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skin-slave · 4 years ago

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That RPF answer was awesome. I'd really love to hear more about the Tijuana Bibles, please?

*breaks knuckles* Time to ramble about junk again, boys.

Tijuana Bibles are little booklets, usually made in the 20s-60s, but some ppl still make them for fun or as art. They're mostly smut, but also have humor, political messages, inappropriate themes, etc. Some of the characters are OCs, some are comic/cartoon characters, and some are well-known figures, like actors. They were illegal, made anonymously, and sold in secret.

They were called Tijuana Bibles to imply that they were smuggled from Mexico. (In line with "Tijuana donkey shows," which also weren't a real thing.) They were also called a lot of other things, like eight-pagers and bluesies. They were sold under the counter or out of ppl's pockets. Organized crime was sometimes blamed, but it's more likely that most printers had presses for making labels and just switched to Bibles as a side gig.

What's important about them - other than the rpf angle - is that they were subversive "low-brow" art, made by regular ppl, for regular ppl. Though they absolutely did make money, they weren't marketable. The art wasn't expected to be consistent, so while some artists were actual pros *cough*Wesley Morse*cough* most of them weren't. The stories were meant to entertain, not to be classics. The creators were diverse (well, more diverse than in commercial products) bc they didn't have to fit any standard. There was no standard. Bibles were trash. Delightful trash, by the ppl, for the ppl.

They're considered by many to be some of the earliest comix, and I agree. Comix - underground comic books that gave a voice to social movement groups, women, the queer community, and other minorities - circumvented the rules for comics via self-publishing and clandestine distributing. If you ask me, and you did lol, that's a significant part of the heritage of fanfic/art as we know it now. Our beautiful mix of voices that would never otherwise be heard, speaking truth and entertaining our small but important audiences.

Going back to the Bibles specifically, the fact that they used various interpretations of beloved characters mixed with OCs makes them fanfic/art. They're tangible proof that we're wired to be inspired (can I get that on a pillow?) and to imagine so much more for the characters we love. They're a historical example of the fact that transformative art doesn't erode the source material, as they had little to no impact on the inspiration.

And they're proof that commercial art, while very valuable, isn't a barometer for our needs or wants. The secret art that we make for each other has always been sexual, dark, humorous, imperfect, gross, bizarre, and free. It embodies the things we aren't getting from "appropriate" media. It's where we find our niche content that no one can afford to publicly endorse. It's our own little world where we escape being told what to look at, and make what we want to look at.

It's also Mae West fucking Popeye. And I think that's beautiful.

#tijuana bibles #sorry i got feelings ok #long post is long #you asked

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mauricedelafalaise · 3 years ago

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My very first DJ gig in August, 2000 at Marko Disco in Tijuana. (me in green)

I would open the night and open the shows for Nortec

#maurice de la falaise #tijuana #mexico #music #dj #2000 #2000s #marko disco

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hombresguk · 2 years ago

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Not long to go 🥳

In one month’s time Hombres G will be going over to Mexico in order to continue their 40th anniversary tour

They’ll be playing quite a few gigs in the country 🇲🇽

If you don’t have tickets yet and don’t want to miss out, you better buy them now 😜

Here are the tour dates:

08/03 - Monterrey (🇲🇽)

10/03 - CDMX (🇲🇽)

11/03 - CDMX (🇲🇽)

15/03 - Querétaro (🇲🇽)

16/03 - Puebla (🇲🇽)

18/03 - Tijuana (🇲🇽)

19/03 - Mexicali (🇲🇽)

#hombresg #hombres g

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kuramirocket · 3 years ago

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Whenever I visit Olvera Street, as I did a couple of weeks ago, my walk through the historic corridor is always the same.

Start at the plaza. Pass the stand where out-of-towners and politicians have donned sombreros and serapes for photos ever since the city turned this area into a tourist trap in 1930.

Look at the vendor stalls. Wonder if I need a new guayabera. Gobble up two beef taquitos bathed in avocado salsa at Cielito Lindo. Then return to my car and go home.

I’ve done this walk as a kid, and as an adult. For food crawls and quick lunches. With grad students on field trips, and with the late Anthony Bourdain for an episode of his “Parts Unknown.”

This last visit was different, though: I had my own camera crew with me.

My last chance at Hollywood fame was going to live or die on Olvera Street.

I was shooting a sizzle reel — footage that a producer will turn into a clip for television executives to determine whether I’m worthy of a show. In this case, I want to turn my 2012 book “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” into the next “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” Or “Somebody Feed Phil.” Or an Alton Brown ripoff. Or a TikTok series.

