Laugh Riot
Next to the screen stand Esteban Zul and Lalo Lopez, two soft-spoken emissaries of the PVLA. The pair are also the creators of Pocho Magazine, which they describe as “a Mad magazine for mad Chicanos.” Since 1990, Zul and Lopez have managed to squeeze out seven issues. Turning a term of derision into a badge of honor, Pocho’s strategy of Chicanoizing popular culture and traditional Mexican folkways satirizes life on both sides of the border. It offers a culturally schizophrenic pastiche, taking jabs at everything from barrio life to U.S. immigration policies. While the zine has been in limbo for nearly a year, the Pochos have blossomed into a multimedia operation. Lopez, cofounder of the Chicano Secret Service performance troupe, writes the “Mexiled” column for L.A. Weekly and draws the cartoon L.A. Cucaracha under the name Lalo Alcaraz. Zul heads up the Berkeley-based hip-hop group Aztlan Nation. Together they’ve performed on Pacifica radio and produced videos with other artists. The Pochos also run a site on the World Wide Web called the Virtual Varrio (silcom.com/-tonkin/pocho/varrio.html). Recent posts include Dia de la Independencia, inspired both by Mexican Independence Day and by this summer’s blockbuster movie; sombrero-shaped spaceships zap the White House with a jalapeno laser (“The next time you call them aliens might be your last!”). Since affirmative action has been eliminated in California, the page also advertises the “National Pochismo Institute,” which offers classes in Transcendental Lowriding, Pochteca History, and business (“Raza Swap Meet Technology”).
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Lopez unloads a cardboard box of jingling bottles and proclaims, “Malt liquor for everybody.”
“I gotta tell you, we are all about free malt liquor,” Zul says. “It enhances our product and loosens the pocketbooks at the end of the show when we sell our merchandise.” Plastic cups are passed out, and Zul walks around pouring from a communal 45-ouncer. Most heartily welcome the ghetto-style aperitif.
“That’s what you call arte,” Lopez explains. “Art so good you have to spell it with four letters.” He introduces the next video, “some animation by one of our Pocho agents, Alex Rivera from New York, and it is called Cybracero.” Lopez explains that the film takes off from the bracero program, which promoted immigration during World War II when Mexican arms [brazos] were needed for agricultural work. From this program came the mass importation of braceros, contracted laborers from Mexico. Cybracero uses stock footage of the actual bracero program, news clips, and slick editing to depict a future in which Mexican labor can be employed to pick crops via the Internet. An enthusiastic narrator says, “The United States Government Department of Labor is excited to announce a new program to get the job done: the Cybracero Program. The presence of braceros contributed to a climate of racial and economic suspicion; evidence of major tension was not hard to find.” The video cuts to footage of last April’s brutal beating of Mexican immigrants by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies in El Monte, California. It then switches to an animated sequence showing robots in sombreros picking fruit in southwestern orchards. “Through the new program, Mexican workers can, from their Mexican village, watch their live Internet feed, decide what fruit is ripe, what branch needs pruning, and what bush needs watering. For the American farmer, it’s all the labor without the worker. In American lingo, cybracero means a worker who poses no threat of becoming a citizen, and that means quality products at low financial and social cost to you, the American consumer!” The video shows a little blond girl drinking orange juice, then fades to black.
“During the campaign for Proposition 187 in California, we were all pretty pissed off and wanted to think of a way that we could attack pro-187 people and get free publicity doing it. So we thought we’d take it to the point of absurdity and become militant self-deportationists.”
Lopez made an encore performance as Daniel D. Portado at the Republican National Convention, where he was accepted into the GOP family. “They loved us, but some liberal photographers there talked shit to me, and we almost got our asses kicked by Chicano Brown Berets in San Diego.” Hispanics for Wilson did not end with the ill-fated Wilson campaign–they continued to solicit donations on the Pocho Web page for their political action committee, WETPAC, to promote the conservative Hispanic-American agenda through reverse immigration, affirmative inaction, pro-Olestra cookouts, and a Million Mexican March to the border. Though some of their critics see the hoax as outright mockery of Latino efforts for immigration rights, the Pochos maintain that their performances portray right-wingers as buffoons while injecting a sense of humor and irony into the sometimes preachy, self-righteous cant of Chicano activism.
