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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE:
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://professorlatinx.la.utexas.edu
CITY: Austin
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 6, 1969, in Mexico City, Mexico.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1992; Stanford University, Ph.D., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Colorado, Boulder, professor; Ohio State University, Columbus, Distinguished University Professor, Distinguished Professor, University Distinguished Scholar, Alumni Distinguished Teacher; University of Texas, Austin, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. Producer and co-creator of the animated film, Carlitos Chupacabra, 2023; member of boards of Ad Astra Media, BreakBread Literacy Project, American Library Association Graphic Novel & Comics, and The American Academy of Poets; consultant to organizations, including PBS Austin, Tubi, and Ubisoft; Host of the podcast, Into the COLAverse.
MEMBER:Texas Institute of Letters; National Cartoonist Society.
AWARDS:Outstanding Scholarly Book for Chicano/Latino Studies, MLA Awards, 2004, for Dancing with Ghosts; Hall of Fame inductee, Ohio State University Office of Diversity and Inclusion; Rodico C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and Susan M Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award, both from Ohio State University; Hispanic Education Bright Spot Award, White House, 2015; Ohio Education Summit Award, 2016; Outstanding Latino/a Faculty Award, American Association of Hispanics, 2016; Eisner Award, 2018; best nonfiction, International Latino Book Awards, 2018.
WRITINGS
Author of forewords, introductions, and prefaces of books, including Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology, The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens, Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy, A Country without Borders: Poems and Stories of Kashmir,
SIDELIGHTS
Frederick Luis Aldama is a writer and educator, whose work is mostly focused on the Latinx experience. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and went on to obtain a Ph.D. from Stanford University. After teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Aldama joined the Ohio State University, where she served in multiple positions, including as Distinguished University Professor and Alumni Distinguished Teacher. Aldama’s next employer was the University of Texas, Austin, where he held the role of Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. He served on the boards of several organizations and as a consultant to media companies, and he was the host of a podcast and co-creator and producer of the animated film, Carlitos Chupacabra. In addition to these responsibilities, Aldama was also a prolific writer and editor. He released dozens of volumes, many of which focused on Latino/a representation in the media and popular culture.
In 2020, Aldama released his first book for children, The Adventures of Charlie Chupacabra. In this volume, he tells the story of the titular protagonist, who is a mythical beast of Latino folklore. Charlie lives with his family on the Mexican side of the wall separating Mexico and the U.S. There, he befriends Lupe, a human girl, and the two decide to take off on an adventure to see what is on the other side of the wall. The wall, which can talk, tells them that they must save the children held by the U.S. Border Patrol agents and separated from their families. A Kirkus Reviews contributor suggested: “The adventure Charlie and Lupe embark on is a timely and courageous one as it addresses the migration crisis on the border.”
In Aldama’s next children’s book, a bilingual volume called Con Papá=With Papá, a child describes what they do with their father. Their actions include running, speaking, dancing, and riding bicycles. In an interview with Daniel A. Olivas, contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Aldama discussed his intentions for the book, stating: “My hope: To give our little ones and their co-readers (guardians, siblings, extended familia, librarians) a different, more capacious origin story, with a kind and joyous serpent god delivering a beautiful brown baby to doorsteps of all sorts of guardians, single papás included; to create an origin story anchored in our deep Mesoamerican mythologies that’s inclusive of all of the ways that we miraculously arrive in the world (in vitro, surrogacy, and adoption, for instance) and are cared for and grown.” Describing the book, he told Olivas: “It’s a picture book that I hope will capture the imaginations of our little ones. It’s also an opportunity for all of us who’ve been purposefully sidelined and ignored to see ourselves and to celebrate our living, breathing, ever-changing, and reverberant mythologies.”
Written for a slightly older audience, Through Fences is a collection of short stories, each featuring a teen protagonist that is affected by the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Main characters including a queer boy, an angry white young man, and a Japanese-Mexican social media influencer. A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “visually effective and necessarily disturbing and difficult as it sheds light on inhumanity.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, January, 2009, P.M. Garcia, review of Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas’s Fictions, p. 899; February, 2009, A.P. Church, review of Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach, p. 1080; April, 2010, K. Gale, review of A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction, p. 1472; October, 2013, G.A. Foster, review of Mex-Cine: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century, p. 267; March, 2019, M.L. Grover, review of The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex, and Latin American Culture, p. 941; November, 2020, D.A. Schmitt, review of Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, p. 240; December, 2022, V.A. Elmwood, review of Latinx TV in the Twenty-first Century, p. 375.
International Social Science Review, Ana Pozzi-Harris, review of Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Ariola to Los Bros Hernandez, p. 140.
Journal of American Ethnic History, fall, 2017, Nhora Lucia Serrano, review of Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future, p. 101; fall, 2018, Luis Saenz de Viguera Erkiaga, review of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, p. 78; winter, 2022, Emily Rauber Rodriguez, review of Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV, p. 107.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2020, review of The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie; oberOct 15, 2023, review of Through Fences.
Lambda Book Report, February, 2004, Ricardo L. Ortiz, “Desert Angel,” review of Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works.
MELUS, spring, 2006, Jesse Aleman, review of Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity, p. 162; fall, 2011, Scott St. Pierre, review of Your Brain on Latino Comics, p. 216.
Post Script, Samuel Saldivar, III, review of The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez, p. 117.
School Library Journal, October, 2018, Sugei Lugo, review of Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling, p. 95.
Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, winter, 2017, Jessica Rutherford, review of Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview; winter, 2017, Noel R. Zavala, review of Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future; winter, 2017, Danielle A. Orozco, review of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.
World Literature Today, summer, 2021, Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón, review of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, p. 115.
Xpress Reviews, August 24, 2018, Lucy Roehrig, review of Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology.
ONLINE
Comics Journal, https://www.tcj.com/ (September 24, 2018), Alex Rueben, author interview.
Frederick Luis Aldama website, https://professorlatinx.la.utexas.edu/ (July 3, 2024).
Latinx Spaces, https://www.latinxspaces.com/ (July 3, 2024), Christina Miranda, author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (March 2, 2017), Daniel A. Olives, author interview; (August 29, 2022), Daniel A. Olives, author interview.
Marvel website, https://www.marvel.com/ (October 15, 2021), Robyn Belt, author interview.
University of Texas, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts website, https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ (July 3, 2024).
Professor LatinX* is a hub of discovery! It invites any and all to see the ways that Latinx pop culture infuses, informs, and transforms the world we live in.
Online courses, videocasts, outreach events, books & book series, comics databases, and more, invite you to explore how pop cultural phenomena (TV, film, and comics especially) grows from and engages with different sociopolitical, historical, ancestral, and regional contexts.
Professor LatinX is a site that invites you to see the different ways that one can enrich understanding of creative and consumptive practices informed by religion, race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Professor LatinX invites you on a journey of shared inquiry where you can sharpen your critical thinking about the challenges and the prospects reflected in pop culture by those actively working to enrich and transform our mainstream imaginary.
I’ve served as a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder followed by 16 years at the Ohio State University where I was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at the Ohio State University, as well as the recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award.
I’m currently the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin. Here I also have affiliate faculty appointments in Radio-TV-Film, LGBTQ Studies, Center for Mexican American Studies, and Latin American Studies.
* A quick word on the term LatinX. I use Latinx not as prescriptive identifier but rather as one of many self-identification options we have, including Latino, Latina, Latine, Chicano/a, among others. For over 2 million people in the US, Latinx offers a useful and positive gender-neutral self-identifier. On a personal note, with Irish, Guatemalan and Mexican ancestral roots, Latinx captures well the complexity of my multiple cultural and geographic identities. It also importantly resonates Malcolm X, whose new identity denounced his slave name as well as with Professor X, who provides refuge for the outcast and disenfranchised muties in X-Men comics.
Frederick Luis Aldama
Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities UT Austin & Adjunct Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University
PhD, Stanford
Curriculum Vitae
aldama@utexas.edu
5103679112
Patton Hall 4.102 | Latinx Pop Lab
office hours: By appointment. Meetings available in person, via zoom, text, & call: 510-367-9112
INTERESTS
Latinx & BIPOC Representation: Comic Books. TV. Film. YA Lit. Popular Culture. Social Media. Storytelling Science.
WEBSITES
Linktree
Wikipedia
Latinx Popcasts
Latinx Pop Lab Podcast
Latinx Pop Lab
Professor Latinx
Chupacabra Charlie
Books
BOOKS
Labyrinths Borne
The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez
Through Fences
Pyroclast
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century
Con Papá/With Papá
Las aventuras de Chupacabra Charlie
The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie
Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in The Americas and Australasia
Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi
Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comics Studies
Cultural Studies in the Digital Age
The Oxford University Press Handbook of Comic Book Studies.
Jeff Smith: Conversations
Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen
Reel Latinxs: Representation in US Film & TV
Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century
Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts
Comics Studies Here and Now
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Pop Culture in Latin America
Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology
Latino/a Children and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics
Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands.
The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Pop Culture
Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview
Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future
Aesthetics of Discomfort: Conversations on Disquieting Ar
Laughter Matters: Conversations on Humor
Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: 21st Century Approaches to Teaching
Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez
The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez.
Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics
Latinos in the End Zone: Conversations on the Brown Color Line in the NFL
Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal
¡Muy Pop! Conversations on Latino Popular Culture
Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry
Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the 21st Century
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature
Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory
Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts
A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction
Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez.
Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach
Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas's Narrative Fictions.
Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists.
Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity.
Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas
Postethnic Narrative Criticism
Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Work
BIOGRAPHY
COURSES
PROFESSOR LATINX
Professor Latinx Teaching
Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin, where he is founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab and its initiative, including the annual BIPOC PoP: Comics, Gaming & Animation Arts Expo & Symposium and the Latinx Pop Magazine.
He is an award-winning author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of dozens of books and the editor of numerous book series, including Latinographix and Brown Ink, which publish Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is the producer and co-creator of the first documentary on Latinx comic book superheroes.
He is the author of several children’s books, including The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (published in English and Spanish) and the award-winning Con Papá/With Papá as well as producer and co-creator of the animation short Carlitos Chupacabra (Cannes Film Festival 2023).
He has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, National Cartoonist Society, and the Ohio State University's Office of Diversity & Inclusion Hall of Fame.
Recently published works include his novel The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez, graphic novels Labyrinths Borne and Through Fences as well as the comic books Pyroclast and The Steampunkera Chronicles (forthcoming).
He sits on several boards, including Ad Astra Media, BreakBread Literacy Project, American Library Association Graphic Novel & Comics, and The American Academy of Poets.
He consults for Ubisoft and PBS Austin, Tubi, among others.
Host of "Into the COLAverse"—a podcast that features conversations with UT faculty from across UT Austin's College of Liberal Arts.
CV: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://minio.la.utexas.edu/colaweb-prod/person_files/0/9383/Aldama%20CV%20Sept.%201,%202023.pdf
Frederick Luis Aldama
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frederick Luis Aldama
Born March 6, 1969 (age 55)
Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation(s) University professor, author
Awards Eisner Award (2018)
Academic background
Alma mater PhD, Stanford University (1999), BA, University of California, Berkeley (1992)
Academic work
Discipline fiction, non-fiction, film studies, pop culture, comics
Notable works Long Story Cut Short (2017), Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (2018)
Website professorlatinx.com
Frederick Luis Aldama is an American author, editor, and academic. He is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab at the University of Texas, Austin.[1] At UT Austin is also affiliate faculty in Latino Media Arts & Studies and LGBTQ Studies. He continues to hold the title Distinguished University Professor[2] as adjunct professor at The Ohio State University.[3] He teaches courses on Latinx pop culture, especially focused on the areas of comics, TV, film, animation, and video games in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film at UT Austin. At the Ohio State University he was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher as well as recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He was also founder and director of the award-winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research[4][5][6] and founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute.[7] In has been inducted into the National Academy of Teachers, National Cartoonist Society,[8] the Texas Institute of Letters,[9] the Ohio State University's Office of Diversity & Inclusion Hall of Fame,[10] and as board of directors for The Academy of American Poets.[11] He sits on the boards for American Library Association Graphic Novel and Comics Round Table, BreakBread Literacy Project, and Ad Astra Media. He is founder and director of UT Austin's BIPOC POP: Comics, Gaming & Animation Arts Expo & Symposium[12] as well as Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Latinx Pop Magazine.
Early life and education
Aldama was born in Mexico City to a Guatemalan- and Irish-American mother from Los Angeles and a Mexican father from Mexico City. When he was a child, his mother moved the family to California.[13] He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1999.[14]
Career
Aldama is an author of fiction and comics as well as a scholar and professor who uses insights from narrative theory, cognitive science, and Latinx critical cultural theory to enrich understanding of the creation, distribution, and consumption of Latinx pop cultural phenomena, especially comic books, TV, film, and animation.
He is book series editor of the Latinx and Latin American Profiles [15] (with the University of Pittsburgh Press) that publishes scholarship on innovative Latinx cultural figures, such as Reading Junot Diaz[16] and Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi.[17] He edits the Global Media & Race[18] and Critical Graphics series (with Rutgers University Press).[19] He edits the Biographix series (University Press of Mississippi) that provides critical insight to key figures in comics. He co-edits the Global Latin/o Americas series (the Ohio State University Press), Latinx Pop Culture[20] (for University of Arizona Press) as well as the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series (for the University of Texas Press).[21] Aldama edits Latinographix,[22] a comic books series that showcases graphic novels, memoir, and nonfiction by Latinx writers and artists, including Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology and United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel by Giannina Braschi and Joakim Lindengren.
In 2017, Aldama published his first book of fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands.[23] His flash fiction style depicts marginalized Latinx lives on both sides of the US/Mexico border.[24] He is the author of the children's books, Con Papá / With Papá[25] and The Adventures of Charlie the Chupacabra (English 2020; Spanish 221).[26] He wrote and produced the award-winning animation film Carlitos Chupacabra as well as produced the first documentary film on the history of Latinx superheroes in mainstream comics.[27] He co-founded and directed of SÕL-CON: The Brown, Black, & Indigenous Comics Expo.[28] He is founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab BIPOC Comics & Multimedia Arts Expo & Symposium at UT Austin—the nation's only collegiate comic book expo that focuses on the work of BIPOC scholars, artists, writers, editors, filmmakers, and illustrators. He served on the executive council of the International Society for the Study of Narrative from 2013 to 2015,[29] and serves on the advisory boards for journals such as Narrative,[30] INKS: The Journal of Comics Society,[31] MELUS, and Journal of Narrative Theory.[32] He is a member of the board for the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies.[33] He is an associate editor of American Book Review[34] and judge for the TIL/Texas Institute of Letters.
Essays, interviews, and media appearances
Aldama's articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Aztlán, College Literature, Poets & Writers, World Literature Today, Cross Cultural Poetics, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, Lucero, Comparative Literature, The Callaloo Journal, Nepantla, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Analysis, American Literature, Latin American Research Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, SubStance, Style, ImageTexT, Latino Studies Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind, Alter/nativas: Latin American Cultural Studies Journal, and Journal of the West. Interviews with Aldama have appeared in ABC News,[35] PBS, Fox News Latino,[36] CNN, VOXXI, MSNBC,[37] Telemundo, The Washington Post,[38] the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Channel 10 news,[39] Hispanic Living; Listin Diario; Spain's Efe; KETR Radio, and KCET's Artbound “Love & Rockets” documentary His the podcast host for "Into the COLA-verse" that listeners on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin.
Selected awards
2022 Honorable Mention. Media Arts Festival. University of North Texas. Carlitos Chupacabra[40]
2022 Festival de Cine Latinoamericano NORTE. Honorable Mention. Mexico. Carlitos Chupacabra[41]
2021 International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention. Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities[42]
2021 Comics Studies Society Honorable Mention Award for Graphic Indigeneity [43]
2018–2019 Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award[44]
2018–2019 Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring[45]
2018 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics[46]
2018 International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction[47]
2017 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and inducted into the Academy of Teaching[48]
2016 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education's Outstanding Latino/a Faculty Award[6]
2016 Ohio Education Summit Award[6]
2015 White House "Hispanic Education Bright Spot" Award for founding and directing LASER[49]
2014 Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor[3]
2014 University Emerging Community Engagement Award[50]
2008 University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award[51]
2004 MLA Award: Outstanding Scholarly Book Chicano/Latino Studies for Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas[52]
1999 Ford Foundation Fellowship[53]
Books published
As author
Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie. University of Texas Press. August 2009. ISBN 9780292722101. OCLC 320192033.
Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. December 2004. ISBN 9780520243927. OCLC 57207131.
Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. January 2005. ISBN 978-0-292-70940-9. OCLC 62746185.
Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Artists and Writers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. January 2006. ISBN 978-0-292-71312-3. OCLC 69199653.
Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. July 2008. ISBN 9780292717985. OCLC 179786739.
Your Brain On Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. June 2009. ISBN 978-0-292-71973-6. OCLC 429911628.
A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. January 2009. ISBN 978-0-292-72577-5. OCLC 288932889.
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. January 2013. ISBN 9780415667876. OCLC 779258509.
Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. July 2013. ISBN 9780230391635. OCLC 829739896.
Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. December 2013. ISBN 9780472029129. OCLC 844924402.
Ilan, Stavans; Aldama, Frederick Luis (December 2013). ¡Muy Pop! Conversations on Latino Popular Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472029440. OCLC 874149423.
González, Christopher; Aldama, Frederick Luis (2013-11-15). Latinos in the End Zone: Conversations on the Brown Color Line in the NFL. New York, NY: Palgrave Pivot. ISBN 978-1137403087. OCLC 860395198.
Hogan, Patrick Colm; Aldama, Frederick Luis (February 2014). Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, Aesthetics. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 9780814212431. OCLC 861955952.
The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2014-10-15. ISBN 9780292761216. OCLC 878667406.
Lindenberger, Herbert S.; Aldama, Frederick Luis (February 2016). Aesthetics of Discomfort: Conversations on Disquieting Art. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472073009. OCLC 930257206.
Ilan, Stavans; Aldama, Frederick Luis (January 2016). Laughing Matters: Conversations on Humor. San Diego, CA: Hyperbole Books. ISBN 978-1938537912. OCLC 940997852.
Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands (in English and Spanish). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 2017-02-07. ISBN 9780816536115. OCLC 965129760.
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. October 2017. ISBN 9780816537082. OCLC 4183209848.
González, Christopher; Aldama, Frederick Luis (December 2018). Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138088443. OCLC 1012346313.
Latino/a Children's and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. January 2018. ISBN 978-0822964971. OCLC 989035334.