Anything at this point, really.

For more than a decade, I’ve tried to break into Hollywood with some success — but the experience has left me cynical. Personal experience and the historical record have taught me that studios and streamers still want Mexicans to stay in the same cinematic lane that American film has paved for more than a century. We’re forever labeled… something. Exotic. Dangerous. Weighed down with problems. Never fully developed, autonomous humans. Always “Mexican.”

Even if we’re natives of Southern California. Especially if we’re natives of Southern California.

I hope my sizzle reel will lead to something different. I doubt it will because the issue is systemic. Industry executives, producers, directors and scriptwriters can only portray the Mexicans they know — and in a perverse, self-fulfilling prophecy, they mostly only know the Mexicans their industry depicts even in a region where Latinos make up nearly half the population.

The vicious cycle even infects creators like me.

As the film crew and I left for our next location, I stopped and looked around. We were right where I began, except I now looked south on Main Street. The plaza was to my left. City Hall loomed on the horizon. The vista was the same as the opening scene of “Bordertown,” a 1935 Warner Bros. film I had seen the night before. It was the first Hollywood movie to address modern-day Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.

What I saw was more than déjà vu. It was a reminder that 86 years later, Hollywood’s Mexican problem hasn’t really progressed at all.

Birth of a stereotype

Screen misrepresentation of Mexicans isn’t just a longstanding wrong; it’s an original sin. And it has an unsurprising Adam: D.W. Griffith.

He’s most infamous for reawakening the Ku Klux Klan with his 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation.” Far less examined is how Griffith’s earliest works also helped give American filmmakers a language with which to typecast Mexicans.

Two of his first six films were so-called “greaser” movies, one-reelers where Mexican Americans were racialized as inherently criminal and played by white people. His 1908 effort “The Greaser’s Gauntlet” is the earliest film to use the slur in its title. Griffith filmed at least eight greaser movies on the East Coast before heading to Southern California in early 1910 for better weather.

The new setting allowed Griffith to double down on his Mexican obsession. He used the San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano missions as backdrops for melodramas embossed with the Spanish Fantasy Heritage, the white California myth that romanticized the state’s Mexican past even as it discriminated against the Mexicans of the present.

In films such as his 1910 shorts “The Thread of Destiny,” “In Old California” (the first movie shot in what would become Hollywood) and “The Two Brothers,” Griffith codified cinematic Mexican characters and themes that persist. The reprobate father. The saintly mother. The wayward son. The idea that Mexicans are forever doomed because they’re, well, Mexicans.

Griffith based his plots not on how modern-day Mexicans actually lived, but rather on how white people thought they did.

A riot nearly broke out as Latinos felt the scene mocked them. It was perhaps the earliest Latino protest against negative depictions of them on the big screen.

But the threat of angry Mexicans didn’t kill greaser movies. Griffith showed the box-office potential of the genre, and many American cinematic pioneers dabbled in them. Thomas Edison’s company shot some, as did its biggest rival, Vitagraph Studios. So did Mutual Film, an early home for Charlie Chaplin. Horror legend Lon Chaney played a greaser. The first western star, Broncho Billy Anderson, made a career out of besting them.

These films were so noxious that the Mexican government in 1922 banned studios that produced them from the country until they “retired... denigrating films from worldwide circulation,” according to a letter that Mexican President Álvaro Obregón wrote to his Secretariat of External Relations. The gambit worked: the greaser films ended. Screenwriters instead reimagined Mexicans as Latin lovers, Mexican spitfires, buffoons, peons, mere bandits and other negative stereotypes.

That’s why “Bordertown” surprised me when I finally saw it. The Warner Bros. movie, starring Paul Muni as an Eastside lawyer named Johnny Ramirez and Bette Davis as the temptress whom he spurns, was popular when released. Today, it’s almost impossible to see outside of a hard-to-find DVD and an occasional Muni marathon on Turner Classic Movies.

Based on a novel of the same name; Muni was a non-Mexican playing a Mexican. Johnny Ramirez had a fiery temper, a bad accent and repeatedly called his mother (played by Spanish actress Soledad Jiminez ) “mamacita,” who in turn calls him “Juanito.” The infamous, incredulous ending has Ramirez suddenly realizing the vacuity of his fast, fun life and returning to the Eastside “back where I belong ... with my own people.” And the film’s poster features a bug-eyed, sombrero-wearing Muni pawing a fetching Davis, even though Ramirez never made a move on Davis’ character or wore a sombrero.

