As the Duck Farts: El Pato demands POCHO retract ‘sketchy salsa’ story

lawyerexcerptelpatoskullsquareAn attorney who claims to represent Walker Foods, U.S. distributors of El Pato (The Duck) salsa, demanded Thursday that POCHO “retract and correct” parts of our story Pocho Ocho sketchy substances in Mexican hot sauce besides lead, even though he acknowledges it is satire.

Downtown Los Angeles lawyer Robert M. Newell, Jr. also wants POCHO to “remove the contrived picture showing what purports to be a bottle of El Pato Salsa Picante bearing a skull and crossbones,” adding that the “story is puro pedo!” (The letter is below.)

Mas…As the Duck Farts: El Pato demands POCHO retract ‘sketchy salsa’ story

Gustavo Arellano: Summers, I turn on my inner George Clooney

Summers are when our amigo Gustavo ¡Ask A Mexican! Arellano, editor of the OC Weekly, turns on his inner George Clooney. In a grisly yearly ritual, Gustavo entrusts me, POCHO Jefe-in-Chief Lalo Alcaraz, with the opportunity to illustrate a comic relating some sad aspect of his tragic love life. He writes the comic script, but then lets me have his way with the last panel, and the results are guaranteed to entertain you and embarrass Gus!  The way he described it to me, it looks something like this…

Disney Day of the Dead faux pas: Latinos turned noise into news (audio)

From NPR: When Disney tried to trademark Dia de los Muertos for their new movie merchandise inspired by the Mexican holiday, Latinos picked up their own mice, went online and turned things back around.

For this week’s News or Noise, Latino USA guest host Luis Antonio Perez speaks with POCHO Jefe-in-Chief Lalo Alcaraz and Kety Esquivel, a digital media strategist, about how Latinos online retaliated against the entertainment giant.

Star Wars loteria cards: Just the mashup you were looking for

Artist Chepo Peña was inspired by Mexican loteria cards and George Lucas’ Star Wars to create these graphics. George Lucas said thanks, Chepa, but don’t sell them.  So he stopped selling them but still keeps them on the Internets. There’s more info over at the TextMex blog (by our amigo Memo Nericcio) and Chepo Peña’s site is here.

Mas…Star Wars loteria cards: Just the mashup you were looking for

POCHO’s Lalo Alcaraz toons up Sotomayor interview on ’60 Minutes’

Was that a cartoon by POCHO Jefe-in-Chief Lalo Alcaraz hanging on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s office wall in Sunday night’s 60 Minutes interview? Why yes it was!

Note from Lalo: The original cartoon, entitled L’il Judge Lopez, is signed by me and my daughter, who was the model/inspiration for the little girl in the toon.

Here’s the full-sized version of the cartoon and the 60 Minutes interview (cartoon @ 11:37):

Mas…POCHO’s Lalo Alcaraz toons up Sotomayor interview on ’60 Minutes’

Ñewsweek: Romney? Ya No Más, I wish I were Latino; iPhone La Raza

Que busy ñewsweek!

Say hello to Angry Abuelas, pochos. The new iPhone 5 — code-named La Raza — is especially designed for Latinos.

Two  videos broke the news: GOP presidential wannabe Mitt Romney wished he were a puro Latino and his campaign released a new Spanish-language ad aimed at “white Hispanics.”

In science ñews, cilantro haters breathed a sigh of relief as genetics proved it was not their fault and the new African monkey species looks familiar somehow.

Here are the links:

Mas…Ñewsweek: Romney? Ya No Más, I wish I were Latino; iPhone La Raza

ZOMG! Mainstream media discovers pochismo for profit

Mainstream media has finally awakened to the profit potential of pochismo, according to the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review:

Lalo Alcaraz [photo, right] has always embraced the word pocho. It refers to Mexican-Americans who have lost their Mexican culture and speak English, and it’s what relatives occasionally called Alcaraz when he was growing up in San Diego. He has leveraged it ever since. In the 1990s, Alcaraz and a friend founded POCHO Magazine, which led to pocho.com. Both projects used English when, for years, “Hispanic media” usually meant Spanish-language content. They satirized Latino issues and poked fun at biculturalism. “We had the National Pochismo Institute,” he says, “where we would send out a fake survey and ‘rate your pochismo.’ ” Currently, Alcaraz hosts a radio show called the “Pocho Hour of Power” on KPFK in Los Angeles.

Mas…ZOMG! Mainstream media discovers pochismo for profit