Nericcio, William Anthony; Aldama, Frederick Luis (November 2019). Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on Screen. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0814255599. OCLC 9664323216.
González, Christopher; Aldama, Frederick Luis (September 2019). Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. ISBN 978-0816539581. OCLC 9491289522.
The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie. Latinographix. Illustrations by Chris Escobar. Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books. June 2020. ISBN 978-0814255865. OCLC 9477020784.
Las aventuras de Chupacabra Charlie. Latinographix. Illustrations by Chris Escobar. Translation by Sonia Rodríguez Salazar. Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books, August 2021. ISBN 978-0-8142-5801-9.
Con Papá/With Papá. iIllustrated by Nicky Rodriguez. Mad Creek Books, 2022. ISBN 978-0-8142-1521-0[54]
Pyroclast. Illustrated by Guillermo Villarreal. Chispa Comics, 2023.[55]
Through Fences. Illustrated by Oscar Garza. Mad Creek Books, 2024. ISBN 978-0-8142-5895-8[56]
The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez. Flowersong Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-963245-55-4[57]
Labyrinths Borne. Ad Astra Media, 2024. ISBN 979-8869173263[58]
As editor
Islas, Arturo (2003). Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. ISBN 9781611920642. OCLC 606994143.
Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas's Fictions. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe. July 2005. ISBN 978-1931010313. OCLC 55878022.
Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. November 2011. ISBN 978-0292737433. OCLC 773258062.
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. June 2010. ISBN 978-0-292-72888-2. OCLC 471787942.
Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. September 2011. ISBN 9780292747647. OCLC 829884734.
Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013-11-07. ISBN 9781137366450. OCLC 845085678.
Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2015-03-15. ISBN 978-1-4773-0240-8. OCLC 881720711.
Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: 21st Century Approaches to Teaching. London: Routledge. 2015-06-23. ISBN 9780415724210. OCLC 852219289.
González, Christopher; Aldama, Frederick Luis, eds. (2016-04-12). Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-1-4773-0915-5. OCLC 920966195.
The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. 2016-05-26. ISBN 9781138638945. OCLC 931226946.
Padilla, Ricardo; L'Hoeste, Héctor Fernández; González, Christopher (January 2016). Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview (1st ed.). San Diego, CA: Hyperbole Books. ISBN 978-1938537929. OCLC 973339575.
Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology. Latinographix. Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books. September 2018. ISBN 978-0-8142-5493-6. OCLC 9480057522.
Comics Studies Here and Now. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018-05-10. ISBN 9781138498976. OCLC 1022076511.
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 2018-06-04. ISBN 9781138894952. OCLC 1038269645.
The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. Oxford University Press. March 2019. ISBN 9780190917944. OCLC 9415464108.
Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. September 2019. ISBN 978-0816537907. OCLC 9622110943.
Jeff Smith: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. October 2019. ISBN 978-1496824806. OCLC 9621677892.
Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. June 2020. ISBN 978-1496828019. OCLC 9604784836.
Aldama, Frederick Luis; O'Dwyer, Tess; and Stavans, Ilan. Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi. (Latinx and Latin American Profiles) Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. October 2020. 9780822946182.[59]
United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel by Giannina Braschi and Joakim Lindengren. Introduction: Smith, Amanda M.; Sheeran, Amy. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. 2021.[60]
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA ON BREAKING DOWN WALLS THROUGH NARRATIVE AND ART
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By Christina Miranda
Frederick Luis Aldama is the author of Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. He is also a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University, and the founder and director of LASER—Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment and Research—which is dedicated to mentoring Latinx students grade 9 through college. Professor Aldama brings a new form to Latin literature. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Frederick Luis Aldama at the 5th Annual San Antonio Book Festival as part of the promotion of his newly-released short story collection, and he was gracious enough to speak with me during a phone interview and go into detail about his first short story collection, which follows the publication of 30 academic books.
I just read your book; it’s fantastic. It doesn’t really follow the traditional narrative of a short story collection. You’ve written close to 30 academic books, although this is actually your first work of fiction. What made you want to do a short story collection to begin with?
I conceived of Long Stories Cut Short before I set pen to paper as an organic whole. So, actually the last story of the collection is the first story I wrote because I had already thought of it in this cryptic form. There’s the beginning, the middle, and the end, and I wanted to mention that because in that sense, what you’re picking up there is distinguished from other short story collections. So you’re reading the stories, and you can read them out of order of course, but maybe ideally reading them in order, what you do is you start to accumulate in your working memory stories that came earlier and they start to bleed into one another as you move from the beginning stages of life (infancy), to middle stages of life, and finally to our ends. So there’s a relationship between some of the stories that you read at the beginning and the stories you read at the end because I conceived of it as a whole. That’s the quick answer to that kind of question.
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“LONG STORIES CUT SHORT WAS A VERY CAREFULLY PICKED TITLE AND IT’S SOMETHING THAT I HAD IN MIND EVEN BEFORE I STARTED THE COLLECTION, BECAUSE VERY OFTEN OUR STORIES, OUR EXPERIENCES, OUR PERSONHOODS AS LATINOS IN THIS COUNTRY AND HEMISPHERIC AMERICAS ARE CUT SHORT.”
As you’ve mentioned I’ve published a whole bunch of books that try to understand how different narratives, whether it’s TV or film or novels or short fiction narratives—even poetry—work. At a certain point, I thought “Gosh, I’ve been not only writing books about this, to try to see if I could enrich our understanding of this stuff, and also teaching this, but also maybe I actually can do this.” And so it wasn’t much of a big leap for me, because I’ve been studying formally how narratives are constructed, how we create stories that have different audiences and minds, different emotional effects that maybe I could try my hand on. And that’s what I did.
Being an academic writer, how was your writing process different from what you usually do for non-fiction?
When you’re writing fiction, anything goes. Speaking of the beginning section of Long Stories Cut Short, there are several narratives that are told from the point of view of infants. And as an adult discarding all of my adultness, and finding a language that would kind of convey that purity of existence but would also have an unlimited capacity of imagination in the child. There’s a moment when a child says, “I can paint the room with the paintbrush on my butt.” This kind of moment is where creativity in fiction allows us to go in ways that are completely unlimited.
Now with academic work, of course I’m still exercising my imagination and hypothetical capacity, and then I’m going to the page exercising in showing people what kind of work has been done there, so in the end I’m still bound by fact. And fact is the sense that you can go and watch the movie that I’m talking about or you can go and read the novel or the short story or the poem that I’m talking about. And you yourself can agree or disagree with what I’ve written. With the fiction, the ideas of immersion, exploration, and a full opening of the windows and doors are open for you the reader to go and explore and be in a space that’s of your own making or your own co-creation with the fiction, but there are no limitations on it. There’s never anything that says your co-creation of my story is wrong.
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The title of your collection is Long Stories Cut Short, and some of these stories are shorter than most short fictions—short shorts if you will—why cut these stories short to begin with
Great question. So the stories are implicitly and some very explicitly about varied experiences or persons that make up our Latino communities. Both the north side of the US border and the south: Latin America, Central America, and our movements within and across borders. Long Stories Cut Short was a very carefully picked title and it’s something that I had in mind even before I started the collection, because very often our stories, our experiences, our personhoods as Latinos in this country and hemispheric Americas are cut short, because here in the US, we see our communities living in areas where libraries have closed or they’ve never opened. Schools are stressed or over-stressed without resources to give new generations tools to go wherever they need to go not only with their imaginations, but also with their creativity whether it’s science or fiction-making or becoming a scholar like myself.
Long Stories Cut Short is really a comment on how we haven’t had access to the full range of possibilities for us to live the long stories. There’s a story [Learning to Teach] about learning to teach to read and write and then it ends with, “...and so they were killed.” That, of course, is something our Latino communities here in the US experience constantly, but the danger of actually learning and teaching these literacy skills that allow us to do all of these wonderful things, but also in our minds we travel across the border to Mexico and the disappearance of the 43 students from the very rural, poor part of Mexico who are going to college to learn to read and write and go back to their rural communities to teach their community the skills it takes to read and write and they were murdered, they were tortured, and they disappeared, these 43 students. A very small short shorty story like that can allow for that expansive movement across borders in our own mind.
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Reading Planning to Teach I found that this section itself, and most of these stories, are not bittersweet but are actually in reverse order. First they’re sweet and then they become bitter. You being a professor of English, do you feel that any of these stories affect you on a personal note, and if so, which parts would those be, and how do they affect your writing in this collection?
So, of course, we’re born into the world and this sort of limitless, expansive possibility. Children, infants, anything goes. But then as we grow older, especially within our communities, there’s an increasing restriction on access to the kinds of things that will continually allow us to grow. Our bodies become more and more surveillanced and policed as we become adults. We experience the world in much more constrained and limited ways, and there’s a story, Cell 113, that in many ways, even though it’s a story of a young Latino who calls it a “dumbass mistake,” he’s put in jail and there’s this moment of him fearing that this dumbass mistake will result in the loss of his daughter in the sense that he won’t be able to be with her. In a night in jail, he is traumatized by the fact that he could spend the rest of his life without the everyday contact with his daughter.
That can happen to our young Latino men and our members of the community; male, female, women, mothers, children, it can happen in ways that increasingly put us in the sense of our lives being so fragile. The carpet can be pulled from underneath us as we grow older because the system in place becomes a system of policing our bodies and our movements and our being. So it might’ve been that you jaywalked, or you got in your car to go to work and your tail light was out and suddenly within an instant if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time because you’re a brown body, because you’re a body that has been marked, you could be thrown in jail. And this can happen to any of us.
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“I WORKED WITH THESE TWO YOUNG CHILEAN CREATORS. I WANTED SOMEONE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER—DEEP SOUTH OF THE BORDER, FROM CHILE—TO DO THE VISUALS IN ORDER FOR US TO EXPAND ON THE SOURCE, SO THEY DON’T ACTUALLY ILLUSTRATE THE STORIES, THEIR VISUALS ALLOW US AS READERS TO HAVE AN EXPANSIVE, HEMISPHERIC IMAGINING OF WHAT’S GOING ON.”
You asked if this speaks personally to me, this all speaks personally to me in that even though I’m a professor, I have tenure, I’m a distinguished professor at Ohio State University. If I decide to go home a different way and something accidental happens, it’s not something that might lead to a fix-it-ticket, it could very potentially lead to incarceration. And I end the collection with a story about an abuela—all our grandmothers, or great-grandmothers, or mothers, fierce women who had to make all of these sacrifices for our new generation, for people like me and my daughter to have a little bit more space in order for us to realize our full potentiality. These fierce, strong women, if you look at some of the decisions they make they might seem weird—they might not seem like sacrifices—but then you understand within the context that they were actually making huge sacrifices for us.
Looking at the text itself, the collection doesn’t really follow a single formula, but instead flows fluidly from English to Spanish to illustrations. For some people, transitions between English and Spanish, they occur naturally, but it might be a little bit different for those who can’t speak Spanish or for those who can’t speak English. I feel like you wanted to have a flowing effect between the languages and the illustrations, but what effect did you want to emerge from people who might not understand either language?
In working closely with the publishers and their design team, I made it very clear that I did not want any walls between the languages. I did not want walls or any physical separations like a page break between the alphabetic text and the visuals. And part of it was that even if you were monolingual English or monolingual Spanish, I wanted it to be an expansive experience. I worked with these two young Chilean creators. I wanted someone from south of the border—deep south of the border, from Chile—to do the visuals in order for us to expand on the source, so they don’t actually illustrate the stories, their visuals allow us as readers to have an expansive, hemispheric imagining of what’s going on. Cell 113 is another example, in it you see a US Latino incarcerated in the alphabetic, but once you get to the visual, you’re actually firmly situated in Chile and the jails and the system of daily incarceration in Chile that has a deep long history of incarcerating innocent people just because they resisted or pushed against a government. So the story that’s alphabetic is suddenly this expansive possibility that’s taking us across the border into a deep history of Latin America.
And then you move into the Spanish, if you’re monolingual English my hope is that you’ll continue to read even the Spanish even if you don’t know it because the rhythms and the sounds will intensify and you’ll recognize some of the connections working with the English. Now, the same happens with the Spanish in reverse, and then of course if you’re bilingual you can move between the two in a way that I was talking about the visual expanding the story. The movement between the English and the Spanish becomes an expansion as well because the Spanish is not an exact replication of the English, so there are differences, and if you read them one after the other in this flow, you’ll actually experience a great expansion in where you can go with your imagination.
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Looking at the illustrations themselves, which are just beautiful, it kind of looks like a comic book illustration. What decisions went into including illustrations between the English and Spanish portions?
To go back to one of your first questions, one of my great passions has been to systematize and make visual the significance of Latinx comic books in both the US and the Americas in general. Part of this comes out of my own deep engagement and passion for that narrative model. So when I approached the Chileans, I knew that they were comic book creators and that they would be creating visuals to expand our imagination in ways that were more akin to comic books then, say, the kinds of illustrations you would see in a children’s book. This was important to me because it’s another model for showing us the importance of visual narrative through the kind of distillation and reconstruction through visual means. Our stories and our lives don’t necessarily need to be always reading in alphabetic narrative but we can also have the immersion, and the experience, and the sense of being reflected and represented through visual narrative. And even though each one of those is tied to my story they also stand on their own two feet. They allow for readers to see themselves through the sort of instances of those flash comic book visuals that are being represented in the text.
The cover, I should say, it was a real gift. A friend of mine, Jaime Hernandez, gifted me his time and his talent to do the cover, and we worked together on it to capture the sense of us and our stories and our people, not just the long stories cut short, but the heroism, the super-heroic way in the infant that can read before she can speak, the abuelo, the abuela, all of the members of our community that are, in spite of everything, our superheroes. They fly out of this backdrop of the Americas because our connection as Latinos in the US is always a connection in and across borders.
Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands is in bookstores now.
Three Questions for Frederick Luis Aldama Regarding His Debut Short Story Collection, “Long Stories Cut Short”
By Daniel A. OlivasMarch 2, 2017
Three Questions for Frederick Luis Aldama Regarding His Debut Short Story Collection, “Long Stories Cut Short”
BY ANY STANDARD, Frederick Luis Aldama is, well, crazy smart. The kind of smart that is backed up by degrees from prestigious universities, with a professorship at yet another prestigious university, and about 30 nonfiction books to his credit. And those are just the broad outlines of what is a remarkably productive career in academia. But if you ever meet him, Aldama simply comes off as an attentive, kind, funny, and humble guy.
Aldama, who was born in Mexico City, is the son of a Guatemalan/Irish American mother from Los Angeles and a Mexican father from Mexico City. His family eventually moved to California. Aldama earned his undergraduate degree in English (summa cum laude) from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, followed by a PhD from Stanford University in 1999.
Aldama eventually moved to the Midwest. There, he became a University Distinguished Scholar as well as Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University, where he teaches Latino/a and Latin American literature, television, comic books, and film in the departments of English, Spanish and Portuguese, and Film Studies.
And Aldama has — not surprisingly — been recognized for his work. For example, he was honored with the 2016 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education award, and he received the White House Bright Spot for Higher Education Award and the Ohio Education Summit Award for his Latino High School outreach program, LASER.
There’s more: Aldama is founder and co-director of The Humanities and Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute, and the author and co-author as well as editor and co-editor of about 30 books, including recently The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Pop Culture, and Latinx Comic Book Storytelling. He is editor of Latino and Latin American Profiles book series (University of Pittsburgh Press), and the trade book graphic novel and nonfiction series, Latinographix (Ohio State University Press). Aldama is the co-editor of various other book series, and is a member of the standing board for the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies.
So, he’s crazy smart, right?
Well, Aldama apparently felt the need to add short story writer to his CV. I knew Aldama had a little fiction in him because way back in 2005 when I sent out a call for submissions for an anthology I was editing, he submitted a bit of flash fiction that made it into the book. But after that, nothing but nonfiction seemed to flow from his keyboard.
I was wrong. Aldama had a book of flash fiction in him in the form of the collection Long Stories Cut Short just published by the University of Arizona Press.
This is a book unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Aldama offers bilingual, illustrated miniatures to capture borderland lives in horrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking brushstrokes. The stories ebb and flow between Spanish and English, among startling pen-and-ink drawings of his Latino/a protagonists. This is an urgent, potent, illuminated Bible for our times.
Aldama kindly agreed to answer a few questions for LARB about Long Stories Cut Short.
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DANIEL OLIVAS: You’ve written many books on Latina/o literature, television, film, and comics. This is your first collection of fiction. What inspired you to move in this direction?
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA: In many ways, this is a tack in a different direction in my writer’s journey. In other ways, it’s a natural extension. For me, both scholarship and fiction spring from our capacity to imagine and to conceive of hypotheticals. It’s just that by accepted convention, scholarship takes one form and fiction another; and, scholarship seeks to identify existing social and physical objects and relations, and fiction seeks to create new physical and social maps with new shapes and new possibilities. Put more simply, and a phrase I just used with my Introduction to Film studies course, I climb the mountain because it exists … I do art because it doesn’t exist.
I’ve been teaching and writing about fiction in its many guises for so long that I thought, well, maybe I could parlay this know-how into its actual creation. While I’ve written formally on Latino poetry, videogames, TV, and literature, I’ve been especially drawn to comic books, flash fiction (or microcuentos), and film. With comic books and film, I’ve been especially interested in how Latino/a creators use visual, alphabetic, and auditory devices to give shape to our stories. For instance, in my books on filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, I explore how he uses sound and image to at once entertain and convey serious sociopolitical messages. In my books on Latino/a comic books, I consider how our creators geometrize our past, present, and future stories. In my work on flash fiction, I explore how the concision of its form — the careful selecting in and out words, images, and syntax — guides our gap filling mechanisms in ways that make new perception, thought, and feeling about the world we live in.
Long Stories Cut Short grows from my knowledge of how all three of these powerful storytelling media work to distill and reconstruct the building blocks of reality. While it includes comic book visuals and a sense of the filmic, in the end readers recognize it as fiction where the dominant is the alphabetic — the written — in the flash fiction format.
It also takes the shape of something readers today see all the time, but have become habituated to: super short narratives in the form of tweets. Of course, an average tweet aims to convey information without much if any aesthetic shaping in mind. Perhaps, however, a reader of Long Stories Cut Short like one of my undergrads might see that the same length or less can create a powerful narrative. Think of [Augusto] Tito Monterroso’s famous one-line flash fiction, “The Dinosaur,” which reads, “When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there” (“Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí”).