These and other faux pas (like Ramirez’s friends singing “La Cucaracha” at a party) distract from a movie that didn’t try to mask the discrimination Mexicans faced in 1930s Los Angeles. Ramirez can’t find justice for his neighbor, who lost his produce truck after a drunk socialite on her way back from dinner at Las Golondrinas on Olvera Street smashed into it. That very socialite, whom Ramirez goes on to date (don’t ask), repeatedly calls him “Savage” as a term of endearment. When Ramirez tires of American bigotry and announces he’s moving south of the border to run a casino, a priest in brownface asks him to remain.

“For what?” Ramirez replies. “So those white little mugs who call themselves gentlemen and aristocrats can make a fool out of me?”

“Bordertown” sprung up from Warner Bros.’ Depression-era roster of social-problem films that served as a rough-edged alternative to the escapism offered by MGM, Disney and Paramount. But its makers committed the same error Griffith did: They fell back on tropes instead of talking to Mexicans right in front of them who might offer a better tale.

Just take the first shot of “Bordertown,” the one I inadvertently recreated on my television shoot.

Under a title that reads “Los Angeles … the Mexican Quarter,” viewers see Olvera Street’s plaza emptier than it should be. That’s because just four years earlier, immigration officials rounded up hundreds of individuals at that very spot. The move was part of a repatriation effort by the American government that saw them boot about a million Mexicans — citizens and not — from the United States during the 1930s.

Following that opening shot is a brief glimpse of a theater marquee that advertises a Mexican music trio called Los Madrugadores (“The Early Risers”). They were the most popular Spanish-language group in Southern California at the time, singing traditional corridos but also ballads about the struggles Mexicans faced in the United States. Lead singer Pedro J. González hosted a popular AM radio morning show heard as far away as Texas that mixed music and denunciations against racism.

By the time “Bordertown” was released in 1935, Gonzalez was in San Quentin, jailed by a false accusation of statutory rape pursued by an L.A. district attorney’s office happy to lock up a critic. He was freed in 1940 after the alleged victim recanted her confession, then summarily deported to Tijuana, where Gonzalez continued his career before returning to California in the 1970s.

Doesn’t Gonzalez and his times make a better movie than “Bordertown”? Warner Bros. could have offered a bold corrective to the image of Mexican Americans if they had just paid attention to their own footage! Instead, Gonzalez’s saga wouldn’t be told on film until a 1984 documentary and 1988 drama.

Both were shot in San Diego. Both received only limited screenings at theaters across the American Southwest and an airing on PBS before going on video. No streamer carries it.

How Hollywood imagines Mexicans versus how we really are turned real for me in 2013, when I became a consulting producer for a Fox cartoon about life on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The title? “Bordertown.”

It aired in 2015 and lasted one season. I enjoyed the end product. I even got to write an episode, which just so happened to be the series finale.

The gig was a dream long deferred. My bachelor’s degree from Chapman University was in film. I had visions of becoming the brown Tarantino or a Mexican Truffaut before journalism got in the way. Over the years, there was Hollywood interest in articles or columns I wrote but never anything that required I do more than a couple of meetings — or scripts by white screenwriters that went nowhere.

But “Bordertown” opened up more doors for me and inspired me to give Hollywood a go.

While I worked on the cartoon, I got another consulting producer credit on a Fusion special for comedian Al Madrigal and sold a script to ABC that same year about gentrification in Boyle Heights through the eyes of a restaurant years before the subject became a trend. Pitch meetings piled up with so much frequency that my childhood friends coined a nickname for me: Hollywood Gus.

My run wouldn’t last long. The microagressions became too annoying.

The veteran writers on “Bordertown” rolled their eyes any time I said that one of their jokes was clichéd, like the one about how eating beans gave our characters flatulent superpowers or the one about a donkey show in Tijuana. Or when they initially rejected a joke about menudo, saying no one knew what the soup was, and they weren’t happy when another Latino writer and I pointed out that you’re pretty clueless if you’ve lived in Southern California for a while and don’t know what menudo is.

The writers were so petty, in fact, that they snuck a line into the animated “Bordertown” where the main character said, “There’s nothing worse than a Mexican with glasses” — which is now my public email to forever remind me of how clueless Hollywood is.

The insults didn’t bother me so much as the insight I gained from those interactions: The only Latinos most Hollywood types know are the janitors and security guards at the studio, and nannies and gardeners at their homes. The few Latinos in the industry I met had assimilated into this worldview as well.

