Analyzing: Citizen Rex

                For this prompt, I am working with the multi-panel sequence on page 119. The panel is essentially the “final battle” between Rex and Mambo, the lead gangster, beginning with some expository dialogue and ending with Mambo’s death.

                The first thing I noticed about this sequence, in regards to McCloud’s Understanding Comics was the explicit use of the action-to-action sequence in between the 5^th and final frames. We don’t actually see Mambo’s head exploding, but we know that it actually happened judging from the massive amount of guts pouring out from where his head used to be. I also noticed the very cartoon-y, non detailed blood spatter erupting from his head. It looks akin to a fountain, or those pop guns that are sold during New Years and the 4^th of July, which fire out the strands of ribbon and confetti. It’s quite ambiguous, and strikes me as very unusual. It seems to express an idea of joy and celebration from the death of Mambo, who, despite the multiple “bad guys” represented in the story (and even then, the line between who is truly “good” and who is truly “bad” is incredibly blurred) is the one singularly faceted antagonistic element throughout the comic.

                Another element to take note of is the existence of the eye, which remains entirely intact throughout the entirety of the story, despite it being dislodged from its original orifice twice throughout the comic. The eye is the element that gave Mambo worth: His ability of mutual perception between Rex and himself, and of course, the laser beam that it omits, prove to be powerful weapons in Mambo’s hands, or I suppose I should say, head (wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) The eye represents Mambo’s envious attempts to be something larger than he is, by taking a part of Rex, it almost appears as if he is trying to be somebody more powerful than he actually is. This same theme is also mentioned the dialogue previous to the incident, where Mambo rants about how lucky Tango was, and expresses a definite theme of jealousy, and ultimate desire of power. The one piece of his head that remains, the eye of Rex, is not truly a part of Mambo, which sends a message that although he strove for superiority and dominance, in the end, he truly is a pathetic, insignificant stain on the walls for the janitor to clean up.

                Overall, the scene was very direct, with little room for interpretation, but even those minor  details give a glancing outlook on Mambo’s existence that before, wasn’t covered much throughout the comic.

                For questions, one thing that I can’t figure out in this scene is that in the scene where Mambo’s head is exploded, the Rex clone’s head is dismembered from his body, and is positioned in the image to almost appear as if the Rex clone’s head was originally a part of Mambo’s body. I have developed a number of theories as to the author’s purpose for this, but cannot construct anything strong enough to use it as an interpretation with confidence.

                So, why in the final scene, is Mambo’s body, and the Rex clone’s head, the only remaining parts of their respective bodies left after the struggle? What is the external message of the author by creating this scene as such?

(552 words)

Inquiry: Miss Clairol

Question #1: How old was Arlene when she first had sex? How do you think this influenced her, and made her become the way she is? What does this imply about childhood in Chicana culture?

Question #2: What does Arlene steal from the K-Mart? Why do you think Champ reacts the way she does to her Mother shoplifting? How does this relate to Champ's impression of her mother throughout the story, and how does this portray the idea of the child-mother relationship as a whole?

Analyzing: Rivera vs. Rodriguez; A conversation.

Tomás Rivera’s …and the Earth Did Not Devour Him shares obvious similarities with Richard Rodriguez’s short “Aria.” They both generally involve a memory of being a young Chicano boy struggling with growing up as a Mexican in American society. Although Rivera’s piece is technically a work of fiction, the chapter “It’s that it hurts” describes a situation so real, that I can’t help but take the liberty of attributing it as a memoire from Rivera’s own past. Both works particularly put emphasis on schooling and the difficulties of going to a school taught entirely in English with a very weak English-speaking background. Almost word-for-word these pieces mirror each other in the way they invoke the self-conscious terror of having to speak a language that the narrator is unfamiliar with, in front of a crowd of his peers who are undoubtedly better at it than they are.

            That is, however, where the similarities end between these two pieces. Rivera’s piece continues to take sympathy on the migrant worker, and the Chicano children, portraying the white gringo, and American society as a whole in progressively harsher, more scornful lighting. He continuously alludes to the famed American dream, portraying it with a sense of yin and yang, light and darkness. On one hand, the American dream was something of a spark of hope for the migrant peoples in Rivera’s tale, but on another hand, it was a false hope, an ideal which is adamantly strived for, but was rarely achieved.

            Rodriguez, though placed in something of the same situation as Rivera, came out of it with an entirely different outlook. He regards his assimilation, although painful at the time, to have been overall better for him in the long run as to becoming a strong, happy American citizen. He overtly criticizes “bilingualists,” claiming that they are attempting to coddle children, and that American children are better off when exposed to American language in schooling. In one memorable instance in his piece, he even recalls a confrontation with a fellow Hispanic, a family friend, with scorn. This particular instance seems to show this big breaking point for Rodriguez, between his crossing from identifying as a Mexican in America, towards identifying completely as an American.

            I have found myself at a bit of a predicament in this analysis, as I feel I have set myself up to attempt to draw connections between two pieces that are entirely opposed to  each other in almost every way. At the same time, I have pondered to myself whether that is as impossible as I might think it is.

            For this prompt, I am instructed to put these two texts in a conversation with each other, but is it not possible that this conversation could lead to a debate. What is present here, are two texts that both take a situation that is near entirely identical to each other, and yet both take radically opposing opinions based on the experiences had.

