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Crazy Loco Love - Graphic memoir portrays anti-Mexican racism as an open sore

Reviewed by William A. Nericcio
September 28, 2008

In a weird way, Victor Villaseñor's “Crazy Loco Love” is the bizzaro-world soul mate of Myriam Gurba's recent “Dahlia Season” – though Gurba's pieces track the obsessional compulsive extremes of LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) protagonists in Long Beach while Villaseñor chronicles the sexual dark side of a similarly eccentric, but decidedly heterosexual, protagonist from North County. Both books are visceral and both are also utterly American and Chicano, even if the lurid pages of veterano Villaseñor's memoir will not be to everyone's taste.

What a book!

Villaseñor, who reminds us that reviewers compared his early writings to Steinbeck, now writes more like Carlos Castañeda filtered through the prism of Elizabeth Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“Crazy Loco Love” aspires to be more than mere memoir: Villaseñor's book is an outrageous mezcla/mix of autobiography, mysticism, folk tales and more. It seeks nothing less than to unite the universe in love. (It even ends with Villaseñor inviting readers to Thanksgiving dinner. No, I am not kidding.)

By the time readers finish Villaseñor's odyssey – or “Odyssey,” since, at one point, Villaseñor's philandering Eve gives him a copy of Homer's book and Villaseñor senses his destiny to be “our” Homer – you have wandered through a thicket of graphic memories. They include: Villaseñor as an angry baby whipping off his diaper and urinating “in his [father's] open snoring mouth”; Villaseñor fantasizing about hot sex with a septuagenarian; and his cathartic nightmare recollections of being molested by an older male (a cousin was inculcated into boy-love by a Catholic priest). Lastly, in one of the most bizarre scenes in American literature, the author attempts to perpetrate a hard-to-read, monstrous act of self-castration. Why? To make sure that Latino monstrosities like himself don't besmirch the blond destiny of a white California.

He fails. More on this below.

This is one of the most honest memoirs I have ever read, akin to peeking into the author's diary. There are these lines about young Victor being saved from castration: “My eyes filled with tears. It was almost like God, Himself, had sent my brother Joseph in the form of a Red Eagle, to stop me from castrating myself.” Where is Tony Soprano's psychiatrist (Dr. Jennifer Melfi) when you need her?

This is an R-rated Mexican “Wonder Years” meets “Father Knows Best.” At a dance, Villaseñor fears his “thing would leap out so big that everyone would see my pants sticking out.” Villaseñor is also our Chicano Walter Mitty, as when he imagines that he “sounds like those good guys you saw in the movies defending the heroine's honor.” In still other places, his book reads like an earnest, religious version of Roth's “Portnoy's Complaint,” relocated to Carlsbad and Oceanside and set on a rich Mexican's ranch.

But there are other kinds of revelations in this volume. Villaseñor's epiphany in Mexico regarding his motherland's mix of ethnicities is brilliant, and his sustained meditation on the role of his strong father is a natural correlative to the mother/abuela love he mines in other works. At times, this gets a tad saccharine, but he always seems to keep things dark enough, “playing blue.”

With this volume, the reading public, in Southern California and beyond, gets a grotesque and naked mirror, a shattered/shattering looking glass that reveals the extreme results of anti-Mexican racism.

Villaseñor treats us to insider revelations, with Anglo military schoolmates shooting undocumented workers in the knees, teachers who presume his illiteracy is a function of his “race”; ridiculing Anglo laughter haunting the child Villaseñor throughout.

“My God, papa,” he writes, “'by sixteen, I was so brainwashed into being ashamed of being un ... un Mexicano that I ... that I ... I ... I had to bite my fist to keep from screaming. I tried to castrate myself, so I wouldn't bring any more inferior people in this world.”

Here, then, we read the memoir of a victim of anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican xenophobic hatred: California as one big Abu Ghraib for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike; California as a nurturing gulag for armies of psychologically dysfunctional Chicanos for tomorrow.

Not since John Fante's “Ask the Dust” have we been smacked in the face so vividly by a work that reveals the psychic (and aesthetic) consequences of growing up hated in California and America. This is the macabre flip side of the quaint mini-malls, beaches and scenic vistas of North County, beach-area communities that revel in their naturalistic excesses while masking their grotesque Hieronymus Bosch-like dimensions, reeling with obsessional anti-Mexican loathing.

But read it yourself and see what you think! I am one of those “scholars” who, in Villaseñor's view, “keep seeing things – as they were trained to see.” But this scholar knows a bizarre book when he sees one and “Crazy Loco Love” may be the strangest one of all.