Or, one of mine, “Destroy, They Said,” that reads: “Schools, hospitals, parks, roads, power transmission lines, water pipes, dwellings, humans of all ages and genders … all obliterated in the name of an ancient god.” And, my one-line story, “Planning to Teach,” unfolds as follows: “Learning to read and write in order to teach to read and write … so they were killed.” The story is sparse, allowing the reader to have this flash image of a world where students (Latino or otherwise) who work hard to acquire skills of survival and to teach these skills are murdered. It works metaphorically and literally, especially if the reader fills in the gaps with the tragic fuller story of those 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, Mexico, who were murdered by the cartels working as an appendage to the corrupt state apparatus. Perhaps my undergrad so used to sending and reading tweets might see how the concision of form and the careful selection of words, images, and syntax can create something new and lasting — something that ask us to think more deeply about the world we live in.
I conceived of the book as an organic whole where all the parts work individually and interlock collectively to create in the reader’s mind a sort of supragestalt experience. So, as one moves through the collection, these and other of one-line narrative fictions begin to resonate and add complexity to the longer (750 words max) fictions that appear in the “Beginnings,” “Middles,” and “Ends” sections. By conceiving it as an organic whole, the aim was for readers to stitch together each of the flash-fictional gestalts as one would an assembly of shots in a film.
I wanted the readers to have a multimedia experience that crisscrossed genre and national borders. To this end, I worked closely with two young brilliant Chilean comic book creators, Rodrigo and Fernando of Mapache Studios. Through Skype and Facebook Messenger, we worked collaboratively to be sure that the artwork didn’t illustrate the stories, but rather worked to expand the imagination of the reader. With only slight guidance from me, Rodrigo and Fernando distilled and reconstructed my flash fictions from their perspective: Latinos living with a past and present shaped by its own social, cultural, political forces. With my story “Cell 113” about a US Latino thrown in jail for no reason, they draw the interior of a Chilean jail, transporting the reader to Chile’s history of torture, murder, and disappearance of innocents.
Finally, along with my knowledge of how different fictional forms use different shaping devices to convey meaning and trigger emotion, there’s life experience. I’m reminded every day that as a Latino in the United States, our lives have not been allowed the long story. For many in our Latino/a communities, access to K–12 and higher education, libraries, and proper living wages have been denied. Many in our communities haven’t been able to realize their full potentials as human beings — as homo faber. Our stories have been cut short.
Unlike virtually all other short story collections, yours is both bilingual and illustrated. Can you talk a little bit about the development of your manuscript vis-à-vis its use of English and Spanish and the integration of the artwork?
Thank you, Daniel, for picking up on this feature of the book: the organic flow not just between alphabetic and iconographic narratives to create a multisensorial experience, but also between languages: English, Spanish.
Working closely with the extraordinary design team at University of Arizona Press, I wanted to be sure that book you have in your hands would move seamlessly between English and Spanish. Rather than create artificial page breaks when one language ends and another begins, they run seamlessly into one another with just the title as an indicator of a break. There would be no walls dividing the two languages. In other words, I wanted the layout and design to reflect the way our communities exist in and across linguistic and national borders.
I wanted the experience of Long Stories Cut Short to mirror the multilingual, multinational, mulitextured experience of our Latino/a communities. And, I wanted the design to dispel any sense that English was somehow the “original” and Spanish the “duplicate.”
Lastly, as the bilingual reader will discover, the microcuentos in Spanish expand the same story in English and vice versa. That is, they share character and plot DNA, but as rewrites of one another that aim to expand the imaginative experience of the story as one passes between the two languages.
Put simply, from the moment I first imagined the book to its writing and final design, I had front and center the creating of Long Stories Cut Short as a multimedial, multilingual, mutinational experience.
You have so many wonderful and different characters in your stories. How did you work on developing so many voices?
Years ago, when I conceived of Long Stories Cut Short, I knew that it would focus on distilling and recreating the triptych of the life journey for Latinos: from birth to middle and old age and death. In my mind, I had each story already shot, cut, and assembled even before I put pen to paper. I’d already seen flashes of stories with characters from all walks of life — including many who we might find abhorrent. For instance, in the “Beginnings” section, readers step into the mind of a Latina infant who deciphers the world by reading before being able to shape thoughts through spoken words. In the “Middles” section, readers will encounter a young Latino family struggling to make ends meet during the mortgage crises. And, in the “Ends” section, they will find themselves six feet under the ground in the mind of a Latino construction worker shot dead for no reason, musing on about the racist actions that led to his death but feeling hopeful that it wasn’t for no reason: “I can feel the pulsing and pounding beats of the people stomping above. I can hear the shouts for justicia. For me? Maybe I did count, for something.”
With the book already shot, cut, and assembled in my mind, I began writing the book from back to front, beginning with the story that ends the book: “A Long Story Cut Short/Una larga historia amputada” — that follows the thoughts of a fierce abuelita as she takes her last breath: “I don’t apologize. That’s what’s so nice about dying. You don’t have to apologize to anyone anymore. Not to anybody. Above all, not to yourself.”
The flash fiction form allowed me to create a quick, urgent immersion into the lives of a panoply of Latino/a characters whose lives often end in a gut punch to the reader. We have a rich tradition of sentimental and nostalgic characters in Latino/a letters. Our voices had been silenced for so long, our authors wanted to give shape to dreams lost, obstacles overcome, and new lives made. With few exceptions, we shied away from airing our dirty laundry. We’re living in a different creative moment today. Long Stories Cut Short aims to create an experience that fleshes out the lives Latino/as are grasping at understanding: living with impossible decisions, suffocating from actions taken — and all intermixed with a forceful vitally and strength of vitality.
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Daniel Olivas is a regular contributor to LARB.
QUOTED: "My hope: To give our little ones and their co-readers (guardians, siblings, extended familia, librarians) a different, more capacious origin story, with a kind and joyous serpent god delivering a beautiful brown baby to doorsteps of all sorts of guardians, single papás included; to create an origin story anchored in our deep Mesoamerican mythologies that’s inclusive of all of the ways that we miraculously arrive in the world (in vitro, surrogacy, and adoption, for instance) and are cared for and grown."
"It’s a picture book that I hope will capture the imaginations of our little ones. It’s also an opportunity for all of us who’ve been purposefully sidelined and ignored to see ourselves and to celebrate our living, breathing, ever-changing, and reverberant mythologies."
Four Questions for Frederick Luis Aldama Regarding His Bilingual Children’s Book, “Con Papá / With Papá”
By Daniel A. OlivasAugust 29, 2022
Four Questions for Frederick Luis Aldama Regarding His Bilingual Children’s Book, “Con Papá / With Papá”
Con Papá / With Papá by Frederick Luis Aldama
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA (a.k.a. Professor LatinX) is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin, where he is the founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab. Aldama is also one of the hardest-working people in literature today. He is an award-winning author of some 50 books, including the bilingual children’s book The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (Mad Creek Books, 2020) and the scholarly study Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (University of Arizona Press, 2017). Aldama is the co-creator of the animation short Carlitos Chupacabra, currently on a world tour that includes a stop at the CineFestival San Antonio 2022. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Despite an always full schedule, Aldama kindly agreed to spend a little time with LARB to discuss his newest children’s book (illustrated by Nicky Rodriguez), Con Papá / With Papá, which is a heartfelt, playful, and culturally rich celebration of fatherhood through a Latinx lens.
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DANIEL A. OLIVAS: Con Papá / With Papá begins with a mythology of birth that is very Mexican: rather than the stork delivering the baby, the serpent god Quetzalcóatl plays that role. This was new to me. Did you invent this new take on where babies come from, or is this something you heard as a child?
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA: My Guatemalan abuelita drove a Hulk-green Chevy Nova and had more stories under her kerchiefed head wrap than Marvel. When I was a chavalito, she filled my head with modern-day retellings of the adventures of the one-legged lightning god Huracan — and the plumed serpent creator god Gucumatz. I didn’t know it at the time (and yes, I blame our Euro–navel-gazing K–12 system), but the plumed serpent god had spread its wings far and wide across Mesoamerican mythologies and religious traditions, known as Kukulkan for the Yucatec Mayans and Quetzalcóatl for the Aztecs. And no wonder. Quetzalcóatl’s got some badass superpowers: creator of arts, sciences — and humanity.
Taking my cue from my abuelita’s spinning of yesteryear’s superheroic yarns, I decided, in the writing of Con Papá / With Papá, that the benevolent Quetzalcóatl would be first-page, front-and-center to our little protagonist’s origin. After all, isn’t it time we give the heave-ho to that all-pervasive image of a pristine-white, big-beak stork dropping a pink-cheeked, wispy-blond baby at doorsteps to be greeted by Leave It to Beaver milk-white mom/dad dyads?
My hope: To give our little ones and their co-readers (guardians, siblings, extended familia, librarians) a different, more capacious origin story, with a kind and joyous serpent god delivering a beautiful brown baby to doorsteps of all sorts of guardians, single papás included; to create an origin story anchored in our deep Mesoamerican mythologies that’s inclusive of all of the ways that we miraculously arrive in the world (in vitro, surrogacy, and adoption, for instance) and are cared for and grown.
It’s a picture book that I hope will capture the imaginations of our little ones. It’s also an opportunity for all of us who’ve been purposefully sidelined and ignored to see ourselves and to celebrate our living, breathing, ever-changing, and reverberant mythologies.
So, yeah, no storks included here, Daniel.
There is such love and joy as the child narrates what they do with Papá, from first steps to running, from learning languages and songs to dancing and bicycle riding — all as a grand adventure of discovery. How did you decide what to include in this wonderful recitation of things to do with Papá?
Oh, my goodness, yes, there is an abundance of milestone moments one can choose from in recreating a child’s discovery of the world — and themselves as active doers in and shapers of this world.
For me, it was a matter of focusing in on those miraculous-seeming, joy-filled moments when children experience their bodies, senses, and minds in new ways; those incredible moments when a child not only learns to walk but also to experience gravity differently by dancing or swimming; that moment when they use languages not only to communicate needs but also to give outward expression and shape to their imaginations: “With Papá, I whisper into shape other worlds in other tongues.”
But it’s not just about selecting moments. It’s also about how we as authors choose to give shape to these milestones in ways that convey this spectacularly splendorous phase of our early development — all while keeping front and center our main audience: little ones viewing and reading along with their papás, mamás, madrinas, abuelitos, librarians, and so many more.
I decided to write Con Papá / With Papá in Spanish and English, giving me the opportunity to use the poetics — sounds, rhythms, patterns, imagery — of both tongues to shape the child’s odyssey:
Con Papá, mis oídos aprenden a escuchar las flores floreciendo.
Escucho el crecimiento rápido y lento de la vida.
With Papá, my ears learn to hear the flowers blooming.
I hear life grow, swift and slow.
Keep in mind, too, that children are poets. Not just in the sense of being creator-makers, but also in the way they naturally metaphorize across the senses. It’s perfectly normal for a child to talk about tasting the colors of the rainbow or hearing a flower bloom. Just as there are no limits to their imagination, there are no borders between senses and sensations. For my little protagonist, their “lips paint skies the color green and mountains the color blue,” and when the “sky cracks open and cries,” their “skin tickles” and mouth opens to “taste the sky.”
Children are our greatest poets — in all senses of the word. Unfortunately, as children grow into teens and then adults, society’s mind-forg’d manacles tend to discipline and even obliterate this creativity.
Perhaps my little protagonist might offer a model for the growing of new generations who step into the world as autonomous creatures and as poets: “Without Papá, I set off on my own adventures. I unzip the sky and begin.”
Often, door and window metaphors are used to talk about kid’s literature and how it opens spaces into the imagination. The mirror metaphor is also used. How do you see these at play in Con Papá / With Papá?
I think these are excellent, concrete ways to think of how kid’s lit works. The mirror metaphor allows us to understand how important it is for all kids to see themselves represented in these stories. Unfortunately, this is far from the case. In my book Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling (2018), I discuss in a more scholarly way how gatekeeping practices (mainstream agents, publishers, editors, book reviewers, acquisition librarians) continue to keep at bay stories by and about Latinx identities and experiences. But it doesn’t take my book to showcase this. Walk into any public library and you’ll be lucky to find a token one or two Latinx kid’s books at best. Sure, we know that kids are not absorptive sponges, that they are powerful re-creatives who, even if they don’t see themselves in a Giving Tree or a Goldilocks or a Knuffle Bunny or a Little Red Riding Hood, still use the windows and doors to travel somewhere new. But that doesn’t mean that the publishing industry gets a pass.
And because of much banging on publisher doors and boots-on-the-ground protests (I think readily of the #DignidadLiteraria movement), we are starting to see more kid’s books by and about Latinx identities, experiences, histories, and cultures. Run out and get your libraries to order books by Francisco Alarcón, Margarita Engle, Gloria Anzaldúa, Pat Mora, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lucha Corpi, Jorge Argueta, Monica Brown, Meg Medina, Yuyi Morales, Matt de la Peña, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Duncan Tonatiuh, David Bowles, and, well, you, Daniel.
While you’re at it, get your library to order kid’s books that create windows, doors, and mirrors for queer Latinx readers — books like Juan Vega’s Carlos, The Fairy Boy / Carlos, El Niño Hada (2020), Ernesto Martínez’s When We Love Someone We Sing to Them (2021), and Isabel Millán’s Chabelita’s Heart / El Corazón de Chabelita (2022). The more options for children to see themselves, to be invited to step through doors to resplendently imagined worlds, the more flexible and open to others and new experiences, as well as creative and imaginative, they will be as teens and then adults.
Nicky Rodriguez’s illustrations are vibrant and whimsical. Can you talk a bit about your collaborative process?
I love working — no, co-creating — with artists. It’s also why I chose to publish this book and The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie with Mad Creek Books, an imprint of Ohio State University Press. Unlike the big kid’s-book publishers, who typically assign an artist to the project (unless you’re a superstar), smaller presses tend to allow more freedom and flexibility. I was familiar with Nicky’s style. The line work and color palette in her illustration and comics work convey strength of character, stitching us deeply to the ups and downs of her Latina characters. I knew too that she could use her deft drawing skills to bring to visual life my unnamed and ungendered narrator and protagonist in ways that would appeal to children.
The process was straightforward. I shared my vision for the characters, emphasizing the need for the protagonist to be ungendered and for the abuelito to be visibly Afro-Latinx to convey the complexity of Latinx interracial histories and heritages. In an email, I shared reference images of my kid, Corina, as a toddler. Nicky then went to work. As her drawings passed back and forth between me and editors at the press, I revised my prose slightly — just as she did her drawings — to avoid redundancies as the words began to meet the visuals more and more.
Nicky’s extraordinary art reminds us that, just as the words should dance off the page and into the child’s imagination, so too should the visuals invite pre-ABC readers to joyfully swirl and twirl from one image to the next as they make the story.
In the end, I hope the results speak for themselves. Nicky’s careful line work, careful choice of perspective, and Latinx-identifiable color palette breathe life into the characters. Nicky brings a visual rhythm to the story that invites us to pause and linger over the action, then move along to the next moment in the story — always in a calm yet exciting (and never overworked) way. I hope others will experience what I do: to love deeply the unnamed protagonist and their journey of discovery with their papá.
¤
Daniel A. Olivas is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books whose most recent book is How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2022). Twitter: @olivasdan.
COMICS
Published October 15, 2021
Frederick Luis Aldama on Latinx Heroes
We spoke to the scholar and author about the history of Latinx comics, heroic inspirations, and ‘Marvel’s Voices: Comunidades.’
BY ROBYN BELT
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Frederick Luis Aldama is a media scholar, an editor, and an award-winning author of over 48 books—but the title he’s most proud of? “Professor LatinX.”
Frederick Luis Aldama lecturing.
A fan of comic books since childhood, Aldama discovered that his “transformative” love of Super Heroes would become his life’s work, exploring themes of super-powered and real-life heroes in Latinx culture at large. Today, Aldama is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as Adjunct Professor & Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University—he is also the Latino Book Award and Eisner Award-winning writer of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, a deep dive into the media spaces of Latinx heroes and the creators who tell their stories.
Marvel.com spoke with Aldama about his earliest days of fandom to the current landscape of Latinx heroes, and where we go from here.
You study super heroics for a living! Was there a single watershed moment for you that sparked your love of comics, or a particular character or storyline?
ALDAMA: Gosh, I have to say that Professor X and the coterie of gifted muties like Iceman, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm had me transfixed. As a Latinx kid from both sides of the US/Mexico border (born in Mexico City to a proverbial chilango papá and Guatemalan-Irish mama from East LA), I felt a little less out of place when I stepped into the X-Mansion—a safe space of exploratory learning that I yearned for.
With the exception of Ororo Munroe, it was mostly these white mutants and Super Heroes that were transformative for me. Remember, this was the mid-1970s so we really didn’t see Latinx Super Heroes on the spinner racks at the corner store.
For me, Marvel comics were more than escapist fantasy. They helped me turn the trauma of being marked as monstrous by Anglophone and Anglophile elementary school teachers into healing and empowerment. Little did I know then that I’d become a teacher and scholar—and that those in the BIPOC comics community would christen me: Professor LatinX. So cool!
Speaking as a historian, who do you cite as the first Latinx hero? For Marvel Comics, Hector Ayala's White Tiger gets the credit as our first Latino hero.
This is a topic I was just tossing around with my friends and fellow creators, Peter Murrieta [author, comics creator, and TV producer] and Alex Rivera [filmmaker]. The first Latinx Super Hero: Joaquin Murrieta—actually, Peter’s great relative. Not only was he a historically factual Super Hero (think Nat Turner) whose superhuman, epic-dimensioned feats became swiftly transformed into corrido lore, he was the inspiration for Zorro. [Writer] Johnston McCulley distilled and recreated (appropriated?) Murrieta’s super-heroic traits, leading to his quick popularization in early film, comics, and radio.
I do want to put a quick spotlight on White Tiger too, and for a couple of reasons. There was something extraordinary about Bill Mantlo and George Pérez’s Super Hero. He’s not criollo (white) Latinx and of the manor-born like Zorro. White Tiger’s working class. He’s street and book-smart. He’s Brown and Proud, firmly rooted and empowered as an Afro-Latinx Nuyorican.
What are you most excited to see from the next generation of Latinx creators and characters?
Today I’m especially enthralled by the relative abundance and complexity of our Latinx Super Heroes who reflect the hugely diverse makeup of our communities that grow from indigenous American and African ancestry, plus bountiful, beautiful spectrums of gender and sexuality. Think: the Santerians, Humberto Lopez as Reptil, Robbie Reyes as Ghost Rider, Sam Alexander as Nova, Miles Morales as Spider-Man, America Chavez, Ava Ayala as White Tiger, Anya Corazon as Araña... and so many more!
