underground.

VT: Sounds quixotic as all hell. Good boy! Uh-oh, there’s an unidentified phenomenon in the sky that I need to investigate, gotta go, bro!

Ernest Hogan is the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, and Victor Theremin is a fictional character, at least in this universe.

Chicanonautica: The Persistence of Quijote

by Ernest Hogan

Years after it finally came into being, I got around to seeing Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I wanted to see it, but these years have been overwhelming. Enough to make a humble vato get in his troque and go searching for windmills to tilt with.

I liked it--I’ve been a fan of Gilliam ever since the early Monty Python days, even though he often gets carried away with his imagery in the European art film tradition, losing track of the story, which I understand, also being an artist whose inspiration come visually, leaving me struggling to come up with appropriate verbalization. He also does better when adapting someone else’s story. 

Like I said, I liked it. It brings the whole myth that launched the novel as an art form into the twenty-first century. El Quijote faces off with the corporate entertainment industry in a dazzling, surreal fantasmagoria that will confuse folks who like a straight forward story line, but delivers with an ending that brings it all together in a satisfying way.

Makes me wonder if the younger generations know about Cervantes’ original novel. Oh well, they can always Google it . . .

It kept me thinking, even as I drifted off into a dream-filled sleep, and into the next day, when I found myself liking it even better.

Then, I had a revelation . . . The novel (that is--gulp!--expanding into a trilogy) Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of  Victor Theremin that I’m working on is an updating of Don Quixote. Honestly, I had no idea I was doing it, but looking at it now it all becomes clear: Victor Theremin, the Chicano science fiction writer who has lost track of where his life ends and the sci-fi begins, is a modern Quijote, the AIs are his Sancho Panza. 

Oh well, maybe it will help when I go off looking for a publisher.

The really strange thing is this isn’t my first Quijote novel. Walter Quixote; Or, Love in the Time of Terroism was a deliberate adaptation of the story, making it about the life and loves of a young Chicano artist in Phoenix in the years 2001 through 2003. Don’t bother looking for it--it was never published. Fed up with my struggles to establish myself as a science fiction writer, I tried to walk away from the unholy megagenre, and go mainstream. Unfortunately, the publishing world recoiled in horror of my creation. After years of rejection, I was told that it was just too damn weird for anybody in New York to publish.

So I went crawling back to sci-fi, where they still are disturbed by my presence.

Oddly, enough, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, isn’t Gilliam’s first Quijote adaptation: I’ve long been saying that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a twentieth century version of the story. Think about. There are a helluvalota parallels. You lit students out there can thank me later.

I know that El Quijote, the book and the character, are controversial as part of La Cultura to anti-Hispanic/Puro Mejicano types. Like it or not, we have been influenced by Hispanic culture ever since the first hijo de la chingada. In the Mundo Nuevo, El Quijote evolved into the charro, and the vaquero, who was Anglicized into the buckaroo, and translated into the cowboy, who without the quixotic compulsion to seek Truth, Justice, and True Love under a blazing sun is just a common redneck. His grey-bearded avatars can still be seen on the dusty roadsides of Aztlán, in their Rocinante-ish vehicles surrounded by light-flashing police cars.

Tezcatlipoca help me, I’m one of them. I’m going to keep writing these books, and battling these windmills. I just can’t help it.

Ernest Hogan is currently leapfrogging between the original Quijote and John Ormsby’s English translation on his phone.

Chicanonautica: In the Camp of Racism Porn

By Ernest Hogan

I believe in freedom, of speech, expression, and the press. I prefer cultural free-fire zones to safe places. I also believe that opposing viewpoints need to be aired and observed. 

And I know that racism is not stopped by banning certain words and images from polite society.

When I heard about Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (translated from the French by Norman R. Shapiro), Steve Bannon’s favorite book, I felt I had to read it.

So I downloaded it for free from Internet Archive. I wasn’t about to spend any money on what has been called an alt right Bible.

There are no surprises in The Camp of the Saints. In my years as a brown-skinned person not from the dominant culture, I’ve heard it all before. Sometimes it’s whispered behind my back, but often blurted out to my face with a shit-eating grin. These folks have been feeling more confident with a certain guy in the White House.

It’s vintage racism porn, originally published in 1973, and all the ideas were ancient back then. And now political correctness has added a pornographic erotic thrill for the target audience. Feelgood reading for Nazis.

The plot is simple: Ships full of refugees from India--the Ganges “armada”--go around the horn of Africa to Europe, land in France, the “wall of black flesh” in zombie apocalypse style (what is a zombie, but a human being stripped of human status?), overwhelms the subcontinent (Europe is about the same size as India), bringing about the end of Western Civilization. 