Damn Ron! That's quite the review! You should be a writer.....oh, missed the part about a"review by Mr. Nericcio".
Think I'll look for it when I get the history books consumed. I do loves me some history!

The more you understand the history down here the more you will come to understand this place. Mexican roots, history and background are quite different than NOB and why their viewpoints on so many things so different as well...

Originally Posted by BajaGringo

Villaseñor, who reminds us that reviewers compared his early writings to Steinbeck, now writes more like Carlos Castañeda filtered through the prism of Elizabeth Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love.”

A not-so veiled exposé of deceipt since Carlo Castañeda tried to present fiction as fact. What a fraud. He only had a following due to the drug-addled times of his writing. If his books came out today, they would be rolled on a cardboard tube and hung in the crapper. Not exactly the durability we look for in literature.

Originally Posted by BajaGringo

The more you understand the history down here the more you will come to understand this place. Mexican roots, history and background are quite different than NOB and why their viewpoints on so many things so different as well...

We arn't allowed to understand the place. Mexicans, more commonly the educated, like to think that their culture is exclusive territory and can't be deciphered by those outsiders who arn't born with the Mixtec Rosetta Stone drifting through their veins.
A most notable example of this exclusivity is "The Labrynth of Solitude" by Octavio Paz. It's said to be an in-depth portrait of "The Mexican" and, therefore can't be realistically translated. It's only for those with the inborn ability to know.
In spite of this private compass in the blood, Mexicans will claim to be lost in their parentage; some claiming kinship to their Mixtec Mother and others to their Conqueror Father. I guess it all depends on which union one belongs to.

Another oddity circling around the private, supposed incomprehensible nature of Paz's book is that millions of copies that were/are still sold around the world in various languages and cultures. Not bad marketing for a mystery with no end, but Mexicans will to this day claim that the vast majority of those readers are incapable of understanding what they have read.

So true, Dennis. It has seemed to me that the yin and yang of the indigenous vs. the conquistadors has its own perpetual flow, much like the tides. It lends a uniqueness to the Mexican culture that I truly believe few in the US can grasp.

Originally Posted by Bajahowodd

So true, Dennis. It has seemed to me that the yin and yang of the indigenous vs. the conquistadors has its own perpetual flow, much like the tides. It lends a uniqueness to the Mexican culture that I truly believe few in the US can grasp.

You're sounding like the Mexicans who wrap themselves with clear plastic in their secret culture. They think they're hidden.
What is it about them that makes them think that Anthropoligsts, Sociologists and all other breed of scientist can't break their code?
It's their need to be secretive, to play their cards close to the chest. It's the last refuge of the vanquished.

We understand the myriad of cultures that form our composit. We understand the Navajo and the Nez Perce. We understand them because we study them.
We understand the Irish and the Italians because they force us to do that.
Why can't we understand the Mexicans? They arn't Martians.

Originally Posted by DENNIS

You're sounding like the Mexicans who wrap themselves with clear plastic in their secret culture. They think they're hidden.
What is it about them that makes them think that Anthropoligsts, Sociologists and all other breed of scientist can't break their code?
It's their need to be secretive, to play their cards close to the chest. It's the last refuge of the vanquished.

We understand the myriad of cultures that form our composit. We understand the Navajo and the Nez Perce. We understand them because we study them.
We understand the Irish and the Italians because they force us to do that.
Why can't we understand the Mexicans? They arn't Martians.

Not saying we cannot understand the Mexican culture. Just stating that way too many folks NOB don't have a clue as to its complexity.

And since you mentioned NOB native Americans, I'd say that goes for them, too. Interesting that you should mention tribes. I have spent a huge amount of time in and about the "four corners" area. I have studied the Navajo, the Hopi, the Anasazi, among others. I admit to feeling an overwhelming sense of spiritually when in those lands. It's palpable, but inexplicable. Manifest destiny be damned. Just maybe some of our Native Americans, NOB or SOB, got it right. Just because the European culture landed in their backyard and had a different set of sensibilities, doesn't mean that they were right (in the long haul).

Originally Posted by Bajahowodd

Not saying we cannot understand the Mexican culture. Just stating that way too many folks NOB don't have a clue as to its complexity.