Preview of “Latinx and Proud” by Julio Anta, Enid Balám, Oren Junior and Federico Blee from MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES.
Preview of “Latinx and Proud” by Julio Anta, Enid Balám, Oren Junior and Federico Blee from MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES.
As the editor of Latinographix, can you share a bit of backstory on how the publication came to be?
I cooked up Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes graphic fiction and nonfiction by and about Latinxs, a decade or so ago—certainly long before today’s Marvel’s Voices initiative and the promise of more balance on the big screen.
The long of the short of it: when I was researching, interviewing, and writing what became my first book, Your Brain on Latino Comics, I realized that there was an abundance of Latinx creators making comics, but they were not being seen. That is, when they knocked on the big portal doors of mainstream and indie publishers, they were more often than not, turned away.
I wanted to clear a pathway for publication and recognition. From Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer followed by Tales from la Vida to today’s United States of Banana, the Latinographix series has put in the hands of readers so many incredible journeys of our everyday Super Heroes.
In your book Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics you cover Latinx storytellers and "storyworlds" across a range of media. What are some notable examples of representation in the past decade?
I’ll be honest—when it comes to big-tent Super Hero films, Latinx’s are still way underrepresented. But it’s not a desert, either. If we peel back some of the purple or green makeup, we see Latinx actors playing pretty significant characters. Think: Oscar Isaac or Zoe Saldana. But there are other Latinxs who we don’t have to peel back an alien-face to find. There’s Molly in Marvel’s Runaways, Claire Temple in Marvel's Daredevil, and Yo-Yo Rodriguez and Robbie Reyes in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And, of course, Black and Brown audiences across the country all jumped for joy—and together—when we got our Afro-Latinx Spider-Man with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
MARVEL'S VOICES: COMUNIDADES is right around the corner! What does Latinx and Hispanic community mean to you and how is it reflected in these stories?
I’ve been pretzel-twisted with excitement waiting for ‘Comunidades’ to drop. The issue embodies all that springs to mind when I think community: family, friends, vecinos, bodegueros, librarians, teachers—all those who work together to create safe spaces to empower and celebrate. Sometimes community is the small things we do. Sometimes it’s the bigger rituals: Día de los Muertos, quinceañeras, Folklorico fests. MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES brings this collective spirit and joy—and always with eyes wide open to see how and where we can make a change today for a better tomorrow.
Preview of “Just as Strange as You” by Terry Blas, Julius Ohta, and Erick Arciniega from MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES #1.
Preview of “Just as Strange as You” by Terry Blas, Julius Ohta, and Erick Arciniega from MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES #1.
Read Frederick Luis Aldama’s opening essay in the pages of MAREL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES, on sale in print and digital November 10, and read more super-powered stories from creators like Terry Blas, Germán Peralta, Enid Balám, Alitha E. Martinez, Paco Medina, Claribel A. Ortega, and more!
Get an exclusive first look at MARVEL’S VOICES: COMUNIDADES here.
“IT’S AN IDEAL MOMENT”: AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK ALDAMA
Alex Dueben | September 24, 2018 | 0 comments
Frederick Aldama is an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University where he is the founder and director of LASER, the Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment Research, and the founder and co-director of Humanities and Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute at The Ohio State University. Since receiving his doctorate from Stanford, he’s written or edited more than thirty books.
Some of those books have been about comics and Aldama won an Eisner Award this year for his book Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. He’s been writing about the medium for more than a decade in between writing books like Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas, Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry, The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez, and the recent Long Stories Cut Short, Aldama’s first book of fiction. He was a founding member of The Comics Studies Society and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal INKS. Aldama is the cofounder of SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comics Expo and last year he launched Latinographix, a publishing imprint from Ohio State University Press.
This fall the imprint is publishing two books, Eric J. Garcia’s Drawing on Anger , a collection of political cartoons, and the anthology Tales From La Vida, which collects short work from more than eighty Latinx creators. I spoke with Aldama about his book, comics in academia, and how Tales From La Vida fits into the space he’s trying to create and nurture with Latinographix. - Alex Dueben
First of all, congratulations on just winning the Eisner for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. This isn’t your first academic book on comics, though.
Right. I published Your Brain on Latino Comics back in 2009. After that I co-edited Graphic Borders: Latino Comics Books Past Present and Future with Christopher González followed by my book Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview (2016). But the research started years before any of these books. I knew even when I wrote Your Brain on Latino Comics, which includes a section about going back into the archives of Latinx representation in mainstream comics, that there was a bigger story there. It would be several years until I had the time to go back and dig into the DC and Marvel archives. It took me a good two years of digging and rereading and researching to put together what became Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.
Reading the book you kept citing so many things, you clearly spent a lot of time reading and rereading and researching this.
[laughs] Absolutely. Gosh, I don’t know how much money I ended up spending on ebay, building the collection that let me create this story of Latinxs in mainstream comics to tell the story that hadn’t been told.
But even before Your Brain on Latino Comics, you were thinking about a book like this that would examine Latinx representation in comics over time.
Exactly. What can I say? It started when I first started reading comic books and realized that one, Latinx folks weren’t very prevalent, and as I grew older, scratching my head when we were represented: bandidos, buffoons, exotic, and disposable. Of course, there were moments when certain characters did appear that were really exciting. Like White Tiger. I loved this character—and I know it generated a lot of enthusiasm among many other readers. So, yes, we can trace back to my childhood the genealogy of my “research” on comics by and about Latinxs.
You do a good job of tracing all these stories over the years. I’m not sure I ever read Hulk #265 where Firebird and Red Wolf save the day and two white heroes show up and get all the credit, but that’s just so perfect.
[laughs] Right? There was a time in the eighties when more superheroes of color began to appear. However, we seemed to function like janitors doing all the hard work and cleaning up messes, only to have white superheroes like Texas Twister claim the credit and the day.
I was glad to see you spent time in the book writing about Milestone’s Blood Syndicate. Ivan Velez, Jr. who wrote the series does not get enough credit for what he did there.
I agree. There’s so much sophisticated comic book storytelling here that needs to be talked about. Someone like Ivan Velez, Jr. was brought in to help co-create the series, wring these amazing intersectional (race, gender, sexuality, class) characters with complex backstories. He brought to the characters all the different ways that we can be Latinx: straight and queer as well as Afrolatinx and ancestrally connected to pre-conquest indigenous Caribbean, and more. That was super significant and important because of course we’re not one homogenous group. We share similar ancestry in terms of our long deep time, but the history of Puerto Rican Latinxs in this country are very different from Mexican ancestried Latinxs. All of the complex ways that we are Latinx in this country needed to be fleshed out, told, shown, and talked about.
He and his Milestone co-creators like ChrisCross also swept to the side the all-pervasive white savior narrative that permeated mainstream comics – and pop culture generally. They celebrated Latinxs in all our messy, textured complexity – and as the superheroes of the world. Latinx and creators of color generally today continue this necessary corrective narrative work; society continues to be numb to the all pervasive white savior myth. Do we really need to see Matt Damon save the world, again? We need to forcefully shine a light back on this and other denigrative narratives to precisely uncover how race and ethnicity continue to be constructed in simplistic and negative ways.
You also mention a more recent example I’d forgotten about, Aztek, and I remember back in the nineties thinking that it was odd because it’s a white character with a Meso-American mythology and backstory.
In mainstream comics, there’s been a strong primitivism and white character in Brownface; where whiteness slums it in a primitive depiction of Latinx for greater victory. We see this even today in animation where you have white voice actors playing Latinx characters. It gets into that whole politics of representation.
It’s important to call all of this appropriation and misrepresentation out, of course. However, it’s also important to put front and center the significance how a story is given shape – and in comics, I call this the geometrizing of the narrative. We get excited and we want to go back again and again to a White Tiger superhero not only because of the complex representation of Latinx identity, but also just as importantly because George Pérez’s dynamic artwork creates this kinesis of action and consciousness. Yes, a willfulness in the representation matters and so too does the visual shaping or geometrizing of the story.
You spend a lot of time in the book writing about the character Echo for that reason, because she was well thought out and well written but also artistically distinctive and significant.
Absolutely. With Joe Quesada and David Mack here’s a coming together of a Latinx and Anglo creator to make something that actually works because they give a darn. They do their homework. They create a complex mestiza superhero and they dynically geometrize the story. They do all the things we expect of really excellent comic book storytelling.
And as you point out, so many characters are often in supporting roles, but they’re often hypersexualized, quick to anger, and portrayed as primitive.
I love it that when Orson Scott Card rebirths Stark as the Latinx superhero, Antoñio Stark [in Ultimate Iron Man], he recreates the entire epidermal surface as his brain. That does all sorts of really cool things with stereotypes of Latinxs as only laboring bodies – braceros working the fields – and no brain. Here we see a creator take a stereotype and turn it inside out, saying, no, we’re all brain and it’s the entire surface of the body.
You’re a tenured professor and you have a lot of scholarly credentials; what has it been like watching comics studies be embraced by academia over the course of your career?
In 2000, I was hired by the University of Colorado, Boulder, as my first job. I knew for a fact that the books that were going to get me where I needed to go – associate and then full professor – would have to be pretty recognizable by senior scholars. That is, they would have to be on literature for the most part. So that’s what I did. I wrote those books. But I knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to write books on comics. That’s something that I’d always wanted to do, even as a graduate student. Once I was a full professor, I started writing these books. There are many other of my colleagues – usually senior scholars – across the country who are building comics studies into the robust discipline it is today.
As a result of all this work, we’re starting to see our PhD students and more junior colleagues writing dissertations as well as publishing articles and books on comics. While it’s a very different scene than the early 2000s, I still advise my PhD students to write a chapter on straight alphabetic literature to present when they give their job talk. Why? There will still people in the room who don’t think comics are worthy of study – and they will be voting on whether or not to give my student the job.
We’re in a transition moment. On the one hand, in our scholarship we have arrived. I just published an edited volume that I titled, Comics Studies Here and Now, to celebrate this arrival in terms of scholarship. At the same time that we’ve “arrived” there’s still some old guard scholars out there gatekeeping this scholarship. There’s a lot of anxiety among colleagues about our arrival, so our younger colleagues and students still need to tread carefully.
There are older scholars like Donald Ault, who’s a William Blake expert, and I can’t help but think that his interest in Carl Barks was treated more like an odd hobby than serious scholarship by some people.
Donald is much more senior of a scholar than me but like me, it would seem, he, published more recognizably traditional scholarship first – for him this was on William Blake. Later, he publishes on Donald Duck and creates one of the preeminent journals in the comics studies field, ImageTexT. If you notice, those books on Carl Barks don’t come out until the 2000‘s. He started publishing those as an already senior scholar who was established.
Today you have students who want to study comics or who want to pursue interdisciplinary study that includes comics?
Absolutely, and if I run a course on film and comics, I’m going to have a long wait list. I’m not saying that we need to modify our subjects and our teachings to demand, but we can do as much with comics in terms of deepening an understanding of how shaping of story can and does complicate our understanding of the world. All that I like to do when I teach literature in terms of opening minds to new ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling about the world, I can do with comics – and the demand is there.
Humanities departments are being pushed to make decisions that are based on the survival of the arts and humanities as a whole. That’s exactly what our new generation of interdisciplinary scholars (literature, comics, film, TV, video games) are doing. They’re saving the arts and humanities.
I know that you’re a professor across a few departments. Comics studies and comics scholars often tend to be part of literature departments. Is it important that comics studies become its own thing?
It needs to be its own thing, of course. Bottom line. It’s not literature. It’s not art. It’s both – and more. It’s Joseph Conrad as much as it is German expressionist art. It’s all of these things in this great planetary cross-pollination that constantly creates new ways to vitally shape narrative fiction and nonfiction. Ideally, we would have comics studies as a properly designated discipline or field as we do with, say, literature. Of course, it would be defined as an interdisciplinary space of learning: art, art history, psychology, communication, media, film, literature, languages, philosophy, for instance.
Given how funding and resources are allocated in universities across the country, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any time soon the mushrooming of comics studies minors, majors, or even departments. For now, what we see in place like OSU with dense concentrations of comics studies scholars from literature, communications, visual design and art departments is the creating of Popular Culture studies writ large. This is more capacious, including faculty who study film, TV, children’s literature, and of course comics. This is an important institutional move. While we don’t have a department or a major per se, we have an infrastructure in place that allows students to find us. In the end, that’s really what it’s really about – students being able to find faculty to work with to study what they want to study.
You recently co-founded and edit the Latinographix fiction and nonfiction book series, which launched last year. For people who don’t know, what is the imprint?
In 2015 I launched the Latinographix trade-press series with Ohio State University Press. I describe the books in the series as using text and visual narrative that explore and push at boundaries of Latinx identity, hybridity, experimentation, and creativity. This series has swiftly become a hit with the press – and readers across the country. Following in the footsteps of Alberto Ledesma’s best-selling and award-winning Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), I published the New York Times lauded Angelitos (2018) by Ilan Stavans and Santiago Cohen.
Creating a space with a lot of possibilities is at the heart of what you’re trying to do with the Latinographix imprint.
Absolutely! The book Latinx Superheroes, the documentary based on it that I just made, Your Brain on Latino Comics, all of the things that I’m doing in my writing and scholarship are clearing these spaces. However, with Latinographix I wanted to open that space specifically for Latinx creators.
One of the difficulties for creators today – especially creators that have been historically underrepresented – is getting people to pay attention in a serious way to what they’re doing with the storytelling part of comic book making. All these creators out there are having difficulty getting their work into the hands of readers beyond those that they’ve found through social media and comics expos. I pitched Latinographix to OSU Press because, even though it’s a trade press series, I wanted the cultural capital and scholarly weight of an academic publisher behind it. I want these books adapted and taught in university classrooms. I want them to be taken seriously as objects of scholarly study just as you would a book coming out of an academic press generally. Getting them into the hands of college students and into university libraries will ensure their longevity on the shelf and in getting them into the hands of future generations of scholars.
There are all these incredible Latinx creators everywhere. They’re creating stories in all different genres and modes– autobiographical, superheroic, romance, memoir, everything and anything. Even things we don’t even recognize. They’re out there doing this great work, but it’s so hard for people to find them and their innovative visual-verbal narratives. I want students and layreaders all over the world to be reading and studying these works.
As part of this, the imprint has two books coming out this fall. One is Tales From La Vida. Why did you decide to assemble an anthology?
I asked each of the contributors if they could think about a hinge moment in their lives – either as a Latinx person and/or as a creator of comics – and if they could recreate that moment in a 2-to-4 page comic. Everybody was really excited They stepped up and before you know it, I had over eighty contributors in one single volume.
When Tales From La Vida comes out this September people all over the country will be able to buy it or borrow it from libraries. They will encounter all of the resplendent pivotal moments in the lives of these Latinx comics creators. They will see how each creator uniquely shapes their journeys. From here, the readers will seek out more of these creators’ works. That’s what it’s all about.
As you said there’s over eighty creators and there’s a lot of great work. You have big names and you have a lot of people I never heard of.
Great. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.
So the plan for the anthology was from the start was to tell short, real life stories?
Through that visual-verbal narrative vignette, I wanted to introduce people like you to the style, the stamp, the form, the shape that each of these different creators gives to their work. So, it’s not just you finding out, wow, that happened to Ricardo Dominguez, but you going, wow, there’s something dazzling about his shaping of the story and I want to go read more of his stuff.
The other really important thing to keep in mind is that it shouts from the rooftops that it’s not just a boys-only club. We have Latinas and LGBTQ creators that are vitally creating and shaping stories. it shouts roofs that this is where the vitality of the creative arts is happening for Latinxs today.
The other fall book coming out from the imprint is Eric Garcia’s collection of political comics, Drawing on Anger. I’ve read his comics in the past but it really is a different experience reading them in a collection like this.
I love seeing them all in one place for a number of reasons. One, it gives us a fuller sense of the complexity of how politics shape our daily lives over big stretches of time. And, it’s beautifully crafted in its line work and nuanced detail. You get all of that by bringing these pieces together into one volume.
Reading a good collection of political cartoons, like this one, you come to understand not just what the cartoonist believes and not just how they work, but how they think.
Absolutely. It’s an ideal moment for us as readers who engage with this kind of work to get a fuller sense of what we might call the career artist. We do this when we return artists and authors that we love—and this already at an early age. As a teenager I was drawn more to Marvel comics than DC, sci-fi novels more than romances, Orozco more than Manet. With Eric’s Drawing on Anger you’re getting that chance to deeply invest in a Latinx artist and his worldview as shaped by his narrative artistry.
Besides the anthology, Drawing on Anger is the third book in the imprint, and they’re all very different from each other. For you, what are the connections between them?
You can’t get away from the social and political now. Each book does it differently and each one gives shape and art to different kinds of questions, but you can’t walk away from any of these and think they somehow exist out of time and out of place. They are very much made by creators in tune with the world at different moments and in very specific locations. That is unavoidable and maybe even inevitable with Latinx creators.
The books are all very engaged with the world. I hesitate to describe books as “political”. What’s the old Howard Zinn line, you can’t be neutral on a moving line?
Exactly. That’s another thing that I love about Tales From La Vida. Some of the Latinx creators give overt shape to the political while others choose to simply have this whisper in the background. I think it’s important for our readers to have a sense of the great variety of experiences and worldviews that inform Latinx comics storytelling.
I’ve read Tales From La Vida twice and the two things that stand out are that few of them have the same style and that while there’s overlap, they all come from very different lives and experiences.
Absolutely. The more we can put that out there for people the better. It can radically change the paradigm – the way the mainstream recreates Latinxs as a border crossing threatening hoard. The more people who see us for the great variety and richness that we are and that we add to the country, the better.
Especially coming now where there is this idea among a lot of white people that Latinx people are this monolithic group with a singular identity and culture, which is nonsense.
Even within our families there’s a lot of variation and variety. It couldn’t come at a better moment, to be honest. If storytelling has a potential capacity to change the way people think and act – as I believe it does – then what better time than this for the publication of Tales From La Vida, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, Angelitos, and Drawing on Anger. We need these more than ever right now.
I’m sure you have the next few years planned out in some detail, but do you want to say more broadly what do you want to do with the imprint and the space you want to create.
I’d like to bring in more women and LGBTQ creators. I’m working on actively to bring these voices and experiences into the Latinographix pipeline. Part of publishing Tales From La Vida was to identify new generations of Latinas and LGBTQ creators. To open this door. With any luck, you’ll be seeing books by these Latinx creators over the next couple of years.
WRITTEN BY
Alex Dueben
POSTED
September 24, 2018
TOPICS
Frederick Aldama
QUOTED: "visually effective and necessarily disturbing and difficult as it sheds light on inhumanity."