Could have made a good, Grand Guignol horror movie, but Jean Raspail is not a crude redneck with a taste for gore, but a respected, award-winning man of letters--a European intellectual! A flower of Western Civilization!

Instead of exciting scenes of battle against barbarian horde, we get a lot of talk--stream-of-consciousness rants about how Jesus was a white supremacist, black and brown people are animals, and about their turd-eating depravity . . . etc. There is more of this than anything going on. It gets pretty tedious, unless this sort of thing gets you off.

Because this is an attack on “mercy monger” liberalism (wasn’t Jesus a mercy monger?) as well as on non-whites, Europe does not fight back. The military can’t bring themselves to fight the “invaders.” The same with the police. The refugees literally get off the ships, walk in, take over, then start committing crimes . . .

There is also not much character development of any kind. It’s all grotesque caricature. As If the KKK took over Mad Magazine, only it’s not funny.

The scariest thing about it isn’t anything in the book, but how--especially in the last couple of years--we keep seeing this racist, fascist, Nazi thinking reflected in public policy.

Some are hailing Camp of the Saints as prophetic. Actually, pundits and politicians are exaggerating news images to resemble this apocalyptic vision. The migrant/asylum seeker caravans are worlds away from the Ganges “armada.”

I’m worried about the people who can enjoy such a book, but I’m not worried about the end of Western Civilization. That’s because good ol’ Western Civ died back in the twentieth century. Good riddance.

Let’s get on with the next thing.

Ernest Hogan is alive and well and living in Arizona, where he has learned a lot about racism.

Tragedy Doesn't Stop a Community from Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Melinda Palacio

 

Sojourner Kincaid Rolle Preps the Contest Winners

What would have been the welcome sound of rain falling on trees, rooftops, and pavements turned into an unprecedented disaster. Half an inch of rain in five minutes fell on Montecito. The death toll has reached 20 and there are still two missing.

While mud emptied out an entire city and turned the 101 freeway into an impassable river, those who lived west of Milpas in Santa Barbara were spared the horrors of having their community swept away. Santa Barbara was sparsely populated for the duration of the 101's shutdown and the isolation of both Montecito and Carpinteria. On the Santa Barbara side schools and businesses went on as usual as people felt an eerie sense of survivor's guilt. Many who didn't heed voluntary or mandatory evacuation orders were able to ride out the fires and storm from the comfort of their homes. This was not the case for people who lived and worked in Montecito. What was it like to wake up in Montecito to find no neighbors on your street? Read T.C.Boyle's account in the New Yorker.

What should have been an all-inclusive celebration in honor of Martin Luther King, turned into a much smaller celebration because people from Montecito, Carpinteria, Summerland and beyond could not get into Santa Barbara due to the total shutdown of the highway.

Every year, I have had the pleasure of assisting Sojourner Kincaid Rolle with Santa Barbara's annual Dr. King celebration. One of the highlights of the program, held at the Arlington Theater, is the Essay & Poetry Contest. Local youth and teens, ages 6-18, participate. This year, the missing participants, parents, and audience made it clear that a disaster had befallen the community. The march from De La Guerra Plaza to the Arlington Theater was also cancelled due to lack of available police.

The program at the Arlington began with a moment of silence in honor of the mudslide victims. The MLK celebration continued and names of the winners of the poetry and essay contests were announced. Many of the students also had difficulty turning in their contest entries because the Thomas Fire had upended their lives. The deadline was extended until just days before the celebration due to the many school closures from the fire preceding the mud slides. One student from Carpinteria High School, Max Coppel, lost all of his poems in the fire, but managed to rewrite his entry for the contest and took 3rd place for his poem, "Life in America Has Changed," along with Jeanette Fantone and her poem, "For the Opressed," also from Carpinteria High. The winner was Kundai Chikowero from Dos Pueblos High School for her poem, "Follow the Legacy."  

2018 Contest Winners

Essay

Ages 13-18

1st Michelle Qin "The Human Right" Dos Pueblos High School

2nd Gabriel Ohedo "Martin Luther King, Jr." Carpinteria High School

Ages 6-12

1st Olivia Battles "Speak Up" Roosevelt School

2nd Noah Zakrzewski "MLK" Monte Vista School

3rd Noah Slotnick-Lastrico "MLK" Washington School

        Connor MacPherson "MLK" Montessori Center School

Poetry

Ages 13-18

1st Kundai Chikowero "Follow the Legacy" Dos Pueblos High School

2nd Hali Schwasnick "Colors" Carpinteria High School

3rd Jeanette Fantone "For the Oppressed" Carpinteria High School

      Max Coppel "Life in American Has Changed" Carpinteria High School

Ages 6-12

1st Zachary Horne "My Dream for Our World" Roosevelt School

2nd Aspen Newhouse "Democracy" Montessori Center School

3rd Tessa de Albergaria "Living a Nightmare" Roosevelt School

         Tali McPeters "Democracy" Roosevelt School

            Quinn Davis Roosevelt Elementary

Sandra Cisneros leaves San Anto?