And since you mentioned NOB native Americans, I'd say that goes for them, too. Interesting that you should mention tribes. I have spent a huge amount of time in and about the "four corners" area. I have studied the Navajo, the Hopi, the Anasazi, among others. I admit to feeling an overwhelming sense of spiritually when in those lands. It's palpable, but inexplicable. Manifest destiny be damned. Just maybe some of our Native Americans, NOB or SOB, got it right. Just because the European culture landed in their backyard and had a different set of sensibilities, doesn't mean that they were right (in the long haul).

Have had the same "sense" when in that area myself... really can't explain the "vibe" ...I got, but on each occasion we have been in that area... had much the same experience..

Know some have much the same experience in Sedona too ...

Very interesting...

VIBES??? C'mon boys. You're letting the hype have it's way with your sensitivities, although open minds do welcome confusion. Go up and spend a week at Esalen and you'll see what I mean.

Originally Posted by DENNIS

VIBES??? C'mon boys. You're letting the hype have it's way with your sensitivities, although open minds do welcome confusion. Go up and spend a week at Esalen and you'll see what I mean.

Nah! I am not easily influenced. It is what it is. Trust me. Or not.

Originally Posted by Bajahowodd

Nah! I am not easily influenced. It is what it is. Trust me. Or not.

What we need is an online OUIJA BOARD. Just run your haunted fingers across the screen.

Dennis, never walk into a area ... that caused the hair on the back of your neck stand up....

just saying....

Originally Posted by wessongroup

Dennis, never walk into a area ... that caused the hair on the back of your neck stand up....

just saying....

Gotta stay outta the breeze, Wiley. It's not good for us ol' folks.

As I recall, back in the day, Casey Stengel employed a ouija board when he managed the Yankees during a historically successful run. Mickey Mantle. Yogi Berra. Whitey Ford.

Actually, as a young pup, I knew theae guys and others, (Skowron, Bauer). I worked at a country club in Manhasset New York. Ford was the tipper from Hell. These guys would come in in the morning and start drinking, on the day they had a night game at Yankee Stadium. Guess maybe I was Mickey's enabler. Always thought that if Mickey didn't have the drinking problem, he may have just gone on to become the greatest MLB had ever seen.

We've gone far afield here, haven't we.
I do think other cultures that aren't as possession oriented may have a leg up in these times.
However, the rich in all cultures value possessions. Ain't no gettin' around that one.
I guess it is up to us more common folk to shape a new paradigm in whatever small way we can. If enough small ripples occur what will the result be. I will and have spent a lifetime doing my best to impact the small areas that I could.
I find it somewhat amusing to read about the perspective of no one being able to truly understand Mexican history.
To think that any human behavior is not understandable overestimates our complexity. Blah, blah, blah....

Originally Posted by soulpatch

I find it somewhat amusing to read about the perspective of no one being able to truly understand Mexican history.

It's more the Mexican psyche, the soul, than the history, but I agree with you.

Originally Posted by DENNIS

We arn't allowed to understand the place. Mexicans, more commonly the educated, like to think that their culture is exclusive territory and can't be deciphered by those outsiders who arn't born with the Mixtec Rosetta Stone drifting through their veins.

I agree to a certain extent Dennis, but it is something that many foreigners who come to the US experience as well, until they finally immerse themselves in the NOB way of life by learning the language (fluently), history and reaching outside their cultural comfort zone. I keep telling people that to really understand this place and the people you need to become fluent enough and culturally immersed to be able to grasp it. Spanish literature is quite rich in the use of adjectives and play on words. To be able to truly comprehend it you need to not only understand the literal translation but often the cultural reference and history. Quite often there is a play on words with double meanings, some meant simply to garnish a laugh but often it carries deep social/cultural/historical significance.

Awhile back there was a thread on Nomad about a sign someone saw in Tijuana or Playas (if I remember correctly), asking for an explanation to its significance. At the time I offered what I am quite sure was a very close translation to the real meaning but it was rejected by most as it simply didn´t neatly fit their online translation or match what they looked up in their dictionary. Most never stopped to think that this was not something a gringo would ever write or understand from a life experience point of view. It takes time and immersion to really "get it" sometimes and I probably benefited from nearly a lifetime of speaking Spanish (Castellano) before arriving here as well as working here all these years and marrying into a Mexican family where we speak only Spanish at home.

There is some snootiness I have found among certain levels of the educated here but I found similar "nose in the ozone" types back home as well. Many who I went to school with years ago and some whom I even looked up to. Today I wouldn´t waste five minutes of my time on them. The world is way too big to paint any single mass of people with a thin brush and that holds true on both sides of the border IMHO...

My wife often says things to me in Spanish that she says she wishes she had the words for in English....
Fortunately for me some things just don't translate directly.