The most ridiculous scene in the oc season 1 comes not during the whole oliver arc but instead during marissa cooper's drunken pill popping slow mo collapse when she's in the bar in Tijuana. The camera slow pans across the wall and the faces of exoticized and demonic Mexican men - constructing the racialized other as menacing, mute scenery. It's one of the most racist moments i've seen on
television - worse than Seinfeld. And then came Survivor Race War, which i'll admit to never having seen, but which i anticipate becoming the subject of innumerable undergraduate cultural studies seminar papers for the next decade or so. Ok, back to work.
step off! the mexican monster is a violently quotidian border construct -- worthy of only the most serious and capable academic inquiry.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the Seinfeld reference? Surely you're not talking about the Kramer's Marxist Cigar Factory episode--that was hella funny.
ReplyDeleteDear anonymous person employing bay area exclamations,
ReplyDeleteI was speaking more generally of the racial imaginary of Seinfeld's New York, which is a profoundly white and gentrified politics of space and subjectivity. I would include the dominican cigar-rollers, the puerto-rican day paraders, et al, within this logic.