[Amelia Montes is off today.]

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

As many of you 60s and 70s activists know, back in those days there were certain cosas that were not talked about in public places, things that La Raza had no tolerance for listening to. Criticism. Questioning of leadership. Talking about the jefes and jefas. It extended into the written word, as well. I remember a fairy tale I wrote that received physical threats as part of my audience review, on me, not on the tale. We seemed to be a gente allergic to the airing of laundry or anything that questioned the sanctity of our celebrities.

I don't know how much times have changed, but I found it refreshing to read a writer, new to me, detailing the type of discussion and views that those of us here at La Bloga have likely deliberately avoided presenting on our pages. Anyone involved in the Chicano lit world has heard unsavory to critical comments about some ChicanA writers. Yes, ChicanO, too. History and gente will decide whether our choices to not publicize or debate such was a journalistic weakness on our part. Likewise our tendency, sometimes, to find few weaknesses in literary works. I'll leave it at that.

Below is the beginning of a lengthy and journalistically responsible (in my opinion) article by Roberto Ontiveros. The title alone says much about its contents and the sometimes heated comments it produced:

Sandra Cisneros's defenders and detractors debate what the celebrated author has meant to San Antonio and Latino literature

[By Roberto Ontiveros, published Feb. 15, 2012 in the Current, "San Antonio’s free, award-winning, alternative newsweekly, featuring local writers and critics covering politics, arts, music, food & drink, and every other crucial Alamo City topic." – Website's "About Us"]

"As nearly everyone now knows, Sandra Cisneros — the oft-times indigenously attired author who founded the Macondo Writers' Workshop here in 1998 and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation two years later — is done with San Antonio. Judging from the comments strung to the news articles announcing her impending exit, people here feel mournfully mosaic about her departure. She is done with Texas as well, and heading for... who knows where really?
.....
"As longtime friend and absolute fan Bill Sanchez told me, Cisneros's reasons for leaving are as simple as the fact that, at 57, she feels compelled to reevaluate her life and the work she still wants to accomplish. It is time to focus on herself, she tells me. So, Cisneros is done with this state and done with the state she found herself in. To be blunt, it sounds like she is done with a lot of you, too."

RudyG: One of the commenters wrote:
"Roberto [Ontiveros], what have you done? As Latinos we haven't the
luxury of destroying one another. The profound irresponsibility of ethics and knowledge in this piece is
 heartbreaking."

What the commenter termed Latinos not having the luxury of destroying one another, I call responsible journalism. The accusation of "irresponsibility of ethics" sounds to me like charges from the old Movimiento caudillismo some of us tolerated more than others.

I leave further interpretation of this article to La Bloga readers to decide for themselves. Go here to read the full article.

Es todo, hoy,
RudyG

Next month the CLOSET opens

Denver debut book signing and reading of

The Closet of Discarded Dreams

Su Teatro's Denver Civic Theater

721 Santa Fe Dr.

Sunday, Sept. 16th, 5:00pm

by Rudy Ch. Garcia, the unfolding author

One week. Siete días. It's almost here. Like my unnamed protagonist would say, Qué chingaus! People at the readings might ask: What did you think about after you heard you'd be published? What did you feel? How was it, holding your first novel in your hands? So, anticipating that, here's this week's installment of what it's like having your first novel published, at least how I experience it.

The Closet of Discarded Dreams will release Sept. 1 and the process will begin. Then I'll wait. I've gotten past anxiety and some nervousness, and now a bit of excitement seems to be entering the picture. But it will take more time for me to hold something physical in my hand, turn the pages, find the typos, thrill in the fact that my first one reached print.

First though, it will not reach print. A few days after Release, ITunes and Amazon will have it in E-book and pdf formats. Then I'll be hustling to get digital review copies to the press, bloggers and whoever else I promised such. But I won't read it; maybe just scan it. I'm waiting for the paper.

Maybe a week after Release, it will be available as a paperback, but I still won't have it in my sweaty palms, though maybe I can get my first copy by paying for overnight delivery. As an immediate-gratification baby boomer, the process will no doubt take fokkin' forrrrrevvvverrrrr.

At least that could take my mind of all the pre-Release work I'm drowning in. Make up posters, business cards, bookmarks, drink coasters; make sure all the info is included, that there's no typos; design it and beg my daughter to get the files ready for the printers. Do a shoot with the same photographer daughter Marika, check proofs, decide on and send for stills. Etc. Here's what we came up with for a publicity photo. Comments appreciated.

