Ilan Stavans, Mr. Spic Goes to Washington (Soft Skull Press, 2008), $15.95, paperback.
By Frederick Aldama
Latino author-artists are tearing it up
in the world of comics. Gilbert and Jaime of Los Bros
Hernandez (Love
& Rockets)
continue to spin out all variety of contemporary characters
and stories from angsty teenage Latino suburbanites to
polyamorous LA barrio denizens. Others like Rhode Montijo
(Pablo's
Inferno), Javier
Hernandez (El
Muerto), and
Rafael Navarro (Sonambulo) mix-n-match myth and genre to bring to
life a variety of complex young and old Latino superheroic
characters. Others like Carlos Saldaña (Burrito) and Lalo Alcaraz (La Cucaracha) anthropomorphize four-and-more legged
ones to satirize an anti-Latino US society. A recent
addition to the Latino fold: the satirical
Mr. Spic Goes to
Washington by
Ilan Stavans (author) and Roberto Weil (artist).
The story follows the protagonist, Samuel Patricio Inocenio
Cárdenas or "S.P.I.C.," as he attempts to bring his East LA
grass-roots political idealism to the Senate floor in DC. A
series of events lead to some back-door political
maneuverings that push Mr. Spic swiftly up the political
rungs. With Latinos as the largest minority group in the
US, there's pressure for Washington's power elite to elect
a Latino as Democratic Senator: "too many colored people
out there. You have to give them the impression they
matter." However, while Mr. Spic's ambitions are admirably
grand--to look at "the nation's power elite en los ojos and
reverse centuries of abuse and discrimination"--Mr. Spic
quickly finds himself swept to the Senate's silent margins.
He refuses to bite his tongue, however: "Órale, Senate
Majority leader. I respectfully submit a proposal to expand
Latino representation in the country. Ya es hora, it's time
to make America more inclusive, less monolithic, ¿o no?"
Mr. Spic's rebellious ways--including the threat to
petition for the secession of California and the
Southwest--don't bode well for him, to say the least.
Mr. Spic Goes to Washington is a satire, a political satire. The
title already establishes and the narrative tone confirms
this. The story proper opens with the narrator stating: "A
busy cabinet meeting was taking place at the office of Los
Angeles Mayor Samuel Patricio Inocencio Cárdenas, alias
S.P.I.C., ¡El vato loco!" Weil's iconic cartoony drawings
allude to and align Mr. Spic with other contemporary race-focused
comic book and comic strip satires such as Lalo
Alcaraz's La Migra
Mouse (2004)
and La
Cucaracha (2004),
Aaron McGruder's and Reginald Hudlin's Birth of a Nation
(2005) and Grady
Klein's The Lost
Colony (2006), to
name a few. Not surprisingly, as the story unfolds,
Mr. Spic
aims to tell us something
about the dirty underbelly of US society and politics,
especially vis-à-vis us Latinos. We learn, for instance,
that less than 1% of school teachers in Latino majority
cities like Los Angeles are Mexican American, that we don't
need a wall between the US and Mexico because "the two
countries are forever intricately linked," and that there
isn't a memorial in DC to commemorate "the thousands of
people who die every year dehydrated while walking the
desert in search of the American Dream." We also learn
certain facts of Latino history, including, by way of the
Puerto Rican "Janitor" character, that Lolita Lebrón's
struggle for Puerto Rico's independence from the US led to
a life sentence in prison.
To smooth the way for its taking its reader back to the
classroom, Stavans and Weil use devices like the flashback
and ellipses (jumps in narrative time) to slow down and
speed up the reading-viewing process. These devices also
importantly allow Stavans and Weil to efficiently tell the
story: to fill in certain details of Mr. Spic's past that
will play a role in his ultimate demise, for instance. And,
they include several "Aha' moments for reader-viewers.
Employing the self-reflexive device used by fiction author
Julio Cortázar in his first and only comic book,
Fantomas
(1975), here too we see the
author, Ilan Stavans, appear as a figure in
Mr.