Aldama, Frederick Luis THROUGH FENCES Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press (Teen None) $17.95 1, 19 ISBN: 9780814258958
Latinx youths experience the violence and trauma of politics, dehumanization, self-hatred, racism, and illness in stories set along the southern U.S. border.
This multiethnic collection featuring people from Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and another unnamed country is enhanced by the effective use of colors combined with stark black-and-white imagery. The artwork includes some full-page panels with benday dots that appear at the end of stories, depicting a significant moment, as well as black gutters, and pages without panels that have black backgrounds. The palette creates a sense of foreboding as families head toward border separation, detention, and other tragedies. In the story of Alicia Xóchitl Arai, a Japanese Mexican teen social media influencer who moved to San Ysidro, California, six years earlier, the color scheme fittingly makes use of Instagram's tropical sunset colors. "El Celso" follows a queer boy whose story ends in tragedy, "Alberto" spotlights a Mexico-born Border Patrol agent who projects his internalized hatred onto others, while "Rocky" shares the perspective of a "white dude who hates the world." English and Spanish are interwoven in most of the entries. Despite the social significance of the stories' perspectives and their context within the many manifestations of border struggles, their brevity stifles their own potential for greater emotional resonance and impact on readers.
Visually effective and necessarily disturbing and difficult as it sheds light on inhumanity. (Graphic fiction. 13-18)
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"Aldama, Frederick Luis: THROUGH FENCES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A768633733/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ae52ca25. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Latinx TV in the twenty-first century, ed. by Frederick Luis Aldama. Arizona, 2022. 408p bibl index ISBN 9780816545018 pbk, $35.00; ISBN 9780816545261 ebook, $35.00
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The unremarkable title of this essay collection stands in contrast to its engaging contents, which feature an impressive, relevant, and accessible array of essays analyzing and critiquing the changing presence of Latinx people in a broad range of televisual texts, including streaming TV, social media, and online video platforms. Taken together, the studies in this collection focus on the world of the serial narrative, both behind and in front of the camera. Structuring the book's approach is the representational tension between TV content produced by what Aldama (humanities, Univ. of Texas, Austin) calls white oculi (the Television Industrial Complex) and brown oculi (Latinx TVLandia). The volume's most interesting moments come from critics who struggle with shows that they see as neither fully denigrating nor completely unproblematic in their representations of Latinidad. Also impressive is the sheer range of genres and the number of shows the book's contributors collectively cover. This variety and volume paradoxically undergird the collection's project of interrogating the ways that Latinx people have been decidedly invisible (or merely selectively visible) in US mass culture. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.--V. A. Elmwood, Loyola University New Orleans
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association CHOICE
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Elmwood, V.A. "Latinx TV in the twenty-first century." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 60, no. 4, Dec. 2022, p. 375. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A728182520/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=37440e30. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV. By Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 192 pp. Index. S22.95 (paper); $22.95 (e-book).
Critiquing stereotypical depictions of Latinxs in American media has been a foundational practice of Latinx media studies, as well as in animating Latinx political consciousness more generally. In Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez take up this project to cover Latinx media representation from the birth of cinema through shifts to television and digital media up to the 2010s, or, as they characterize the text, a "roadmap through the history of our misrepresentation" (p. x). While they argue that "reel" Latinidad (the mainstream yet deficient depiction of Latinx identity on screen) "nearly fiatlines a simplistic and racist reconstruction of Latinx subjectivity and experience" (p. x), they also collect examples of "real" Latinidad (depictions of Latinx identity they see as more accurate). By juxtaposing the "reel" with the "real." they can not only critique, but also provide examples of preferable depictions, allowing them to emerge with a sense of optimism for the future of Latinx media representation should it follow this path.
Positioned as an entry-level primer on the history of Latinx representation in US film and television. Reel Latinxs is structured around loose, thematic chapters (gender, children, comedy, the speculative), but operates more fundamentally as a kind of encyclopedia, with each chapter comprised of short sub-sections on a range of media objects. For instance, within the comedy chapter, the section on Latinx buffoons covers Chccch and Chong, Three Amigos! (1986), Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite (2004), and Nucha Libre (2006), tracing this character trope across different eras as it was invoked for different creative purposes. While these short segmentations don't allow for incredibly in-depth analysis of any particular film, the authors are able to draw value through linking these divergent media objects along conceptual lines, which allows them to cover much more, if at limes cursory, ground.
Indeed, the sheer number of films, characters, actors, and filmmakers compiled within this text make it a valuable scholarly reference source for those venturing into Latinx media topics. As the authors note, the prospect of defining Latinidad- both in fiction and in reality--is a challenge, since, as a multiracial ethnicity, they have no singular appearance, and in media tend to "swing on an ethnoracial pendulum between exaggerated presence ... to absence" (p. 30). Thus, the authors take a generous approach in defining the scope of Latinidad, including not only the works of Latinx filmmakers and actors whose specific nationalities and family histories have valuably been researched and noted throughout but also Latinx characters played by non-Latinx actors. Additionally. Aldama and Gonzalez provide compelling reads of coded, allegorical Latinidad signified by plot--dance, farm work, street racing- rather than the character or actor's identity alone. The resulting collection, erring on the side of inclusion, thus seems assuredly comprehensive in terms of potential Latinx media representation, making it a useful database for a variety of scholarly work.
In support of the heavily segmented, legible structure. Reel Latinxs is written in a conversational tone, in which the authors freely incorporate their own histories, personalities, and opinions into the text. The authors do an excellent job of condensing theoretical concepts into plain language, including Viet Nguyen's "narrative plcntitudc" and Isabel Molina-Guzman's "color blind/color conscious TV." Overall, though, outside citations are kept to an "omnipresent whisper" (p. xi). mostly collected as "Further Reading" within each chapter's notes. Including more of a history of Latinx media studies -in the same accessible language--would have been appreciated, but the decision to keep the discussion focused on the media objects themselves is also understandable. These stylistic choices allow Aldama and Gonzalez to produce a text that contains a valuable collection of research for scholars but in a package that is less dry academic text, more manifesto--making it more accessible to students, or even those outside academia. Fittingly, the book concludes with a call to action framed under the rallying cry, "We want our Wakanda!" (p. 159). Taking the lead from black media activism in this regard, the authors demonstrate a desire for the ground-shifting reaction that can occur when an audience sees themselves and knows others are seeing them in mainstream popular culture, for perhaps the first time, in a non-denigrative way.
Emily Rauber Rodriguez
University of Southern California
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
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Rodriguez, Emily Rauber. "Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 41, no. 2, Wntr 2022, pp. 107+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691920455/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5360aea6. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi
Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama & Tess O'Dwyer
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press.
2020. 168 pages.
PUERTO RICO-BORN and New Yorkbased Giannina Braschi is a strange writer. A poet and a novelist, over the last four decades she has published three books--the first, El imperio de los sueños, in Spanish; the second, Yo-Yo Boing!, in Spanglish; and the third, United States of Banana, in English. Together, these form a trilogy of sorts, a nonstop literary romp, which moves from experimental prose-poem, to novel, to theatrical dialogue. They are all shot through with a consistent philosophical and political exploration of the limits and ethics of language, the relationship between freedom and the imagination, and the Puerto Rican colonial situation. If it sounds excessive, it is. Braschi's contemporary reader--educated after the postmodern heyday--is often at odds to explain what is happening, how it is allowed to happen, and why--despite all this--it works so well.
Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi is a collection of academic essays that attempts to answer these questions using the tools available to contemporary literary scholars: contextualization, comparison, exegesis, critique, and theorization. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Braschi's translator, Tess O'Dwyer, the book's main thrust is to reintroduce Braschi to a wider academic public and reframe her, through the critical lens of the day, as "one of today's foremost experimental Latinx authors." For Aldama and the book's contributors, Braschi participates in a long, albeit less visible, branch of Latinx writing that has been and continues to be driven by aesthetic and literary experimentation rather than explicit realist representation--like Isabel Rios, Cecile Pineda, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Salvador Plascencia. This tradition has largely been sidelined in scholarly inquiries into both the Latinx experience and aesthetic and literary experimentation.
Braschi's oeuvre, as Madelena González writes in the first essay of the volume, populated as it is by migrants and questions of language, colonialism, and politics, would seem at first sight to cry out to be analyzed from within the existing critical parameters of "postcolonial studies" and the study of "world literature." Beyond mere obliviousness, then, why has its impact remained limited to certain literary and scholarly niches, alien to those who seek texts that tackle these problematics? For González the answer is simple. Take a book such as Braschi's United States of Banana. Immediately upon reading, you will notice how it "obstinately refuses to conform to the protocols laid out for it." Braschi uses "formalist concerns and the potency of style" to question and lay waste to "accepted values and interpretative strategies" at every level of the work, making most straightforward analysis troublesome. Anne Ashbaugh, another of the contributors to the volume, holds that Braschi's writings participate in a constant motion that "prevents analysis" and makes it "impracticable to resort to traditional hermeneutical strategies." In other words, both scholars insist that the challenge found between the covers of Braschis books is that these insistently work toward interrupting our literary expectations and critical habits at every twist in the road, making the reader uncomfortable and blowing her out of the water over and over again.
The best way to engage with Braschi, for Ashbaugh--and this applies to the tradition of experimental Latinx writing mentioned above--is, instead, to go along for the ride and think with her; to create a conversation between the work and the many other thinkers that pop up among her pages and explore and examine what might result. In her essay, for example, Ashbaugh stages a philosophical dialogue between Braschi and Nietzsche's Zarathustra, a figure that is also fictionalized in United States of Banana. The comparison allows Ashbaugh to clarify the relationship between freedom and art in the text, and she concludes that whereas Nietzsche "frees the Will that has been colonized by religious paradigms," Braschi "frees Latinx creativity that has been colonized by empires." Both Nietzsche and Braschi, she writes, "share this concern for strengthening the human will, and they resort to creative experiences in order to instill selfworth in an otherwise ineffectual will."
Like Ashbaugh's, the best contributions to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers are those that engage in a similar manner with Braschi's work, not by strictly analyzing its constitutive elements but by going along with it. Another such trip that deserves mention is Ronald Mendoza de Jesús's, where a recurrent line in Braschi's United States of Banana is put into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida that is, surprisingly, a pleasure to read. By unraveling Braschi's refrain and engaging with her slippery and playful deployments of ideas of freedom, and then doing the same with Derrida's last works, Mendoza de Jesús sheds light on what is and has always been at stake in Braschi's (and Derrida's) oeuvre: a resistance to the politics of power, to any force that preaches the ethics of servitude and obedience. For Braschi, as Madelena González points out, that resistance is embodied in the author's commitment to art and poetry as practices of an insurgent, critical imagination.
Appropriately, Poets, Philosophers, Lovers closes with a conversation between Giannina Braschi and a scholar, Rolando Pérez. At one moment of their sprawling and meandering conversation, Braschi recounts an anecdote that captures something that I believe is essential in her work. Braschi is eighteen and living in Madrid. There, she meets an older poet whom she admires. The older poet applauds Braschi's own work, sighs, and tells her that "to be a poet when you're eighteen, twenty, that's easy, but to be a poet when you're fifty, that's something else." Something about those words echoes with Braschi, now an "older poet" herself, and she tells her interviewer: "How can you continue to believe in poetry, after all the blows that life has dealt you? How does one still believe in feelings and innocence?" She might not have had an answer to the question when she was eighteen, but today, we can say that over the last four decades, her work has offered a solid rebuttal and shown a path to continue believing in poetry's force, not despite the battery of life and history but because of it.
Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón
Oberlin College
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Gutiérrez Negrón, Sergio. "Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi." World Literature Today, vol. 95, no. 3, summer 2021, pp. 115+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666943020/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f61a35bd. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the screen, by Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio. Ohio State, 2019. 186p bibl index ISBN 9780814255599 cloth, $34.95; ISBN 9780814277447 ebook, $19.95
58-0641
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The "talking" to which the title refers is the deeply felt, wide-ranging, well-informed conversation between Aldama (director, Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research [LASER], Ohio State Univ.) and Nericcio (director, Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences [MALAS], San Diego State Univ.)--a conversation that serves as the book's format. Both men have written extensively on Latinx issues. Aldama and Nericcio divide this volume into five sections. They begin with their theory of "brown televisual imaginary," then move on to discuss "pinche paradoxes." In subsequent sections the authors discuss how children and teens perceive the presence or absence of brown people in the saturated world of US media. Though television--and all it delivers--is the core of of their discussion, they do not neglect electronic media. Leaving few stones unturned, the authors cover art, music, history, politics, sociology, sexuality, and ethnology. The volume is strategically illustrated, with images from many media forms and some graphic works by Nericcio. The authors' back and forth is scholarly, though they occasionally resort to slang. Including an introduction, coda, notes, a 272-item bibliography, and a 12-page index, this will be a good supplementary resource for those studying diversity in the media (both traditional and social). Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; graduate students.--D. A. Schmitt, emerita, St. Louis Community College at Meramec
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association CHOICE
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Schmitt, D.A. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the screen." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 58, no. 3, Nov. 2020, p. 240. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639876354/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a340b2ce. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "The adventure Charlie and Lupe embark on is a timely and courageous one as it addresses the migration crisis on the border."
Escobar, Chris THE ADVENTURES OF CHUPACABRA CHARLIE Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press (Children's None) $9.95 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-8142-5586-5
A chupacabra and its human friend look for adventures on the borderland.
Charlie is a 10-year-old chupacabra, a monster from “made-up human stories.” Except Charlie is real. Charlie and family live on the border close to “the land they call Estados Unidos,” but Charlie has never seen over The Wall. One night, thirsty for adventures, Charlie sneaks out and searches for a friend. Soon, Charlie meets Lupe, a human girl who joins the search for adventures. As they reach The Wall and try to scale it, the duo realizes they’ll need help to cross over. After The Wall helps them—it turns out it is sentient—they are tasked with a mission: rescuing the niños who are lost on the other side and held captive by Big People in Green. The adventure Charlie and Lupe embark on is a timely and courageous one as it addresses the migration crisis on the border and the imprisonment of children. Gaunt-looking humans fill the pages, with contrasting kind-looking and nonthreatening (but still monstrous) chupacabras that flip the idea of what is a threat. However, the illustrations at times seem to defeat the purpose, as they are filled with Mexican stereotypes of congested city streets and thick-mustachioed men, like El Señor Big Bigote. Spanish words in the text are italicized and easily understood through context clues and immediate translation.
Timely yet skippable. (note, glossary) (Picture book. 4-9)
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"Escobar, Chris: THE ADVENTURES OF CHUPACABRA CHARLIE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A620268127/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9de43cd1. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
The Routledge companion to gender, sex and Latin American culture, ed. by Frederick Luis Aldama. Routledge, 2018. 436p bibl index ISBN 9781138894952 cloth, $220.00; ISBN 9781315179728 ebook, $53, 95
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Latin America has a rich popular heritage due to a variety of cultures, peoples, and traditions. This volume explores the diversity and complexity of recent popular cultural expressions associated with gender, sex, and ethnicity. The collection includes 36 essays on various topics, including general culture, film, art, photography, sports, dance, and theater. Most of the authors are connected to US academic institutions; notably, they come largely from literature and language backgrounds. The majority of the essays do not cover traditional literary topics, illustrating the recent scholarly shift away from traditional research toward all aspects of Latin American studies by literature and language faculty. Throughout, essays examine the intersectional identities of gender and sexuality and their relationship to aspects of Latin American popular culture. Many of the authors are beginning or mid-career in the field, though there are a few prominent scholars, including David William Foster, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, and Ilan Stavans. Though ethnicity references are found in several essays, only three focus specifically on Indigenous and Afro-Latin influences. This collection provides a window into the state of research occurring in the US on Latin American popular culture. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above.--M. L. Grover, emeritus, Brigham Young University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association CHOICE
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Grover, M.L. "The Routledge companion to gender, sex and Latin American culture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 56, no. 7, Mar. 2019, p. 941. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A578046818/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d22a9bc. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology. Mad Creek: Ohio State Univ. (Latinographix: Latinx Comics). Sept. 2018. 184p. ed. by Frederick Luis Aldama. ISBN 9780814254936. pap. $17.95. COMICS
This collection of more than 80 short stories, compiled by Aldama (Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands; Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics), from a range of Latinx creators (e.g., Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Roberta Gregory, Kat Fajardo) all center on the larger themes of Latinx identity. They include an array of autobiographical pieces, the commonalities among them nicely showcased in various styles, some cartoony, some realistic, and some rough and raw. Despite the broad artistic differences, many similar themes emerge around religion, spirituality, family and tradition, LGBTQ issues, and living in a marginalized community. Several accounts detail mixed-race Latinx struggling to find identity within and outside their own communities, while others depict how the absence of diverse role models in media led the author/artist to tell their own stories as inspiration to future generations.
VERDICT There's something for everyone to respond to in this anthology. Recommended for adults and mature teens seeking voices that explore culture and diversity, as well as fans of eclectic visual narratives. [Previewed in Jody Osicki's "Graphically Speaking," LJ 6/15/18.]--Lucy Roehrig, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
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Roehrig, Lucy. "Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology." Xpress Reviews, 24 Aug. 2018, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A552263048/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ea7983b. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
ALDAMA, Frederick Luis. Latino/a Children's and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling. 248p. bibliog. index. Univ. of Pittsburgh. Mar. 2018. pap. $27.95. ISBN 9780822964971.
Aldama interviews an eclectic group of contemporary Latinx children's book authors and illustrators (as well as Ashley Hope Perez, who is white but whose spouse, Arnulfo, is Latinx), who discuss genres, writing for youth, and the role their identities and background played in their decisions to become writers and artists. Subjects stress the need for more Latinx creators, publishers, and editors; the significance of small presses; and the power of children's book awards in making Latinx writers and artists more visible. The interviewees range from self-taught artists to those with formal training, but all are driven to challenge whiteness in publishing and provide a voice for the marginalized. Readers will be inspired to revisit these creators' work. A preface, introduction, and afterword offer context on Latinx literature. VERDICT An important resource for youth, school, and academic librarians; educators; and library science students.--Sujei Lugo, Boston Public Library
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Lugo, Sujei. "ALDAMA, Frederick Luis. Latino/a Children's and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling." School Library Journal, vol. 64, no. 10, Oct. 2018, p. 95. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A556838522/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ecdd5b19. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. By Frederick Luis Aldama. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. xxi +208 pp. Color illustrations, appendix, works cited, and index. $22.95 (paper).