Could I blame them for their ignorance when it came to capturing Mexican American stories, especially those in Southern California? Of course I can.

What ended any aspirations for a full-time Hollywood career was a meeting with a television executive shortly after ABC passed on my Boyle Heights script (characters weren’t believable, per the rejection). They repeatedly asked that I think about doing a show about my father’s life, which didn’t interest me. Comedies about immigrant parents are clichéd at this point. So one day I blurted that I was more interested in telling my stories.

I never heard from the executive again.

A pair of boots

Five years later, and that Hollywood dream just won’t leave me.

I’m not leaving journalism. But at this point, I just want to prove to myself that I can help exorcise D.W. Griffith’s anti-Mexican demons from Hollywood once and for all. That I can show the Netflix honcho they were wrong for passing on a “Taco USA” series with the excuse that the topic of Mexican food in the United States was too “limited.” And the Food Network people who said they just couldn’t see a show about the subject as being as “fun” as it was. Or the bigtime Latino actor’s production company who wanted the rights to my "¡Ask a Mexican!” book, then ghosted me after I said I didn’t hold them but I did own the rights to my brain.

When this food-show sizzle reel gets cut, and I start my Hollywood jarabe anew, I’ll keep in mind a line in “Bordertown” that Johnny Ramirez said: “An American man can lift himself up by his bootstraps. All he needs is strength and a pair of boots.”

Mexicans have had the strength since forever in this town. But can Hollywood finally give us the botas?

#mexican #mexican american #chicano #chicana #usa #united states #racism #discrimination #hollywood #movies #history #california #stereotypes #latinos #latinas #ku klux klan #mexico #🇲🇽

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dirt-grub · 4 years ago

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okay. okay i said i was gonna share my 90′s au so here goes

(its more of a vague idea than a linear plot for anything, and its also still very open to change. i made this a few weeks ago for pure self indulgence but i found the community here and figured I’d share lol)

(also, feel free to add some of your own/take inspo from this!!! its totally fair game for anyone, if you wanna borrow some headcanons, add some headcanons, draw/write about it, go ahead!)

- This is an au where Fry never goes to the future, but the rest of the main cast already exists in 1990′s New York in time period appropriate ways; Fry is, well, Fry; Leela is a pilot-in-training and a member of the Manhattan Flight Club; Amy is an NYU grad student, etc, etc.

-They’ve all met before New Years, 1999, at different times that are still yet to be decided, but somewhere around college age. Bender has known Fry the longest, followed by Leela, and then the rest of the crew.

- All non-human characters are human, however many of the traits of their original species will be integrated into their character (Leela was born blind in one eye, Bender excels at menial physical labor and has an incredibly high alcohol tolerance, etc.)

- Fry and Bender share a shitty cramped apartment in Brooklyn. Fry lived with Michelle for a little while before this, but they were so on-again off-again that Bender offered for him to stay at his place.

- Bender is an up-and-coming musician, or at least, that’s what he tells people. He doesn’t really play gigs, he just throws parties and plays for friends, and they rarely ever give him money if he plays at one of their parties. The way he manages to pull an income is puzzling, but he manages; usually by doing odd jobs, showing up to Fry’s work at random, get-rich-quick schemes, and a wide array of illegal and/or immoral activities. Y’know, typical Bender.

- Fry has Seymour in this au, but he typically stays at Pannuchi’s overnight, as Fry and Bender’s apartment doesn’t allow dogs. Also, Bender pretends to be allergic to dogs and holds a grudge against Seymour, but its really because he doesn’t like sharing Fry’s attention. Leela calls him out on it constantly, but Fry believes him anyway.

- Fry and Bender totally fuckin like each other, but they’re also both oblivious as shit. Bender flirts with Fry and he hardly ever notices (but everyone else does). He has several pet names for Fry that seem casual (he calls him “red” a lot). Despite this, he gets extremely thrown off guard if Fry ever catches on and jokingly reciprocates or pays him a genuine compliment of any kind.

- Bender’s full name is Benjamin. If you call him this he will hurt you. (Unless you’re his mom. Fry can get away with calling him Ben, but he’s on thin fucking ice.)

-Bender is MEXICAN DAMMIT. He has some other stuff mixed in, but he isn’t really sure what it is, so he makes it up as he sees fit. (The 90′s equivalent of the “I’m 40% __!” jokes come from this. On St. Patrick’s Day he claims to be 40% Irish, on Oktoberfest he claims to be 40% German, etc.)

