Bill “Memo” Nericcio, author, professor at San Diego State University and proprietor of the Tex[t]-Mex Gallery Blog, collects representations of Mexican-Americans in pop culture.
He just posted a set of scanned 1936-37 covers from pulp fiction magazine Spicy Western Stories and its siblings that all exploit the same stereotype — the leering (ugly) (brown) bandido and the (scantily-clad) (white) chica/victim in distress. Hate much?
The image above is just one slice of the four covers Memo found; the big images of all four are below (click to enlarge):
Memo goes around the country with a portable — and ever-changing — exhibit of this stuff. Check out his blog and also his Facebook page for more info.
We looked online for a text version of one of these stories and we only found e-pub versions from the publisher’s generic Spicy Stories magazine, but what we found will give you a good idea of what these pulp fiction zines were about.
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