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics is Frederick Luis Aldama's latest journey into the analysis of Latinxs and comic books. The present volume constitutes a thoroughly researched genealogy, catalog, and analysis of constructions of Latinxness originating in superhero comic books. Aldama's present work, however, expands the scope of his study beyond comic book publications to what he terms "comic book story worlds," which include contemporary animation, TV shows, and films based on comic book characters. This acknowledgment and problematization of the multi-platform presence of Latinxs in contemporary popular culture heightens the relevance of this work not only for comics studies and Latinx studies, but also for scholars working on minority representations in media and film.
This profusely illustrated volume traces a genealogy and offers a typology of Latinx comic book characters mostly in mainstream superhero fantasies (such as those published by DC and Marvel Comics), although Aldama also discusses lesser-known alternative press titles. The book analyzes Latinx characters created both by Latinx and non-Latinx creators, and in this regard, it is an important companion to his previous books on Latinx comics and their creators (such as 2009's Your Brain on Latino Comics and 2016's Latinx Comic Book Storytelling). Aldama's thorough research stands out as one of the book's most important contributions. While the birth of Latinx superheroes tends to be located in the 1970s, with Marvel Comics' White Tiger, Latinx Superheroes digs into the long history of American comic books in order to find the ancestors of today's Latinx superheroes. Going back to 1940's "The Whip," a Zorro knock-off, Aldama painstakingly reconstructs a genealogy of the Latinx superheroes, supervillains, and supporting characters that have populated superhero storyworlds in comics, cartoons, TV, and film in the last seven decades.
The book analyzes these characters from the perspective of "geometrization" or "will to style," and documents how they evolve from flat, stereotypical characters to increasingly complex ones--although progress, alas, is not a straight arrow. The book provides a formal analysis of shaping devices used to construct Latinx characters, such as visual (coloring, physical features) and linguistic elements (tensions between Spanish and English). Especially meaningful is Aldama's critique of Latinx portrayals in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. As in other media, Latinx comic book characters are often reduced to oversexualized, irrational bodies that come to represent the exotic other. Racially, Aldama worryingly identifies a significant historical tendency to favor European-featured Latinxs and an avoidance of Afrolatinx characters, especially when it comes to the complexities of Blatinx identity in the United States (with the noteworthy exception of Miles Morales, the mixed-heritage Ultimate Spider-Man). Aldama's analysis also discusses the characters' location in regards to the border between the United States and Latin America, as well as their relationship to culture of origin, family, and tradition.
The array of Latinx representations discussed oscillates between the grossly stereotyped and the nuanced. Throughout the book, though, Aldama discusses the active participation of Latinx readers and creators when engaging with and contesting these representations. In parallel to his analysis of Latinx characters, Aldama also sketches out a history of the tensions between inclusion and exclusion that characterize portrayal of minorities in American comic books, and Aldama's analysis crosses over to the discussion of African American and LGBT characters as similarly affected by such tensions. Although Aldama identifies a historical tendency toward stereotyping, his analysis also demonstrates a growing concern among creators toward representing the Latinx experience in its complexity as a means to build more believable storyworlds. Symptomatically, Aldama provides ample examples of this tendency in comics, yet he observes its absence when it comes to more widely consumed media, such as film and TV. The epilogue ends in a keenly aware, bittersweet note. While taking stock of multiple efforts to represent the diverse Latinx experience in comic book storyworlds in both mainstream and alternative comics, Aldama also acknowledges there is work to be done: "[l]n the mainstream, corporate-driven creation of superhero comics, animation, TV, and film we are either willfully erased or barely present" (p. 172).
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics is a vital contribution to a variety of fields: comics studies, Latinx studies, ethnic studies, and media and film studies. It is also a valuable resource for scholars interested in representations of ethnic groups in mainstream popular culture, who will get introduced to a thoroughly researched catalog of characters and the wider context in which to understand them. Latinx Superheroes is certainly an important work by the indefatigable Luis Frederick Aldama, but it also has the potential to be an invitation to other scholars, perhaps reluctant to engage with the world of Mainstream comic books, to enter this rich, complex, and problematic universe of minority representations.
Luis Saenz de Viguera Erkiaga
Merrimack College
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
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de Viguera Erkiaga, Luis Saenz. "Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 38, no. 1, fall 2018, pp. 78+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561522130/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8b2bf1f. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 304 pp. Works cited and index. $90 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
As the inaugural volume in the groundbreaking series on World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction from the University of Texas Press, Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future proudly proclaims to the greater academic community that "comic books and graphic nonfiction by and about Latinos constitute a swiftly growing area of production and study" (p. 1). For co-editors Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez, Graphic Borders is a long-overdue critical volume because it earnestly embraces the vital multicultural facet of comics and demonstrates that "Latinos are producing visual-verbal narratives as diverse in form and content as reflected in the massively burgeoning production of Latino culture today" (p. 1). To illustrate the impressive field of Latino fiction and non-fiction graphic narratives, the editors have amassed thirteen thought-provoking essays and one amazing interview all from eminent and rising scholars. Put simply, Graphic Borders proffers a wide array of socio-historical, aesthetic, and theoretical approaches to "remind us how resplendent and richly various today's comics are by and about Latinos" (p. 17).
At the onset, Graphic Borders immediately grounds itself within a Latino visual-verbal argot by opening with "Taking Back Control of Our Story Space," a fitting foreword by Frank Espinosa, cartoonist of Rocketo. In this introduction, the thrice Eisner-nominated Espinosa sets a magical, beguiling tone by emphasizing the distinctive quality and inimitable voice of Latino comics storytelling that has taken roots within "the borderland space of El Super Barrio" (p. x). Espinosa's enthusiastic appraisal of the volume's scope--from Latino superheroes and nonfictional memoirs, to immigration and Los Bros Hernandez--is especially contagious for contemporary readers of global multiculturalism because he asserts without hesitation that Graphic Borders shares "the bounteous symbols of our great Latino visual literature." In fact, much like his fictional world-famous traveler and mapmaker Rocketo, Espinosa frames the volume's objective as an exploration into Latino comics, a voyage of discovery for mainstream readers and one of re-discovery for comics aficionados. For Espinosa, Graphic Borders promises to imprint "brave Latino artists," locales, characters, and themes of El Super Barrio upon its readers in order that Latino comics are forever mapped on the terrain of comics studies and "not forgotten" (p. x). This heartfelt mandate is further implemented in the brilliant introduction "Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future--A Primer" wherein Aldama and Gonzalez highlight five major areas of study--Science Fiction, Erotica and Other Noirish Shades, Satires and Superheroes, Stories of the Self, Historical and Mythological Narratives--to demonstrate how "Latino comic book authors create stories that run the gamut of all genres" (p. 1). From emphasizing the "different formulations on how to approach Latino comics" to pointing out that there are "material constraints and issues involved in the production and consumption of comics by and about Latinos," the editors illustrate in particular that "comic books are a particularly good medium to overturn denigrating stereotypes" (p. 14).
The all-encompassing introduction frames the ensuing scholarly contributions, which are organized into five sections centered on the multifaceted nexus of Latinidad: Alternativas; Cuerpo Comics; Tortilla Strips; A Bird a Plane... Straight and Queer Super-Lats; and Multiverses, Admixtures, and More. Within these sections, the contributors focus on a variety of Latino comics including Love & Rockets, 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Sonambulo, Baldo, Migra Mouse, and Latino U.S.A.: A Cartoon History as well as Latino superheroes like Mile Morales (Afro-Latino Spider-Man), Anya Sofia Corazon (Mexican and Puerto Rican Spider-Girl), and Gregorio de la Vega (Guardians of the Universe's Extrano). All of the contributors address how these comics, by and about Latinos, draw primarily from the rich and varied tradition of pulp storytelling. In turn, each essay facilitates a critical discussion of the sophisticated and oft-vexed relationship of Latino cartoonists and comics stories to mainstream and popular cultural trends. In particular, Gonzalez's own contribution, "Three Decades with Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez: An Odyssey by Interview," is the volume's centerpiece; it offers an invaluable insight into how Los Bros Hernandez's trailblazing storytelling intersected with pop- and sub-culture genres as it also ushered in a new standard for comics' engagement with Latino culture. All in all, the contributions in Graphic Borders "remind... [readers] that comics by and about Latinos are made and consumed in time (history) and space (geographic region)" (p. 17). Moreover, these wonderful essays will no doubt serve as important teaching tools for the university classroom and cartoonists alike.
In sum, in today's world where discussions about immigration and diversity are fraught and passionate, Graphic Borders acknowledges the prominence of comics by and about Latinos as well as the scholars who introduce them to the global multicultural stage. With Graphic Borders, Aldama and Gonzalez have gathered in one volume a cross-disciplinary contribution that heralds in a new era where Latinidad and Latino comics are a force to be reckoned with, admired and studied with rigor and enthusiasm alongside mainstream comics.
Nhora Lucia Serrano
Hamilton College
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Source Citation
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Serrano, Nhora Lucia. "Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 37, no. 1, fall 2017, pp. 101+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A517768161/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=240b5f84. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Review of Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: Uof Arizona P, 2017.
Keywords
Latino, Latina, superheroes, comics, animation, film, television, history
Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2017. 232 pp.
In an age of never-ending superhero comic books, movies, and television shows, it is apparent that superheroes have come to dominate popular media. We frequently see strong, muscled-up heroes in chiseled body suits and buxom heroines in skin-tight spandex--overused images, but figures that still prevail in Hollywood blockbusters. But what is even more notable is that these "super" bodies are overwhelmingly white, straight, and cisgendered. While people of color and queer individuals are starting to occupy roles in mainstream superhero media, their presence is still marginal at best. The need for Latinx superheroes is even more dire, as Latinx communities struggle to see realistic representations or positive portrayals of themselves in popular culture. At a time when the United States has an estimated total of 51 million Latinos, this lack of diversity in superhero culture is difficult to understand. This is where Frederick Luis Aldama's work steps in to save the day. His new book, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, aims to uncover and promote those Latinx superheroes who have been slowly but steadily changing the faces--and bodies--of the comic book industry.
In this extensive archival text, Aldama builds off his previous work in Your Brain on Latino Comics by considering Latinx superheroes in comic book storyworlds (including print, filmic, and televisual means). Aldama chooses to study these mediums because of their accessibility to a variety of audiences. By analyzing historical and contemporary Latinx superheroes, Aldama is interested in how shaping devices (like panels in comics, camera placement in films, and voice-acting in animation) can distill and reconstruct Latinidad in complex ways. Sometimes these representations are created in manners that revise our perceptions about Latinos, while at other times such portrayals fail by falling into racist stereotypes rooted in hyper-sexuality or hyper-violence. Even worse, there are texts that simply erase Latinidad, such as Christopher Nolan's re-imagining of Bane's character in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Ultimately, Aldama's work illuminates how comics' creators (artists, writers, animators, and filmmakers) have constructed specific images of Latinos in popular media. As audience members respond to these representations of Latinx communities, they work with the comic's creators to create a unique viewing experience.
Aldama begins his text with a foreword from John Jennings, a UC Riverside professor specializing in media studies, and ends his book with an afterword by Javier Hernandez, the independent comic. Through their unique contributions, the book becomes an effective interdisciplinary exercise as academia and artistic activism merge. The Preface outlines the purpose of the text (to provide an analytical archive of Latinx superheroes) and offers a detailed Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 42, Iss. 1 [2017], Art. 21 acknowledgments list that demonstrates how careful scholarly work is achieved through a network of passionate gente 'people.' The Prologue, "Kicking Some Culo!" (Kicking Some 'Ass') not only provides important historical context for how Latinos are seen in media, but also delineates the contents of Latinx Superheroes. The book opens with chapter 1, "Excavating a Latino Superhero Print-Comic Archive," in which Aldama begins his impressive archive of Latinx superheroes from the 1940s to the twenty-first century. His research is enlightening--even validating--when one considers the significance of Latinidad in a space such as the mainstream comics industry, where Latinos have been historically marginalized.
Chapter 2 focuses on providing a theoretical understanding of comics, while chapter 3 continues an archive of Latinx superheroes. Chapter 2, "Toward a Theory of Latino Comic Book," discusses how creators and audiences co-create the comics experience. Here, Aldama considers how visual shaping devices give form to the final comic's product in order to elicit certain cognitive emotions from readers. In chapter 3, "Multimediated Latino Superheroes," Aldama analyzes contemporary filmic culture--primarily animation, television, and cinema--to understand how contemporary, modern Latinx superheroes are configured. While animation and television provide room for creative expression and feature more positive representations for Latinos in mainstream media, Hollywood blockbusters still struggle to overcome the pitfalls of damaging stereotypes. Nevertheless, Aldama's epilogue, "Up, Up ... and Away!" ends on an optimistic note, as he reflects on recent sociopolitical changes and how the entertainment industry will continue to change and grow with each generation of Latinx-ers.
By providing a rare and extensive archive of Latinx superheroes, Aldama delivers groundbreaking work to Comics Studies. His text pulls together a collection of diverse voices from critical theory, film studies, queer studies, and Latinx literature. He engages with distinguished theorists like Liam Burke and Karin Kukkonen, scholarly critics such as Jared Gardner and Adilifu Nama, and pop culture aficiandos like Washington Post writer David Betancourt. The inclusion of John Jennings's Foreword and Javier Hernandez's Afterword allows academics and artists to be in dialogue with one another, which is not always an easy or feasible task. With these decisions, Aldama gives shape to a text that celebrates a wealth of perspectives through both scholarly and public discourses.
What is most profound about Aldama's Latinx Superheroes is that it unflinchingly guides readers to evaluate the hard truth about Latinx populations and how they are marginalized within mainstream media, even as Latinos are becoming a majority group in the U.S. While his text is thought-provoking and provocative, it is also a genuine pleasure to read. His language is intellectual but not inaccessible; his use of "I" and "we" reinforces his personal investment in this project. At the same time, his casual tone fosters an instant connection with the reader. Ultimately, Aldama's distinct voice propels the book forward as generations of young Latinx individuals, like myself, eagerly learn about old and new images of Latinx superheroes. By providing visibility to the invisible Latinx figures in comic books and comics-related media, Aldama ultimately becomes the very superhero about which he so energetically researches and writes.
Danielle Alexis Orozco
The Ohio State University, orozco.37@osu.edu
https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1980
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kansas State University, Department of Modern Languages
http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/
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Orozco, Danielle A. "Frederick Luis Aldama. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, winter 2017, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512775884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2fd889b0. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. Gonzalez, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.
Keywords
Latino/a Studies, cultural studies, race, ethnicity, gender
Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. Gonzalez, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016. x + 295 pp.
Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. Gonzalez, is the fifth offering in the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series for which Aldama and Gonzalez also serve as editors. Admittedly, when offered the opportunity to review this text I simultaneously experienced great excitement and a pang of anxiety. As an avid reader in my youth, my current engagement with comics is restricted to the summer, when I am able peruse the wonderful selection collected by the library at my local institution and take home collected runs of Spider-Man, Love and Rockets, and the occasional Batman graphic novel (no apologies to Superman). And so, although I recognized some of the artists and characters discussed in Graphic Borders, I initially worried about my ability to authoritatively review it until I read the award-winning artist Frank Espinosa confess as much in his foreword to the collection: "So delicate is this new Latino symbolization that much of it is unknown, even, dare I say, to some of the artists who write, draw, and create our new stories" (xi). Thus, as Espinosa (and I) can attest after reading Graphic Borders, "[w]ith every page turned, the bounteous symbols of our great Latino visual literature become known to you" (xi). What's more, the authors included operate as Mappers akin to Espinosa's Rocketo, given that through their sparkling essays, they map and measure the constellations that comprise the expanding universe of Latino comics.
The collection, which is comprised of thirteen essays and an interview, speaks to the vitality of the Latina/o (and Blatino) experience as represented in comic form. But perhaps that puts it too mildly, for these essays boldly step beyond to comment on issues of comic theory, reading practices, and industry politics. Aldama and Gonzalez's introduction, aptly titled "Latino Comics Past, Present, and Future--A Primer," briskly yet thoroughly historicizes the emergence of Latino comics, providing an overview of the themes prevalent therein. Additionally, it familiarizes the uninitiated with the formal features of the genre and points toward foundational scholarship in the field. Separated into five sections, the essays culled here represent a wide variety of critical approaches and engage with both independently produced comics and mainstream offerings from the Big 2 (Marvel and DC). Given the (at best) historically ambivalent engagement the latter has had with Latinos in terms of the industry and subject matter, it is quite fitting that the first section, "Alternativas," makes the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez its object of analysis. Focusing on comics that defy generic convention, the section begins with an essay by Patrick L Hamilton, which calls into question the "conflation" of temporality that occurs when reading panels sequentially. By using beautifully reproduced examples from Los Bros Hernandez' Love and Rockets, Hamilton explains how panel arrangement and juxtaposition can work to create a nonsequential and nonlinear temporal simultaneity between panels (39). This attention to formal matters continues in Aldama's meditative piece that considers how an author's geometrizing, or use of verbal and visual devices, shapes a text's mood, essentially taking us all back to school. In the following section, "Cuerpo Comics" ('Body' Comics), the authors look to how notions of race and gender are complicated by an artist's reconfigurations of the body. While not as surreal as Wilfred Santiago's evocative work on Roberto Clemente (on which Gonzalez wonderfully writes), Ellen Gil-Gomez's essay looks to how the luchador 'male wrestler' and luchadora 'female wrestler' figures in Rafael Navarro and Jaime Hernandez's respective texts challenge gender norms. In "Tortilla Strips," a tongue-in-check description of the Latino comic strips section, the section's authors meditate on the complexity of the Latino experience and how an artist's background and/or political leaning may influence their work. Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste's contribution is particularly striking in its attention to the problematic assimilative politics of Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos' light-hearted comic Baldo. These politics become all the more glaring when the essay is read alongside Juan Poblete's analysis of Lalo Alcaraz's long-running satirical strip, La Cucaracha, which often ruminates on the racial politics of the day.