            My question, then, is considering the fact that Rivera and Rodriguez have both told a story (or shared a recollection, to be more precise) with identical situations, but which draw opposing arguments and beliefs based on those experiments, what subtle differences between Rivera’s experience and Rodriguez’ experience could there be for them to experience the same situation so differently?

(551 words)

Analyzing: Never Marry a Mexican

For this post, I am going to be focusing on a passage from Never Marry a Mexican. The passage takes place in three small paragraphs beginning from the bottom of page 82. The plot of the piece revolves a woman named Clemencia, and reflections of Drew, a married man who she once had an affair with when she was a teenager. In the passage, Clemencia reflects on the scenario prior, where she had courted Drew’s now-teenaged son and killed him. We soon realize in this passage, that the prior scenario was merely  something she had dreamt up inside her head, and she reflects on her ability to kill someone.

                The passage takes place during the falling action of the work as a whole, directly preceding the climax, where she had dreamt that she had killed Drew’s son. It is mainly significant as a clarifying point in the story, as it shows that Clemencia did not, in fact, kill Drew’s son, but was merely thinking of a way to enact something of vengeance on Drew.  The passage is something of a sigh of relief. A solemn revelation that “Oh, that F’d up thing that happened in the two paragraphs before this didn’t actually happen outside of her own imagination, and she just calls the guy at 2 A.M. instead. Well thank God for that.”  From Clemencia’s point of view, however, the entire feeling of the passage is actually quite pathetic. She realizes that she doesn’t have the capability, in one way or another, to actually pull it off. So when she has these feelings, “when it wants out from my eyes” she calls him on the phone, the line “dangerous as a terrorist” coming off as a sarcastic admittance that she isn’t even capable of killing the boy.

                Moreso, however, she speaks almost as a person who is unraveling. Throughout this passage she uses incredibly abstract language to convey simple ideas, throwing metaphors seemingly anywhere that they may be applicable.  Her thought process is conveyed in the passage with a very clear, understandable sentence structure, but her actual words, the diction, is something a bit off. It should be of note that she doesn’t seem to convey any remorse for her thoughts of killing Drew’s son. It is merely conveyed that she can not actually go through with it for whatever means, or in an even darker interpretation, she just merely hasn’t yet.

                This passage, to me, is one of the most interesting passages throughout a story that I found interesting enough as a whole. It’s appearance after a moment that was so intense that my eyeballs felt like they were going to dry up from lack of moisture is just this huge contrast. One minute she’s luring a boy to his death, another she’s calmly questioning her ability to kill, and her sanity. It’s truly boggling, and I am a bit frightened to admit that I ate it all up.

Oh, and a discussion question: What does everybody think about the comparison that the situation with her mother and her father has with the situation with Drew? Does anybody else see a pattern here?

Analyzing: I am Joaquin.

I am Joaquin is an epic poem written by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales. There were a number of things that stuck out to me instantly from a first glance at this piece. First and foremost, it’s size is respectably large, with well over 400 lines throughout the entire piece, and only two stanzas. Despite the apparent vastness of it, however, I couldn’t help but notice that the individual lines within the piece were very irregular. There are some lines that stretch almost the entirety of the page, yet at the same time I specifically remember an entire line completely devoted to the word “I.” and there are a number of other single-word lines scattered throughout the piece.

                Honestly, I spent a great deal of time, probably more time than I should have, trying to discern why Gonzales chose to design his poem with such bizarre line breaks. What is significant about the word “I” or the word “And” that makes it so special that he could not just tack it onto the line before or after? I ran through a number of hypotheses in my head, ranging from the importance of the statement in the lines, whether or not lines were broken based on their relativity to his own person (again, inconsistent), and I eventually settled on the idea that he was just an individual kind-of guy who breaks lines wherever, and whenever he feels like it, and good luck to all of us who try to decipher why.

                However, after taking something of a break from the piece, I decided to eat some Top Ramen. As I was eating said Top Ramen, I glanced towards my desk, where I had left the piece, and noticed that the words on the page (page 4 I believed) looked like a Totem Pole. It took me some seconds to fully realize this epiphany, and I grabbed the piece, flipping through the pages to notice, yes indeed: the various line breaks all make some-sort of design that somewhat resembles Mesoamerican art. Whether or not this is a coincidence from a combination of the pages I got being written in center text (for whatever reason) and my own overactive imagination, or if it was actually something that Gonzales had planned all along, I found it to be an interesting find, and am interested to see if any of the shapes I see in the page actually correlate any sort-of meaning.

                Strange geometrical aspects aside, I find the actual lyrical connotation of the piece to be something of a call to arms to other Mexican Americans, to be more precise, to remember the glory of their ancestors (Chiefs and Kings) and to strive again for that same glory, and prominence that was stripped from them. I find the examples of this theme throughout the piece to be obvious with scornful depictions of the ways in which their land has been taken from them, how they as a people have been enslaved (“I have survived the toils of slavery in the fields”), and in the way that he regards Europeans throughout the piece overall. Another thing I noticed was his usage of prominent figures throughout the history of central America, from the great Aztec king Cuauhtémoc, to Pancho Villa. He, in a sense, juxtaposes the idea of the great Aztec nation of ancient times with more modern tales of Mexican heroism and pride. In this, it becomes less about pride of the indigenous blooded people of Mexico, but more prideful of the accomplishments of the Mexican nation as a whole. Regardless of how one looks at it, however, it is a very obvious portrayal of Mexican pride, and a cry to other Mexicans to fight, and reshape their lives into something better.

 (Word Count: 625)