As many of you may have read, POCHO’s beloved film critic, Cisco Yberra, passed away last week. We’ll miss him so much, and so will you when you check out some of the cinematic gems he brought to our attention when he was not dead:
Month: April 2013
Mexicans falling to Earth from space? Not to worry, scientists say
(PNS reporting from OUTER ESPACE) Let that long-held breath out, folks. The Alpha Mexnetic Spectrometer has picked up a lot of mysterious antimatter in low Earth orbit recently – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sign of falling Mexi-matter, AKA “Space Mexicans” falling to Earth, according to NASA.
In fact, even with the 400,000 pocho-particles picked up by the cosmic ray experiment – the largest number of such particles ever analyzed in outer espace — it’s unclear whether those pocho-particles result from decaying Mexicans left over from building the International Space Station, or simply from Mexicans shot into space from various border patrol agencies over the year.
The ambitious $1.6-billion Alpha Mexnetic Spectrometer is roughly 10 times more sensitive to Meximatter than its predecessors. The detector, which was ferried on the Space Shuttle Endeavour (also built by Mexicans) to the International Space Station in 2011, has picked up billions of pocho-particles since then.
Mas…Mexicans falling to Earth from space? Not to worry, scientists say
Sandra Ramos O’Briant – ‘Chile Tales: The Green Addiction’
Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
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In Texas, when my parents were still married, we ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes laden with cream gravy, green beans flavored with bits of bacon and buttery light biscuits. Every item on the menu had its own serving dish, and cloth napkins were always used.
“May I have another biscuit, ma’am?” I would say.
“You surely may, Sandra Mae,” my daddy’s mama would reply and everyone would smile. Or we’d have fried pork chops and suck on the salty bones, but only when it was just my mama and me at the dinner table.
In Texas, there were black-eyed peas and ham and all manner of greens and put-up preserves. There was watermelon and homemade ice cream from the hand-crank ice-cream maker. Daddy held a bourbon and water in one hand, and turned the handle with the other, while Mama and my daddy’s mama drank iced tea on the back porch and exchanged polite insults. My grandma didn’t like it that Daddy had married a Mexican.
Mas…Sandra Ramos O’Briant – ‘Chile Tales: The Green Addiction’
Pocho Ocho signs that you are a renter
Here at POCHO headquarters, not all of us own our own homes. As a matter of fact, some of us are the victims of less-than-concerned landlords. Oh, the joys of renting!
Here are the Pocho ocho signs that you’re renting:
8. Your towel rack is broken for weeks at a time and you have to hang your towel on the front stoop, which “brings down property values” but doesn’t lower your rent.
7. You can hear cats having sex on every side of your apartment complex in the middle of the night.
6. Toilets, showers and sinks occasionally overflow with water that smells funny.
Paint your nails with calla lilies? In a pig’s ear! (photos)
Zantedeschia aethiopica (common names calla lily, arum lily; a.k.a. varkoor, an Afrikaans name meaning ‘pig’s ear’) is a species in the family Araceae, native to southern Africa.
Its preferred habitat is in streams and ponds and on the fingernails of POCHO’s Subcommandanta del Ñews Sara Inés Calderón.
Mas…Paint your nails with calla lilies? In a pig’s ear! (photos)
Cristela Alonzo is from the Mexican part of Texas, i.e. Texas (video)
Texas Mexican Cristela Alzonzo represents (old school Nintendo style) in this Comedy Time Latino clip from 2009. She has also lied on her resume.
PNS*Hot*Flash: Chicana frets – winged eyebrows or eyeliner?
(PNS reporting from EAST LOS ANGELES) Veronica Gonzalez has a conundrum: Should she go rockabilly and do winged eyeliner or go chola and do winged eyebrows?
“It’s, like, hard, you know? I’m just trying to keep up with my heritage,” Gonzalez told PNS Wednesday.
Gonzalez said that if she went rockabilly it would not only look cute with her new cats-eye glasses, but she would be able to dress more girly. If she went with the chola eyebrows, then she would have to wear more khaki and that’s just not her color.
Mas…PNS*Hot*Flash: Chicana frets – winged eyebrows or eyeliner?
‘Spitfire,’ a novel by Annette Sandoval (Chapters 1-2)
Interoffice Memo
To: Samantha
From: Tomi
Date: July 12, 2011
Subject: Guess what?
Scott, the new associate, just offered me the executive assistant job. He says we could do a three-month trial. He’s offering $45,000 a year.