The next section, "A Bird, a Plane . . . Straight and Queer Super-Lats," turns its attention to superpowered Latinos to explore how these characters reconfigure ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. Mauricio Espinoza's insightful essay identifies how the dual deployment of otherness (ethnic difference and superpower/alienness) both asserts Latino specificity and, as representatives of their communities, demonstrates their value to the nation. Richard T. Rodriguez's careful analysis of queer characters throughout narrative, images, and fan reception reassesses the various efforts at queer representation. Lastly, in "Multiverses, Admixtures, and More," the considerable intellectual powers of Kathryn M Frank, Adilfu Nama, Maya Haddad, and Brain Montes are brought to bear on Latino characters amidst pop culture trends. Understandably then, these authors' attention is focused on the ever-popular yet recently controversial figure of Spider-Man, namely the emergence of Blatino Miles Morales as potential heir to Peter Parker's throne and the forces that stand in his way (for example: Marvel and Sony, comic writer Brian Bendis, and, until recently, the Multiverse). "Simply put," Aldama and Gonzalez's explain, "the mainstream DC and Marvel publishers are not interested in innovation--unless it sells" (15). Yet as the attention to Latinos as a demographic and their representation in comics grows (9-10), perhaps in the future we can look forward to concomitant efforts in media and merchandise as indicated by the Multiverse colliding video game, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, which saw the inclusion of the futuristic Miguel O'Hara as Spider-Man 2099. Or at least this optimistic Latino fanboy hopes as much.
In conclusion, the essays in Graphic Borders do not fail to amaze, and the marshalling of such a wide variety of topics and comics by Aldama and Gonzalez is nothing short of breathtaking. Whether for the comics novice or aficionado, this collection will introduce the reader to new modes of graphic narrative analysis and will shine as a lodestar for future scholarship in the years to come.
Noel Zavala, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Noel R. Zavala
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, nzavala2@illinois.edu
https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1956
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kansas State University, Department of Modern Languages
http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/
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Zavala, Noel R. "Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. Gonzalez, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, winter 2017, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512775881/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93260fb0. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Review of Frederick Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego: !Hyperbole Books!, 2017.
Keywords
U.S. Latino comics, storytelling, alternative archives
Frederick Luis Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego: !Hyperbole Books!, 2017. 137 pp.
Frederick Aldama's Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview contributes to academic conversations not only within the realm of Latino comics studies but also in the larger field of Latin/o American cultural studies. He does this by complicating the notion of the archive to include cultural texts existing outside of the traditional canons that have come to characterize literary and cultural disciplines within academia. The book is structured by thirty interviews that Aldama conducted with an emerging generation of Latino comic book creators, set alongside conversations with established author-artists such as Lalo Alcaraz, Frank Espinosa, John Gonzales, Jules Rivera, and Sam Teer. For the comics creators and consumers that contribute to the metaphorical odyssey that these interviews provide, comics as a medium present an accessible vehicle for the expression of Latino identities and experiences, both of which have often been marginalized and underrepresented within traditional US comics production. As Aldama asserts, "For Latino storytellers who are visually inclined, the comic book medium offers a real possibility. Pencils, paper, and a drafting table are far cheaper than film cameras and film stock required of the other visual-driven media modes. And, as you'll discover in goring yourself on the panoply of voices herein, Latinos with limited means and who want to maintain total control over their artistic production turn to the visual-verbal format of comics" (13). Ultimately, Aldama's compilation of interviews carves out new spaces for these author-artists to assert their own interventions in the field as they create the stories that help creators and readers digest the realities of growing up Latino in the US.
In the living, breathing archive that Aldama constructs in this book, he draws the reader's attention to the relevance of individual biographies as they coexist with each comic creator's process and practice, ultimately working to represent the multiplicity of Latino identities and experiences within the comics community. In this way, Latino Comic Book Storytelling puts author-artists in dialogue with one another from coast to coast. For example, Jose Cabrera, who has roots in Los Altos de Manhattan (i.e. Washington Heights), appears alongside Lalo Alcaraz, whose comic strip La Cucaracha runs in the Los Angeles Times. In addition to showcasing the work of artists from all across the US, Aldama also works to demonstrate the transnationality of influence at work in the production of US Latino author-artists. While Cabrera finds himself at the beginning of a promising career, publishing work whose significance he locates within the context of contemporary US comic production with close ties to the Dominican community in upper Manhattan, Alcaraz sees his own production as part of a long tradition of editorial cartoonists with roots extending to Latin America. At the same time, however, Alcaraz translates these influences into work that seeks to intervene in contemporary US comics production, righting the historical wrongs of Latino (mis)representation within the medium. In his interview with Aldama, Alcaraz highlights the significance of Latino comics as they relate to social, cultural, and political issues relevant to the larger community: "You have to remember, I grew up watching white people on television or in print and wondering where were the brown people. This continues today. When we do finally see ourselves we're misrepresented, I don't want my kids to grow up where this continues and they don't see themselves represented or misrepresented" (19). Diverse though the group of author-artists collected in this book may be, this desire to work towards Latino visibility in the US comics industry is one bond that unites them all. For many, it is part of their quest as author-artists of Latino comics. Contributing to this mission, Aldama's Latino Comic Book Storytelling offers yet another platform though which Latino comic book creators are able to tell their stories: discussing their motives, tracing their inspirations, and stating their goals as they work towards constructing a new US comics universe in which Latinos occupy the graphic narrative forefront.
A continuation of the work that he began in Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009), Aldama's Latino Comic Book Storytelling is an invaluable tool for undergraduate and graduate students interested in Latino literature, comics, and cultural studies, particularly those that look to rearticulate the place that alternative media occupy within contemporary cultural production. As Latino Studies and related fields move towards expanding their fields of analysis, this book serves also to underscore the numerous ways in which comics can and should be considered alongside other textual objects in the study of US Latino life and culture. As scholars of the discipline attest, the graphic narratives of which comics are composed proffer unique and insightful textual windows into cultural imaginaries; in doing so, they explore Latino experiences in the US in a medium that has long been overlooked by the academy, just as Latinos have been within the history of comics production. Not only does Aldama's interview odyssey highlight the perspectival shift that comes with the foregrounding of Latino protagonists in the comics themselves, he also trains the spotlight on Latino storytellers, signaling both comics and their production as a site of power and agency. This book is a must read for comic book enthusiasts from all walks of life.
Jessica Rutherford
The Ohio State University, rutherford.103@osu.edu
https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1973
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kansas State University, Department of Modern Languages
http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/
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Rutherford, Jessica. "Frederick Luis Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, winter 2017, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512775883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0b510a8e. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez. Austin: U of Texas P, 2014. 192 pp. $24.95, paper.
With the publication of The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez, Frederick Luis Aldama makes an important contribution to Latino and film scholarship when he explores the "knowledge making" process of director/ screenwriter/editor/composer Robert Rodriguez. Motivated by his desire to "enrich our understanding of just how Rodriguez's films are made (nuts and bolts) and consumed (perception, thought, feeling)" (2), Aldama critically examines Rodriguez's films as a way of better understanding how the Austin, Texas-based director relies on specific cinematic approaches that establish a unique "relationship with the viewer" (6). For Aldama, nuts and bolts include, but are not limited to, Rodriguez's "intention[al]" uses of language, lighting, camera angles, sound, etc. to elicit a "series of peak emotions" (7) from audiences. Thus, both director and film become significant points of reference for readers as Aldama maps how "the most productive U.S. Latino filmmaker working today" (1) creates films that engage social issues while also entertaining us.
HISTORICAL BREADTH AND DIRECTORIAL GROWTH
Beginning with a historical approach, Aldama analyzes Rodriguez's relationship to cinema in 1968, which was the year Rodriguez was born. While directors like Elia Kazan and Ed Wood were creatively held back by the slow moving "technical apparatus" (3) of film making in the 1950s, Aldama notes, Rodriguez grew up during a time when access to filmmaking devices, such as video recording cameras, VCRs, and rental videos stores was much more prevalent and thus accessible for middle and working class families like Rodriguez's. Such access to films and filmmaking devices motivated Rodriguez to self-learn the ins and outs of filming, editing, and scoring films. Borrowing his father's VHS camera and motivated by directors like John Carpenter, Rodriguez was on his way. Aldama documents how Rodriguez's early works functioned as a training ground of "self-education" that allowed him to create films on next-to-zero budgets. According to Aldama, these self-educational filmmaking practices and limited funds would later become one of Rodriguez's trademark directorial approaches. Aldama asserts that the period in which Rodriguez grew up was one that allowed for the kinds of access to movie making materials that would foster his growth as a complete film creator.
Although initially rejected by the University of Texas's Department of RadioTelevision-Film (RTF), Aldama recounts how Rodriguez, using borrowed equipment and a camcorder he purchased with money he made as a medical test subject, made a series of shorts titled Austin Shorts, which became his point of entry into the RTF department. Admittance into the RTF department gave Rodriguez access to more movie-making equipment, and, as Aldama notes, more opportunities to create films. It was during this time that Rodriguez decided to make what would become his breakout film El Mariachi (1992). Working with a budget of only $7,000, Rodriguez borrowed film equipment for 13 days. Rodriguez's main goal in shooting the film was to "learn to make a feature length film by shooting the film" (31). Although the film was intended for "Spanish-language home viewing audience," it was picked up by Columbia Pictures and became a commercial success. For Aldama, this self-learning approach to filmmaking Rodriguez took in creating El Mariachi became a directorial style, which he identifies in many of Rodriguez's subsequent films. Moreover, Aldama contends that El Mariachi established for Rodriguez a "mariachi filmmaking mantra: to maintain creative freedom, to use as few dollars as possible to make the best-damned film possible" (31).
CINEMATIC STYLING
This mariachi filmmaking mantra becomes a continued point of exploration for Aldama as he charts out the various interworkings of Rodriguez's feature length films. For the remainder of the book, Aldama sets about understanding the "cinematic nuts and bolts" that hold, Rodriguez's films together. Placing a keen eye on what he calls the "overarching aesthetic of the grotesque: the melding of the attractive with the unappealing" (135), and a Tex-Avery "comic book sensibility" (14) where "anything can happen ... just as anything can happen in comic, cartoons--and dreams" (16), Aldama highlights the various points in Rodriguez's films where filmmaking boundaries and ontologies are frequently traversed. An example of such styling is observed in Aldama's analysis of the 2005 film Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller. For Aldama the unique uses of color, lighting, and camera angles used to create Sin City "make new" (41) the viewers engagement with the film through the constant interplay of the beautiful and grotesque. This process of "making new" is not only bound to adult-oriented films, but is also identified in the various Spy Kids films along with Shark Boy and Lava Girl, which Rodriguez likewise directed. These child-centered films underscore the depth and the breadth of Rodriguez's talents as a director, as it highlights his ability to create films that cast children, like Juni and Carmen Cortez, as characters who must overcome almost insurmountable odds by themselves. (Aldama astutely notes that in most Spy Kids films parents are the ones who need saving.) For Aldama, such struggles reinforce for child audiences an aesthetic of the grotesque, which functions as a constant reminder that, "like comic books and cartoons ... all will be ok" (75).
Rodriguez's consideration of audience, however, falls short in the making of Machete Kills, in Aldama's estimation. While films like Planet Terror and Machete, for example, are said to rely on the grotesque and a Tex Avery-like cartoon styling that invites audiences to "have fun" with characters like She (who is shot in the eye and lives with seemingly little consequence beyond having to wear an eye-patch), Aldama maintains that Rodriguez does not have an ideal audience in mind in the making of Machete Kills. Thus the film is "rooted in the lack of a clear vision on what the story should be telling" (133) and ultimately fails to connect with its viewers and critics.
Considering the book as a whole, The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez similarly contains its own limitations when it comes to addressing the issues of Latinidad in Rodriguez's films. While Aldama describes Rodriguez as "the most prolific Latino film director of the twenty-first century" (136), the cinematic insertions of Latinidad Rodriguez employs in many of his films are frequently overlooked or disregarded by Aldama. Of course, Aldama is right in saying that "Latinos simply exist" (72, 78) in many of Rodriguez's films, or that the films comically critique entrenched stereotypes (e.g., Machete as a gardener). However, Aldama does not acknowledge the fact that Latinos as a population and culture offer key cinematic ingredients as well; they function as other sorts of "cinematic nuts and bolts" that he is interested in. Moreover, they are ingredients of the styling of Rodriguez's films, and without them the films become something else entirely. As a brief example, consider how the specific scenes in which curanderisma (a sort of Mexican folk-healing) is depicted in Machete, assists in shaping and realizing these Latinized storyworlds. In other words, the use of Latinos in Rodriguez's films speaks to a much larger issue wherein the only spaces in which Latinos can simply exist are in the cinematic storyworlds of Robert Rodriguez. This is conversation, unfortunately, that Aldama's elides in his book because, as he claims, these films were made, above all, to entertain. To extend his metaphor of nuts and bolts, it's as if Aldama is concerned with only a certain type of nut or bolt while choosing to pay little heed to a host of other items that are holding the film together.
Such criticism, however warranted, does not detract from Aldama's unique observations of Robert Rodriguez's films. His observations of a Tex Avery cartoon styling, as but one example, offer new ways of understanding and interpreting how directors, and Rodriguez specifically, navigate and construct characters and films. Aldama's various identifications of the grotesque also create inroads for identifying the many ways directors create films that are both appealing and repulsive to audiences. Aldama's text also includes an insightful forward by film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg, and a comprehensive one-on-one, in person, interview with Rodriguez. Accordingly, The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez should be considered a useful resource for Latino and film studies scholars alike.
Reviewed by Samuel Saldivar, III
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Post Script, Inc.
http://www.tamuc.edu/academics/colleges/humanitiessocialsciencesarts/departments/literatureLanguages/publications/postScript.asp
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Saldivar, Samuel, III. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez." Post Script, vol. 33, no. 3, summer 2014, pp. 117+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A409550167/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6602b08d. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Mex-Cine: Mexican filmmaking, production, and consumption in the twenty-first century. Michigan, 2013. 268p bibl filmography index afp ISBN 9780472071937, $75.00; ISBN 9780472051939 pbk, $27.95; ISBN 9780472029129 e-book, contact publisher for price
Aldama (Ohio State Univ.) has created a solid, thorough, and accessible guide to the current Mexican film scene, from production through exhibition and public reception. The Mexican cinema has produced a number of deeply influential directors of late, including Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron. It seems that in the 21st century the country's film industry is stronger than ever from both a commercial and a critical standpoint. Aldama's multidisciplinary investigation combines industrial, technical, and sociopolitical analysis. The book highlights how many Mexican directors make their initial breakthrough in their native land, and then almost immediately move to Hollywood and more mainstream projects with bigger budgets. Aldama details the numerous problems that native Mexican films face in the international distribution market; he outlines specific examples of films that crossed over into the US market and others that failed to make the jump. Complete with a detailed filmography that goes through 2010, this is the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and knowledgeable guide on the current Mexican cinema available. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-level undergraduates and above.--G. A. Foster, University of Nebraska--Lincoln
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Foster, G.A. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. Mex-Cine: Mexican filmmaking, production, and consumption in the twenty-first century." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 51, no. 2, Oct. 2013, p. 267. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A347001978/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03bad991. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Your Brain on Latino Comics. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 341 pages. $60.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.
Comic books are not just for kids any more. That is the claim at least if the opposite was ever the case--of a growing number of scholars who have turned to the study of what many call "graphic narrative" in recent years. Frederick Luis Aldama's book, Your Brain on Latino Comics, makes a welcome intervention into the field of graphic narrative study on behalf of the relatively marginalized "Latino comic book tradition" (84). Aldama points out that in the US, "there remains a straightjacket around comic books: they are strictly the domain of young people, and those adults who still gravitate toward their storytelling form are presumed to suffer from some sort of arrested development" (3). He contests this presumption, describing instead the rich, complex, and often overtly political history of Latino comics. His book offers a comprehensive overview of that tradition, along with an analysis that attempts to bring cognitive theory, which Aldama describes as "some insights from the brain sciences," together with literary criticism (83). The result is mixed: the book is a great reference for scholars of Latino literature, graphic narrative, or US visual culture, but not a fully effective application of the insights of the "brain sciences" to comic book reading.
The first of the book's three sections will perhaps be the most useful both for readers new to the Latino comic book tradition and to more experienced readers looking for an encyclopedic genealogy of the tradition. Aldama provides a compelling account of the field's history, spending time on "mainstream" books such as DC Comics' Justice League of America and its "ethnic" comic line DC Milestone (with titles such as Blood Syndicate, Shadow Cabinet, and Kobalt), as well as cult and independent books, including Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets and Richard Dominguez's Team Tejas. That description, though, barely scratches the surface of this well-researched, cogently explained, and information-packed section. Even veteran readers of Latino comic books are likely to discover new texts in Aldama's extensive account. Moreover, the author begins to unravel "how a given comic book might challenge dominant social, sexual, and cultural codes of conduct" while also being careful not to discount the importance of how comics also "create pleasing effects for their reader-viewers' brains" (19). It's a tough balancing act, but Aldama handles it well.
The second portion of the book is where Aldama is not as penetrating as he could be. His intention to discover "how [comic books'] devices make meaning in our brains" by appealing to cognitive science is an ingenious and novel approach. His argument for the importance of readers' ability to "read minds" based on graphic representations of characters' mental and emotional states is a brilliant insight and a valuable contribution to the study of graphic narrative. But Aldama does not go far enough in incorporating brain science into his work. For example, Aldama at one point argues that "comic book author-artists use different techniques coherently in ways that trigger our limbic reflexes" (93). While that statement may be true, the significance of the assertion is never explained in the context of a holistic theory of mind. One would like to see a more thorough reflection on how brain science can help us understand comics.
Additionally, Aldama's book handles its subject matter's "Latinoness" in a problematic way. Throughout, he refers almost without exception to how "Latino comic books" do this and do that. Such phrasing would seem to suggest some distinction in how Latino comic books operate. But Aldama seems caught, as he admits, in trying to sort out the universal and the particular--that is, what is true of all comics versus what is peculiar to Latino comics. Those looking for insight into how Latino comics in particular operate in and on our brains (as the book's title seems to promise) will be disappointed. Aldama's theory of mind as elaborated here seems to be a theory about all comic books.
In spite of these conceptual issues, the book is effective in terms of its polemical objective. Aldama argues that "comic books and comic strips [are] unique kinds of storytelling forms that require the responsible shaping of a crucial set of conceptual tools for analysis" (7). To emphasize this point, he dedicates the second half of the book to "Conversations with the Creators": interviews with twenty-one of the most important Latino comic authors and artists, in which each is allowed space to meditate on his or her craft at length. The interviews tackle the economics of the business, the physical production and storycraft, philosophies of art, and personal histories. These provide an excellent resource that illustrates the richness and complexity of the field. For example, in one recurrent theme, Gus Arriola of the comic strip Gordo explains that he conceives of his work as nonconfrontational. This approach stands in conflict with others, including Hector Cantu, creator of Baldo. Cantu takes an explicitly political stance, arguing for ethics and an awareness that "we face this dilemma of representation as Latino creators working on a pop-culture stage. Sure, we have responsibilities not to present stereotypes.... As an artist, that's my responsibility" (133). By providing this forum and allowing for disagreement, Aldama breaks down the false notion of a monolithic "Latino comics" and allows Latino creators to express the diversity of their community as well as the diversity of their views on the political nature of their work.