Spic. Mr. Spic
receives a postcard from "Ilan Stavans" that says, "Orale
Vato!" On another, Stavans appears as a figure peeing in a
urinal, eavesdropping on Mr. Spic as he speaks with the
"Janitor."
This said, Mr.
Spic doesn't take
full advantage of the double (visual and verbal) narrative
form of comic books. Of course, there is no formula for how
comic book author-artists should use the visual and verbal
narrative elements--their combination is infinite. However,
when there is a consistent subordination of one over the
other, the beat at the heart of the medium stops. In the
case of Mr.
Spic, it's the
verbal elements that dominate. The visuals are present, but
less to propel the story forward and more as scene filler:
objects in a particular place, clothing styles, height and
physique of characters, and so on. Certainly, a heavy
leaning on the verbal or text elements as its narrative
steam makes this .
Not only does Mr.
Spic not take
full advantage of the comic book's double narrator form--it
reads more like a Prince Valiant comic where you really do
not need the visuals to get the story--but its dominant
verbal narrative is too uniform. The late Russian literary
theorist and language philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin,
distinguished between novel and the epic poem, celebrating
the former for its ability to free up the voices, and
worldviews expressed through their voices, that were
otherwise constrained by the authorial voice of the latter.
The voices in Mr.
Spic feel unduly
constrained by their author; the characters never own their
language--it's always the proprietorship of the author. The
result: characters that talk or narrators that describe,
but always as talking heads that foreground the
anti-establishment position of Mr. Spic they never own
never own their language. A case in point. Mr. Spic's
code-switches between English and Spanish but in a way that
we just wouldn't hear in everyday Chicano caló speech acts.
You would never hear, "You shouldn't have threatened al
pobre store owner"; rather, you'd hear "you shouldn't have
threatened the pobre store owner." The Spanish mixed with
English sentences that the characters speak are too
perfectly welded together; they're written in too mannered
a grammatical written standard English and Spanish. It's
not that an author shouldn't be precise in their use of
language. It's just that the precision should stylize in
such a way that conveys the feel of the language actually
used by a character with a distinctive identity and
worldview. This doesn't help enrich Mr. Spic's identity as
a character with an already limited set of personality
traits. And when the story tries to breath complexity into
Mr. Spic's character, it's too out of character and falls flat. During
an interview with t.v. reporter Jorge Ramos, the Mr. Spic
who has up till that point been identified as seriously
about change, responds: "he makes Latinos look cool on tv".
This is a guy who takes more than seriously his politics,
and not someone who kowtows to showbiz spectacles. It
doesn't work.
Perhaps, we should be more forgiving of Mr. Spic. Given that it is a comic book interested less in
storytelling and more in educating, perhaps we should let
slide its near total reliance on features that tell us,
rather than show us the story. I think of the comic book
mode used in the pamphlets distributed by the two political
parties, the PAN and PRI, in Mexico's last elections.
Clearly, these were less interested in storytelling and
more into using the comic book form to peddle their
political wares. And, much like these political pamphlets,
Stavans and Weil also assume a certain background
knowledge. There are many Latino cultural references--the
story mentions the band Café Tacuba along with poet Juan
Felipe Herrera, author Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, as well as
activists like Corky Gonzalez and Rubén Salazar, among
others--but with few exceptions, if you don't know the
references, you won't get much more than that they support
Mr. Spic's political positions. More importantly, if we
redeem Mr.
Spic by reading
as a political pamphlet, we might wonder of its politics.
It promotes a sense that ideas and the individual alone
representing these ideas will be the agent of change. Mr.
Spic wants to pass unidentified legislative measures that
will pave the way for a "diverse America where Latinos and
other minorities aren't los de abajo, the underdogs" (35),
for example. Yet, Mr. Spic also tells its readers that while change
is in the hands of individuals like Mr. Spic (César Chávez,
Che Guevara, Benito Juárez, and others are also
referenced), such individuals stand no chance in a world
governed by a corrupt power elite. So why bother.
Either way we read Mr. Spic, there's just no air to breath in this
comic book.
