One of the peculiarities of my tendencies when it comes to semiotic hoardings, as you well know, are cameos by Latinas/os in mainstream American media artifacts.
Now Zap Comics were anything but the mainstream back in the day, but they have, over time, entered the effluvial, miasmic flow of pop culture leavings that typify a certain moment, a certain groovy time in American cultural history.
So it is that I chanced upon this cover at the REMARKABLE site, The Golden Age Site.
It is classic R. Crumb fare, a cover for Zap #8, 1975, featuring a psychologically befuddled protagonist (he appears to have auto-trepanned his brain in order to ferret out some sort of existential conundrum), and some top shelf Crumb lines and colors. But what caught my eye in this issue, which I don’t own – one of the few – is the Mexican kid in the window looking to make a dime.
It’s not offensive, really, though the affected “Mexicanized” pidgin English might move one to think so at first – I was actually moved by it.