- The nickname Bender comes from a few things, from the literal meaning of a wild drinking spree to his favorite sex position (which he details loudly and often, I’m sure you can guess what it is).

-Bender’s family speaks fluent Spanish, but his is shit. He only knows enough to communicate with family, flirt, talk shit and swear. Fry is impressed by it anyway, and Bender teaches him obscenities disguised as normal phrases, and gooey romantic crap disguised as obscenities. (Bender once taught Fry “Me cautivan tus ojos” and told him it was a rude phrase. He almost immediately forgot about it, so later when Fry repeated it back he had a fucking heart attack).

- He tells everyone he’s from Tijuana, but he was just born there. His parents are from Tijuana, and his mother went into labor early while visiting her sister back home. He was raised entirely in New York, but moved from borough to borough. He lived in the Bronx before the Brooklyn apartment.

- He’s actually pretty talented, but he’s not serious or focused enough to get anywhere with his music career. He loves to gas on about music and the rockstar lifestyle though, and sometimes when he’s drunk, he’ll tell Fry elaborate tales of how they’re gonna live once he’s made it big.

- Leela was still orphaned as a child. Her parents were immigrants, and they came to NYC to let her to get a good life while struggling to get a green card to come over themselves. In her adulthood they finally succeed, allowing her to build a relationship with them like she always wanted. I’m unsure of her cultural background just yet, but one that states the last name before the first name like in canon.

- Her parents traveled a lot, as her mother has her doctorate in linguistics and her father was a thrill seeker and sight seer. They decided NYC was the perfect city for Leela to experience the American dream in. They always knew she was going to be something brilliant, and while they observed and worried from afar, they never doubted she would be great.

- She’s smart and tough as hell, and manages to juggle school and several jobs. She’s always felt the need to prove herself, and is terrible at asking for help or allowing any kind of vulnerability show through. She’s extremely career motivated, but she has to work the same dead-end job as Fry and Bender, at least temporarily, to make enough money for flight school.

- She has black hair naturally, but nobody’s ever seen it in person. She dyes it purple so habitually that you hardly ever see her roots.

- She’s involved in a lot of charity work and activism (1990′s NYC was rough man).

- She was a star soccer player in high school, but didn’t make the cut in the high intensity world of college sports. She is constantly bitter about this.

- Amy’s an NYU grad student, studying applied physics under Professor Farnsworth (who they later find out is a distant relative of Fry’s). Her parents are rich one-percenters on wall street, but she was smart enough to get into NYU without their connections.

- She was spoiled as a child, but also damaged by her parents insanely high expectations of her and comments on her lifestyle and appearance. She decided to get her doctorate mostly to spite her parents, who just wanted her to marry someone rich and expand their business, but discovered her love for science.

- I also hc her as ambidexterous for literally no reason.

- Leela had a one-sided feud with her in college, mostly due to Leela’s need to prove herself. She always deeply respected her and her intelligence, even if she played along and teased back. She’s a strong believer in women building up other women, but that doesn’t mean playful teasing and friendly competition isn’t allowed in her book.

- Everyone is gay because I said so (but there are specifics and nuances to everyone’s sexualities). There’s some implied internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality bc the 90′s but I probably won’t focus on that very much (fiction is for escapism!)

-Fry doesn’t like to label himself, but he has the potential to get a crush on anyone. Early on, he thinks of himself as a straight guy who just happened to have a few crushes on guys, and later just opts not to call himself anything.

- Leela is mainly sapphic, and is attracted to some guys, but has incredibly high standards for them in comparison to girls and generally leans towards those who present more femininely.

- Bender is bisexual and is attracted to different things when it comes to different genders, but he’s generally pretty attracted to anyone.

- Amy is pan and poly, and the most open about her sexuality.

Oh uhhhhh I should probably mention more of the PE crew

- Zoidberg is a sketchy doctor with a history of malpractice that for some reason the Professor trusts to be his assistant.

-Hermes is head of the science department. No one knows why the fuck he puts up with Zoidberg and the Professor, but they all seem weirdly close. (Possibly because they all have blackmail on each other and tolerating each other is the best arrangement).

- Kif is an exchange student and Amy’s partner. They met when she was studying abroad, after which he transferred to NYU to be with her.

aaaaand there’s probably a lot more but this post is getting super long lol

anyways yeah ive had this idea in my head for a while and ive actually done some art for it so if i decide to post that here’s some context!

#connor talks #90's AU #futurama #ahhhhhh this took so long to write and theres still more in my google doc #anyways go nuts with this one folks feel free to add more

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