Your Brain on Latino Comics is a strong resource for its opening and closing sections. Aldama himself concedes that "this is but a first baby step in the study of Latino comic books" (106), and that view is evident in the theory of mind he puts forward. Yet as a guide to the texts that make up this tradition and as a series of talks with the creators, the book more than makes up for being "but a first baby step." One hopes Aldama will have a chance to think more fully about our brains, but for now Your Brain on Latino Comics has a great deal to recommend it.
Scott St. Pierre
Oklahoma State University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Oxford University Press
http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/
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St. Pierre, Scott. "Your Brain on Latino Comics." MELUS, vol. 36, no. 3, fall 2011, pp. 216+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A268870495/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b844af35. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Ariola to Los Bros Hernandez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009. viii + 331 pages. Paper, $24.95.
Your Brain on Latino Comics is a valuable introduction to the analysis of comics, with a focus on those created by Latino writers and oriented toward both a Latino and non-Latino audience. The book is divided into three distinct sections. The first part provides an overview of Latino comics and of the scholarship that has addressed them to date. The second part discusses analytical strategies for comics as a whole, using Latino examples. The last part is a collection of twenty-one interviews of Latino comic artists conducted by the author. These interviews constitute the book's most relevant contribution to the scholarship on Latino comics.
The artist or author interview is at the core of social sciences and humanities research, yet Aldama's initiative to publish such a large collection of statements suggests that the real-life experiences of comic book authors has not been a priority in previous studies on the topic. In fact, his literature review indicates that scholars have typically focused on the politics of representation of Latinos in comics (by Latino writers or otherwise), and on the hypothetical experiences of Latino readers. These interviews are bound to prompt a new set of questions and to dispel certain assumptions. We learn, for example, that most Latino comic writers admired mainstream comic superheroes like Superman, the Fantastic Four, or Batman; that Frank Espinosa, the Cuban author of Rocketo, held his first job at Walt Disney Studios and was later art director of the consumer products division at Warner Brothers; and, that many artists make aesthetic choices, like doing black-and-white drawings, purely out of financial need. Contrary to expectation, we also learn that some Latino authors avoid political themes altogether (e.g., Gus Ariola), and that many (e.g., Jonathan and Joshua Luna, or Bobby Rubio) do not believe that their ethnicity affected their experiences in the profession. These interviews provide great insight into the processes involved in comic book making, on the distinct activities of writing and drawing comic books, on the marketing strategies of comic book authors, and on their negotiations with syndicates and animation studios. Aldama tends to ask similar (though not identical) questions to each author, so the comparative information offers an interesting cross section of experiences and opinions. These published interviews will furnish future researchers with valuable primary source material on a little-studied topic.
Aside from these interviews, Aldama discusses how comics as a medium deserve a unique set of analytical tools. He believes that other disciplines' approaches--those used in visual art or film, for example--cannot account for the unique characteristics of comics, particularly the relationship between textual information, visual information, and the overall narrative intention. With this in mind, the second part of this book enumerates the set of problems that specifically pertain to the creation of comics. Following the example of Patrick Hogan in The Mind and Its Stories (2003), Aldama introduces a cognitive and emotional approach to the study of comic books and strips. He explains that Latino comic "author-artists" work within the three narrative prototypes identified by Hogan--tragicomedy, heroic tragicomedy, and sacrificial tragicomedy and that their narratives tap on the brain's emotional wiring. Accordingly, Latino comics are engaging and ultimately successful when readers identify with the fictional characters and their stories. This analytical section constitutes a good introduction to the issues involved in creating and reading comics, but it is somewhat disappointing because it reads more like commentary rather than in-depth analysis. Aldama chooses to comment lightly on too many examples rather than focus on a few case studies. It is often difficult to clarify or verify Aldama's commentary against the actual example he is addressing because the illustrated comics, when provided, are not clearly marked or documented.
One important feature of this work worth noting is Aldama's understanding of the "Latino" contribution to comics and to culture as a whole. Since he argues that Latino comic writers work within universal narrative prototypes which are built in the structure of the brain, his argument avoids the dilemma about the original contribution (or the relative lack of it) of a marginal cultural product, and about its relation to mainstream culture. Aldama suggests that Latino writers use the same narrative prototypes as other marginal non-Latino or mainstream writers because such prototypes are universal. The use of Latino superheroes or main characters, the linguistic nuances, and Latino political issues (e.g., immigration law) provide cultural specificity to Latino comics, but Aldama argues (and several comic book writers support his claim in the interviews) that any contemporary audience of any culture can identify with the struggles and emotions of Latino comic characters. Many writers also maintain that their comics are successful because they treat issues that are sufficiently engaging to a culturally-diverse audience, not just to the growing Latino audience in the United States. Aldama's approach, then, bypasses the questions scholars typically ask when assessing the value of a cultural contribution, namely, those of cultural and historical specificity, of influence, and of appropriation. While Aldama's argument will merit a closer look in future scholarship, his universalist perspective opens the door for a critical reevaluation of non-mainstream comics.
Ana Pozzi-Harris, PhD
Instructor of Art History
North Georgia College & State University
Dahlonega, Georgia
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Pi Gamma Mu
http://www.pigammamu.org/international-social-science-review.html
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Pozzi-Harris, Ana. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Ariola to Los Bros Hernandez." International Social Science Review, vol. 85, no. 3-4, fall-winter 2010, pp. 140+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A247971692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=948cfbf6. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. A user's guide to postcolonial and Latino borderland fiction. Texas, 2009. 198p bibl index afp ISBN 9780292719682, $65.00
Aldama (Ohio State Univ.) explores the work of Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Zadie Smith, and Hari Kunzru along with comic-book writers and the short fiction of Luis Rodriguez and Dagoberto Gilb. The hook that connects these authors is that they are "postcolonial" in terms of theme and "borderland" in terms of theme, genre, point of view, style, of mode. This gets tricky because "borderlines" is a highly politicized 21st-century term. Are Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo not borderland because they are white males, or are they borderland, according to Aldama's definition, since they break ground in terms of style? Aldama uses "borderland" about as loosely as one can, so the "Latino" and "borderland" in the title of this book will lead many readers to expect he will consider different texts than he does. This confusion aside, this is an admirable analysis of a group of disparate postcolonial books and the ways in which they deconstruct a brave new world. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Graduate students and researchers.--K. Gaje, Antioch University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
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Gale, K. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. A user's guide to postcolonial and Latino borderland fiction." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 47, no. 8, Apr. 2010, p. 1472. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A251861148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4895615a. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Critical mappings of Arturo Islas's fictions, ed. by Frederick Luis Aldama. Bilingual Press, 2008. 378p bibl ISBN 1931010315 pbk, $23.00; ISBN 9781931010313 pbk, $23.00
These essays examine Islas's major novels and early short stories. Because he came of age as the first works of Chicano/a literature were being published, Islas (1938-91) did not find a willing audience. As Aldama points out, "He both affirmed Chicano cultural heritage--using bilingual technique and bicultural image and form--and also radically complicated the literary terrain with the introduction of his queer Chicano protagonist." In the 1980s and early 1990s, Islas found both success and frustration. Critics and readers praised The Rain God (1984) and Migrant Souls (1990), but publishers rejected his third and last novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears, which was eventually released posthumously in 1996. His diagnosis of HIV positive in 1988 led to depression just as he was achieving literary recognition. Aldama (Ohio State Univ.) gathers insightful, invaluable essays by scholars such as Renato Rosaldo, Marta Saz, Rosaura Saz, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, and Jose David Saldivar. The volume concludes with an interview with Islas, conducted shortly before his death, in which he wryly comments that "[w]riters cross borders constantly in their imaginations." This observation aptly characterizes the scholarly views presented in this critical anthology. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty.--P. M. Garcia, Our Lady of the Lake University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Garcia, P.M. "Critical mappings of Arturo Islas's fictions." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 46, no. 5, Jan. 2009, pp. 899+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A266634775/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba5ae6c1. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Why the humanities matter: a commonsense approach. Texas, 2008. 377p bibl index afp ISBN 9780292717985, $50.00
This book has a narrower audience than the title suggests. Aldama's intended audience must consist mostly of his peers: cultural material shipmates on the ever-listing portside upper decks of the academic Titanic. Unfortunately, anyone below decks or on the starboard side seems likely to go down with the ship, since they will not find room in the lifeboats. Though some will be willing to accept Aldama's neo Marxist worldview and extreme leftist politics as the objective truth and commonsense reasoning he presupposes they are, his sweeping generalizations that capitalism is the root of all evil and the US is an imperialist nation will appeal only to the most radical of readers. Such statements used to be called logical fallacies, and they detract from Aldama's otherwise (even often) interesting survey of postmodern methods of inquiry. Ultimately Aldama (English and comparative studies, Ohio State Univ.) leaves unarticulated why the humanities do and should matter. This reviewer doubts if the average college reader of this book could explain why the humanities matter, and many might conclude they do not matter if academics of Aldama's ilk are the humanities' 21stcentury apologists. Summing Up: Not recommended.--A. P. Church, Dickinson State University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
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Church, A.P. "Aldama, Frederick Luis. Why the humanities matter: a commonsense approach." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 46, no. 6, Feb. 2009, p. 1080. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A266750120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=afd98b43. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006. 176 pages. $50 cloth; $19.95 paper.
From Frederick Luis Aldama comes Brown on Brown, an innovative and rigorous discussion of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in Chicana/o cultural production. Aldama is as an award-winning writer whose groundbreaking scholarship on Arturo Islas has contributed greatly to the critical discussions about Chicana/o writers, ethnic identity, and their relation to the politics of narrative. His Brown on Brown is no exception, as it develops a critical frame for considering how Chicana/o literature and film engage readers in political change while disengaging them from enacting that change in real world. The argument is reminiscent of the Marxist critique that considered novel reading a bourgeois practice that, no matter how radical the literature, can never enact real historical change precisely because the act of reading requires individual, introspective isolation rather than collective social action.
For Aldama, fiction can raise people's political consciousness but this enlightenment is "not the same thing as the massive organizing and protesting of real people that historically has transformed the social and political arena." Aesthetics might reflect social conditions but only collective action can change them, never mind the poststructural dilemmas about defining "reality" too. Aldama sees the works of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault as practically nonsensical in the context of everyday communication, interaction, and sites of power, which continue to operate as modes of meaning, identity-formation, and places of oppression, despite the supposed slippages and gaps poststructuralism theorizes. In fact, Aldama's opening chapter is a salvo against current notions of identity as a "construction." Instead, biology matters insofar as it provides a "materialist background" to ethnic and queer identities. His is not an argument for biological determinism, of course, though perhaps the chapter could have fleshed out the repercussions of defining Chicana/o and queer identities as biological. Rather, the chapter uses neuroscience studies to examine how biological conditions function as material realities that impact our sense of self.
The second chapter continues Aldama's critique by considering the limitations of poststructural theory in relation to ethno-queer identities and what Aldama weighs as the facts of everyday life. The chapter levels a compelling challenge to poststructural thought and its applicability to queer Chicana/o identities. Aldama comes out against poststructuralism, viewing it as specious tautological thinking that is too indeterminate to work as foundational thought for theorizing, understanding, and changing the power struggles that impact queer, ethnic identities. Poststructuralism's insistence on the indeterminacy of signification elides how material conditions--global capitalism, unfair labor practices, and the unequal distribution of wealth--concretely overdetermine the everyday lives of people around the world. The real world is not just signs and symbols for Aldama. It is a material space, a physical fact that distinguishes discourses from the reality that they represent.
This separation between reality and its representation frames Aldama's analysis of works by John Rechy, Richard Rodriguez, Arturo Islas, Ana Castillo, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, and Edward James Olmos. Contrary to Chicano/a studies, Aldama does not make an argument for "narratives of resistance" in his analysis. Instead, he argues that fiction and film generate a critical aesthetic that functions in a world closed off from reality. The writers whom Aldama selects generate art that forces readers to encounter the everyday realities, politics, history, and culture of ethno-queer identities. Queer aesthetics offers readers a world that engages them in the complex politics of gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity but also disengages readers from the real world of social change.
John Rechy's use of genre, narrative technique, and experimental form, for instance, crafts a queer world that allows readers to re-imagine Chicana/o identity through contradictory queer protagonists who navigate the real-historical experiences of being a gay borderland subject. Arturo Islas and Richard Rodriguez likewise complicate Chicano/a identities and lived experiences by imagining the confluences of queer and straight spaces. Aesthetically, both writers draw on different genres and styles to imagine the city space, but they collapse the supposed distinction between straight and queer as Rodriguez's Mexico City in Days of Obligation becomes a confluence of active and passive, Chicano and indio, queer and straight, while gay author Arturo Islas re-imagines San Francisco by way of Louie Mendoza, the straight Chicano protagonist of La Mollie and the King of Tears who traverses across the queer city. The distinction between mainstream and marginal Chicana writers also collapses in Aldama's chapter on Ana Castillo and Sheila Ortiz Taylor, for, despite Castillo's mainstream status, her aesthetic worlds share a similar view with Ortiz Taylor's work: both challenge the heterosexualization of Chicanas (straight and queer) as objects of male desire.
The book's most effective chapter, however, is the one on Olmos's American Me because mainstream and Chicana/o critics do not recognize Olmos's film as queer (in the expansive sense of the word). Aldama takes a film that, for the most part, has been considered a troubling gang exploitation film and reads it instead as a complex critique of the film's ostensible Chicano machismo and homophobia. He performs a deep reading that pays close attention to the film's details to come to the convincing conclusion that the film is more critical of its heterosexism than it seems. What is also compelling about this chapter is that it performs a deconstructive reading of the film, so to speak, by paying attention to what is present rather than absent in the film. It is a reading that in effect enacts Aldama's opening argument that material facts and conditions constitute meaning and identity.
Some readers might want more "theory" in the book; others might be interested in how less openly gay texts nevertheless imagine a queer world. But overall, Aldama's Brown and Brown nicely balances between a student-friendly book and an informed scholarly discussion about the limits and possibilities of reading, teaching, and writing about queer Chicano/a cultural production.
Jesse Aleman
University of New Mexico
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Oxford University Press
http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/
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Aleman, Jesse. "Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity." MELUS, vol. 31, no. 1, spring 2006, pp. 162+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A146346509/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=10d66435. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works
Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama
Arte Publico Press
ISBN 1558853685
PB, $16.95, 246 pp.
This year--2004--should prove a banner year in the posthumous literary life of the heretofore criminally under-appreciated queer Chicano novelist and poet Arturo Islas. Known primarily in Chicano and Latino literary and scholarly circles for a pair of beautiful novels published in the decade before his 1991 death from AIDS complications, Islas will finally receive his due this year with the publication of two major volumes, one a sustained critical study of his literary work, and the other a biography. Both of these are the work of Frederick Luis Aldama, an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the editor of a third Islas volume, Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works, published by Arte Publico Press in 2003.
Aldama's considerable and important scholarly work will certainly reinforce Islas' already secure position in the canon of Chicano and Latino literary production, and should in turn spark additional scholarly work about this talented, visionary writer in the context of those fields of study. It can only be hoped that these publications will also spark the long-overdue interest of readers and scholars of U.S. queer literature as well.
Islas, born to parents of Mexican ancestry in late 1930s El Paso, Texas, did his undergraduate, graduate and professorial work in the English department at Stanford University, where he studied fiction with Hortense Callisher and poetry with Yvor Winters, and where he himself became a beloved and highly respected teacher of American literature and creative writing. Set mostly in a fictionalized version of El Paso, his two finished novels (1984's The Rain God and 1991's Migrant Souls) tell the story, loosely based on his family's own, of the Chicano Angel clan across four generations, and across most of the course of the Twentieth Century. Published in the last decade of Islas' life, the two novels feature a number of gay characters and gay-themed subplots; Miguel (Chico) Angel, the character most closely based on Islas himself, struggles across the course of both novels' many interwoven stories to reconcile the cultural and other conflicts arising from the gay and Chicano dimensions of his identity.
Because of Islas' muted, subtle, melancholic treatment of these issues in Miguel Chico's life, however, his treatment of gay themes in general may appear at first glance too tenuous, too closety even, for the evolved queer reader and, in fact, this reading of his treatment of gay themes has perhaps contributed to the only passing interest in Islas on the part of especially non-Latino contemporary queer readers. As Aldama's editorial material in Uncollected Works makes clear, however, that reticence wasn't so much due to any sexual squeamishness on Islas' part, but on the demands of a mostly unsympathetic response on the part of the many large publishing houses to which Islas unsuccessfully peddled early versions of The Rain God in the 1970s. In addition, both these early drafts of that novel and the selection of poems from that same period now available in this volume attest to Islas' willingness to explore sexual themes (including, most interestingly, S & M practices) in a bracingly explicit, open manner.
For this reason alone the new volume should occasion a significant and positive reassessment of Islas' place in American queer writing of the past half-century. The appearance in published form of the poems especially should serve to complete the picture of the evolution of an extraordinary queer Chicano subjectivity and sensibility to which the two El Paso novels could only hint. That said, the material in this volume will certainly also contribute to an equally significant and positive reassessment of Islas' place in the canon of Chicano writing; while the early drafts of material leading to the eventual form that the El Paso novels take will certainly enrich our understanding of the larger artistic vision informing those novels, Uncollected Works also features a number of essays, written for delivery as public lectures, which meditate explicitly on the status and function of Chicano/Latino literature in the larger American and Latin American literary scene. Of these the most memorable is Islas' critical response to the unprecedented, and controversial, success of (his fellow queer Chicano and Stanford alum) Richard Rodriguez's 1982 memoir Hunger of Memory.
Aldama's work across these three mostly scholarly projects should, under the best of circumstances, lead especially non-academic readers of all kinds to the two finished novels, which stand as the truest measure of Islas' achievement as an artist. The poems appearing in Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works also confirm what Islas' third, unfinished novel (La Mollie and the Kings of Tears, published posthumously by the University of New Mexico Press) already made abundantly clear: that Islas' death, like any and every other AIDS death, is only belied by its merely statistical status or value. Behind each such death is the tragically untimely loss of a life with important, irreplaceable work left to do.
Ricardo L. Ortiz teaches U.S. Latino studies in the English department at Georgetown University.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
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Ortiz, Ricardo L. "Desert angel." Lambda Book Report, vol. 12, no. 7, Feb. 2004, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A114744009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c18d168a. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.