Even More Phantom Sightings

Four more entries from the Phantom Sightings timeline written by Ruben Ortiz and myself. The official title of our piece is called "The Truthful History of the Conquest of Nuevo Aztlan." It's supposed to be funny and ironic. Oh well. In any case here are some art inspired entries and a music video visual aid. The show opens this week. I'll still be in New York. Someone attend and please get back to me with Opening Night chisme:

1979
Los Angeles, California
Newly arrived Mexican immigrant, and art school student, Guillermo Gómez-Peña wraps himself in a serape, binds his body with rope, and lies in an intentionally pathetic heap on the floor of a well-traveled elevator in a downtown Los Angeles office building for twenty-four hours. Uncomfortable yuppies in business suits ignore the performance, titled Loneliness of the Immigrant. Twelve years later the MacArthur Foundation awards Gómez-Peña a fellowship, one of the so-called “Genius Awards.”

1988
Compton, California
California rap group NWA releases Straight Outta Compton and forever changes the iconic, East Coast hip-hop style of Adidas track suits, Kangol hats, and large gold chains to the more cholo style of Pendleton shirts, baggy khaki trousers, bandannas, and tattoos in Old English fonts. Two years later Arturo Molina, better known as Kid Frost, releases the classic hip-hop album Hispanic Causing Panic, featuring the single ‘La Raza.’ In the accompanying music video, Chicano nationalism goes MTV as lowriders, bigotes, gang signs, Dickies, the Aztec calendar, and other barrio signifiers, are beamed into surburban gringo dens from Orange County to Long Island.

July 7, 1993
Seattle, Washington
Mia Zapata, lead singer of the influential rock band the Gits, is murdered in a dark alley just as the national press discovers the so-called grunge movement of the Pacific Northwest. Artistic contemporaries of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Zapata and the Gits will not enjoy a major-label record deal, never get MTV airplay, and never grace a Rolling Stone cover. A phantom sighting.

2002
San Antonio, Texas
Pedro Herrera, the son of Mexican immigrants, hosts a hip-hop show on his Trinity University college radio station. In the dark anonymity of the studio the quiet scholarship boy transforms himself into Chingo Bling, a trash-talking rapper with a voice described as “somewhere between B-Real’s nasel tone, Tony Montana’s fierce growl, and you cousin Pepe’s Mexican accent.” With his Nike-swoosed ostrich boots, black cowboy hat, platinum teeth, and often holding his beloved pet rooster Cleto (not to mention an entrepreneurial empire that includes Chingo Bling bobble heads, spring-break “Girls Gone Wild”-type DVDs, and a line of Tamale Christmas ornaments), the self described “ghetto vaquero” and performance artist out-Gómez-Peñas Gómez-Peña.

Comments

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