What do you think?
Tomi
P.S. Yo mama is so ugly she makes onions cry.
A Latina’s Guide: How to talk to a racist
As unfortunate a reality as it may be, one way or another in our country, you’re going to have to deal with someone who is racist, or at least holds a little bit of prejudice.
What’s even more unfortunate is that you’re most likely to come across someone who doesn’t necessarily know that they are prejudiced, and thus, pointing out this behavior or dealing with it may be a bit more difficult for you.
Now, say that you are a Latina and so have to deal with society’s sexist — as well as racist — attitudes and all of a sudden you find yourself in a bit of a bind. How does one fight The Man, preconceived notions of femininity (from both American and Latino cultures), civility standards, sexism and racism all at once?
I have a few tips that I thought might be useful, so here we go:
1. Don’t blow up
Flowers that bloom in Bel-Air, tra la, need immigrant gardeners (fotos)
Installation artist Ramiro Gomez — who makes invisible immigrant laborers visible by installing cardboard cutout painted figures around Los Angeles neighborhoods — emailed Tuesday evening:
My newest piece is in front of a home in Bel-Air. I drove around for a while looking for a place that felt right. At first I placed them in front of the Hotel Bel-Air (see below) but the sun was setting fast and it didn’t feel right, so I continued driving down the street and found this house. As I approached this home on Strada Corta Rd. near the Bel-Air Country Club, I was immediately drawn to the colorful spring flowers, the sun shining at the right spot and my instinct was to place them here.
If you could mention that my UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center show “Luxury, Interrupted” closes April 8th I would really appreciate it.
Mas…Flowers that bloom in Bel-Air, tra la, need immigrant gardeners (fotos)
Kelly Miller’s 35th birthday party in Bondi: To Mexico with love (video)
Kelly Miller lives in Bondi, Australia, a suburb of Sydney, famous for Bondi Beach and “bondi blue,” a Steve Jobs iMac color.
Kelly has never been to Mexico and has no “Mexican heritage,” but she wants to visit. In February, she used Facebook to organize a “Made In Mexico” 35th birthday bash that somehow involved Bob Esponja. How did she do as a Mexican wannabe? (Don’t be hatin’ on her for the piñata mishap after all those jello shots.)
Mas…Kelly Miller’s 35th birthday party in Bondi: To Mexico with love (video)
AP’s Pocho Ocho dropped names beside ‘illegal immigrant’
Associated Press (AP), the cooperative news service used by print, broadcast and online media, today dropped the term “illegal immigrant” from its stylebook:
‘Illegal immigrant’ no more
Posted on 04/02/2013 by Paul Colford
The AP Stylebook today is making some changes in how we describe people living in a country illegally.Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explains the thinking behind the decision:
The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally…. [Continued at AP]
But that’s not all! Here are the Pocho Ocho other designations dropped by AP:
7. Elote-eaters
Mas…AP’s Pocho Ocho dropped names beside ‘illegal immigrant’
PNS*Hot*Flash: Alumni magazine gives Encino man the sad
(PNS reporting from ENCINO) San Fernando Valley homeowner Donald Murietta was depressed most of Saturday afternoon after reading the latest issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Pennsylvania.
Murietta, a 1998 Penn graduate, first turned to the obituary section when the glossy monthly arrived with the 2PM mail delivery, and that’s when his ball-breaking downer began.
News of the February 12 death (a tragic fish-pickling accident in Rochester, NY) of old girlfriend Leslie Sonnenshein (nee Baldwin), Class of 1999, set off a cascade of emotions that started at the top with their intense makeout session at that SAE party after the Princeton game and ended at the bottom with a very public breakup in the Van Pelt Library right before Christmas, which was totally his fault because he fucked that girl Candi.
It’s Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and Google threw a Doodle party
Late Saturday night, as I searched for some historical images for a new history book I’m illustrating, I saw that Google had finally honored farm labor icon Cesar Chavez with their “Google Doodle.”
My first thought (and tweet) was, “Brace yourselves for anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant, anti-Cesar Chavez racist hate from internet Christians on their Holy Day.” Faster than you could pull up a thousand images of the Mexican-American hero on Google Images, the harsh comments started rolling in.
As I called it, a few hateful internet Christians declared jihad on Google because it’s not a Jesus Christ Doodle or their main religious figure, the Easter Bunny (historical image below).
Mas…It’s Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and Google threw a Doodle party
