By William Anthony 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 jibes/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: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture (University of Texas Press, 2007) 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.
You can see all of my Textmex Galleryblog postings on the so-called Mexican Spitfire here.
*This article is a reproduction of the original blog post by William A. Nericcio in Duke University’s academic program, Latinos in the Global South. It is reproduced with permission from the author.
William Nericcio is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals including Camera Obscura, Americas Review, Spring, the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and Mosaic. In 2007, The University of Texas Press published his American Library Association award-winning cultural studies volume Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. His next book, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race is presently in development. He is also the author of two edited collections (Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck’s Enduring Voice for California and The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer’s Early Works [+] PLUS) for San Diego State University Press. Most recently, he assisted philosopher Mark Richard Wheeler with his critical anthology, 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact on Contemporary Thought and Culture for SDSU Press and helped edit and design Secession, with Amy Sara Carroll, with Hyperbole Books.