“Give Us One of Those Latin Bombshell Dances” : Lupe Velez Comic-Generated!

*We’re big fans of Memo Nericcio’s take on Mexican-American stereotypes in mass media. He keeps us current and sharp. VL

Another Great Chapter in the History of Mexicans in American Mass Culture

From the textmex obsessed imagination of William A. Nericcio

Time and again I have tipped my sombrero to the remarkable treasures to be found at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, but now he has outdone himself with a post that jives/gels/fuses with my #textmex and #mextasy researches/art/presentations and more.

One of his latest entries is a comic book from 1951 that fictionalizes the life and times of Lupe Velez–the ‘Mexican Spitfire’ that figures at the heart of my research in Myra Mendible’s From Bananas to Buttocks and in my own Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America {(Quality Comics’ Love Secrets #41 (1941), reprinted from Love Confessions #9 (1951)}

Click the images here to be plunged into mexstatic semiotic pleasure or go to Pappy’s blog to read the whole story. Read my interpretation of Lupe Velez’s life story–her career in cinema and the tragic climax to her life–here.

This article was originally published in The Textmex Galleryblog.

William Anthony Nericcio, aka “Memo,” is the Director of San Diego State University’s ever-evolving MALAS program (The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences)–a dynamic, interdisciplinary, cultural studies graduate program located near the U.S./Mexico border. Nericcio also serves on the faculties of the Chicana/o Studies Department, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU.

Suggested reading

A rogues’ gallery of Mexican bandits, bombshells, lotharios, and thieves saturates American popular culture. Remember Speedy Gonzalez? “Mexican Spitfire” Lupe Vélez? The Frito Bandito? Familiar and reassuring—at least to Anglos—these Mexican stereotypes are not a people but a text, a carefully woven, articulated, and consumer-ready commodity. In this original, provocative, and highly entertaining book, William Anthony Nericcio deconstructs Tex[t]-Mexicans in films, television, advertising, comic books, toys, literature, and even critical theory, revealing them to be less flesh-and-blood than “seductive hallucinations,” less reality than consumer products, a kind of “digital crack.”

Click on the image to buy.