Then daughter says, "You need Facebook and Twitter." "What for? I don't do that stuff."

"Everybody else does. Like your potential readers." Okay, so now I face and tweet, or at least my author self and the book do.

Then at the last minute somebody say, "Where's the QR code?" "What's that?" After a couple of hours of online googling, reading, navigating and back and forth questions to daughter, I don't completely understand, except that I know it's something the kids (under 50) do with their digital toys that I don't have because I can't afford the service they pay for as a "necessity." So I add the QR code, even though I doubt I'll ever use one, otherwise. 

Here's what I'll likely send out today for a beer coaster. The idea that I heard about from another author is to take them to college bars, ask Mr. Nice Bartender if it would be alright to leave some around, and then hope the college boys--before they get too borachos--will notice the graphic while they're waiting for their fourth beer, read it, and maybe scan the QR or head over to the book website.

The Closet of Discarded Dreams is filled with clones of celebrities and historical figures, Marilyn and Che included. So the graphic is a fit. In fact, in the book the two homestead one of the 9/11 monuments, debating, flirting and generally acting unlike anything you might imagine would happen if they'd met in their past real lives. I could be reading a passage from my protagonist's first encounter with the famous twosome, at Su Teatro or in Albu. If you can make it, I think you'll find that, among other things, more than entertaining. It's one part of the novel that I relish reading to myself.

Okay, one more week. In the meantime, you can check out the work my daughter and I have been taking care of, at the sites below. I'm not sure how it's all said but, tweet me, make me your friend, or friend me, like me, face me (or is it give me face?). And when you're done with that, send or connect or link or QR it to all your digital worlds. I love what we've created on the website and more is coming that your friends will probably like. Much more. Just not soon enuf for me.

book website: discarded-dreams.com     FB: rudy.ch.garcia      Twitter: DiscardedDreams

Es todo, hoy,

RudyG

Adiós Carlos Fuentes

Thank you señor Carlos Fuentes for all your books. We will miss you. Your books will be enjoyed by future generations.

Focus on a small press: Pilgrimage

If you're a writer seriously attempting to get your stories or articles an audience, you can easily get drowned by the requirements of the publishing world.

Keeping a log of every story and where, when and how it was received (rejected), or comments an editor or agent might have sent. There are deadlines, submission requirements and heavy questions like: do they want Spanish words italicized or underlined? Or not?

This last week I was even given specs of a novel I should write if I wanted to get published. (None of my five completed MSS fit this person's expectations.) Of course, there are few guarantees in the world of publishing, so even if I were to write such a speced novel, it might only become the sixth to populate my files.

Anyway, in all the mayhem of publishing activities, one can forget what one is doing, what one is part of, and what the whole purpose of this hobby, business or passion is about. It's about writing. Creating. A story or poem that wants to see the light of the printed page. Characters or verse that have a need to let themselves be known, watched, read and maybe even liked.

A small press like Pilgrimage can help set you back on track. It's been around for years doing its thing. It's not a very complicated, deadline-driven, heavily textually demanding thing. It's a print magazine. With stories. Here's the website description.

"Pilgrimage is:

• a small magazine living the big questions

• a community-in-print serving an eclectic fellowship of readers, writers, artists, naturalists, contemplatives, activists, seekers, adventurers, and other kindred spirits

• a place to tell the stories that matter

• an invitation to inward and outward exploration

• and an appreciation of the way home"

"Pilgrimage, founded in 1976, is published three times a year in Pueblo, Colorado. We feature the work of writers and artists in and beyond the Greater Southwest. Help sustain a good thing."

And just because it's a small press, doesn't mean it's of small stature. The editor-publisher Maria Melendez has credentials: Latino Poetry Review and Momotombo Press editorship; Utah State University and Saint Mary's College teacher; community outreach poet-teacher and two anthologies with California Poets in the Schools; writer-in-residence UC Davis Arboretum; founding editor Swan Scythe Press; poetry collection How Long She'll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), Honorable Mention 2007 International Latino Book Awards; finalist 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards; poetry collection Flexible Bones from University of Arizona Press (2010); her works in Altar, Orion Afield and Isotope, NPR's American Democracy Project, Barrow Street, International Quarterly and Ecological Restoration. You get the picture.

You can click here to visit the website and order current or past issues. The website is as uncomplicated as the magazine: black type on white page, all that writing amounts to, in the end, at least until a reader transforms it. About the only thing I wish is that there were more examples available of poetry and fiction they've published. If you've "lost your way home" or want to "help sustain a god thing," here's the link to their guidelines.

Now I'm going to go back to writing. Something. And take my time.

Es todo, hoy

RudyG