The Obscene Machine Goes Tex[t]-Mex and Chinese

E493 reporter Melissa Soltman checks in with a report that spans the Rio Grande River to the Yangtze!

Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007
From: "Melissa Soltman"
To: "Bill Nericcio"
Subject: blogs

Hi Professor Nericcio,

I stumbled across some interesting Tex[t]-Mex situations that I wanted to bring to your attention. I was at an award ceremony for my friend at UCSD, and a Professor Paul Pickowicz gave a lecture on his first visit to China in 1971, when there were no diplomatic relations between the US and China. It was right at the time of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He bought many posters home with him that were propaganda posters during the revolution. He said that a lot of people today think they are funny, and while the stereotypes show him why people laugh, at the time they were very serious. Sometimes intentionally, they show many mostly hidden aspects of Chinese life during the cultural revolution. The posters resemble those in your opening chapter of Tex[t]-Mex and reflect your argument regarding stereotypes, how engraved in society they are and their consequences. I also thought it was interesting that two countries (US and China) can actually be linked socially when they had nothing to do with each other diplomatically.... Anyway, I thought these might be class worthy. ...