Text read to present Jaime Hernandez at UCSD

Rock n’ roll was a victim of the student massacre in Mexico City in 1968. The left considered it an imperialist cultural alienation while the right and the government associated it with unacceptable, radical and revolutionary youth. It became an unattainable object of desire. Rock concerts were prohibited. Scratched and burned out movie prints of Woodstock, Monterrey Pop and other concert movies were screened at the University film theatre to a desperate crowd that would danced undressed and stoned, clapping for an encore that would never come. The “Nopal Curtain” made us ghosts that could see but were not seen. Bands were not allowed to play in public and much less to air their stuff in the radio. Since the whole thing had to be underground the bands were way out there. Like the punk band Maria Bonita formed by the fat brothers Lafontaine that were also known as “Las Toronjas.” Mario was a soul drag queen chained by Juan Carlos who was a gothic industrial dressed like a priest while playing the synthesizers. Juan Carlos did not speak English but it was not necessary for him since he thought that he could communicate through his outfit with Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees.

There was a rumor in my high school that Frank Zappa was Mexican. His real name was supposed to be Francisco Zapata and supposedly he changed it like Sam the Sham. My search for punk rock took me to London in the eighties were I discovered Love n’ Rockets. This time it had to be for real. These stories had to be about my friends and family. Otherwise why could there be Ortiz’s vatos and punksters. Somehow my father didn’t tell me about cousins Speedy and Izzy but I read about them and Palomar had to be somewhere there between Colima and Sinaloa where some relatives are. These comic books reconciled the schizophrenia of growing up playing punk rock in a major industrialized and polluted city, dreaming (and living) with science fiction with the crazy stories of my family in the countryside. I never read that a shark ate my aunt when she was having her period and that the shark was later killed by my uncle with a machete but I remember seeing the picture. I did not read neither about another uncle that would see the devil every time he would encounter a goat. However I read about the American anthropologist that timed one of the kids from Palomar breaking the 100 m. world record. A record that exists outside history like everything that happens were nothing is supposed to happen.

Now my platonic love Hopey is growing old and Maggie too. How do Jaime and Gilbert know about California, punk rock, women, Latin America, and whoever “us” is so well? We should find out. Carlos Monsivais the famous Mexican writer referred to my generation as “the first generation of gringos born in Mexico.” Love and Rockets proof him wrong. Perhaps we are the first generation of Chicanos from Oxnard born in Mexico.