I’ll be deep into road tripping by the time you read this. Moving through a transmogrified world. And of course, I’ll be going through changes of my own. When I get home, I’ll be different, my day-to-day world will be different.
Or is it all a delusion?
Who am I, anyway? The maniac who writes the books and makes that art? Or the nice guy with a job, a wife, a house . . .
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying cyberpunk (does anybody know about the McCarthy Era now that it’s happening again, only worse?). But look me up online and there I am, THE Chicano Cyberpunk!
We don’t get to decide how others perceive us. People keep throwing labels at me, and none of them stick.
Frank Zappa, “Who Are the Brain Police?” (1966): “What do you do when the label comes off / and the plastic’s all melted / and the chrome is too soft?”
I don’t blame them. I’m a rasquache mess of random selections of
my unstable environment. Your handful of popular stereotypes just distort me.
I was in an Afrofuturist anthology. Now I’m going to a Xicanxfuturist one. It’s something new, yet I’ve been doing it all my life.
And I’ll be seventy years old soon.
I’m also a Chicanonaut and the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.
I like the science fiction label because it’s often used to describe what people don’t understand, which is accurate for me. Imagine if I went around calling myself a surrealist aesthetic terrorist creative blasphemer . . .
But who am I really? That guy in the mirror is always surprising me. What did people do before selfies? All those temporary identities melting and evaporating with documentation.
And where am I? In the breakroom of a library, typing this on my phone? Or on the road as you read this?
If I need to, I can become a space vato or a ciberbandido. Maybe I’ll discover a new identity somewhere soon . . .
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