Bordertown

The book is titled "Bordertown" and regards sympathetically for the way los tejanos have been marginalized in the borderlands. It's an artbook, relying on design, montage and photographs to convey their rhetoric. But as well respected it is visually, there is come clever use of language as well. They set the tone for the rest of the book, not with the opening paragraph, but with a hand written blurb on the second. It clearly declares their book notjust as art, but also as ethos propaganda.

Yo Tengo un pistole

Con manago de marfil

para matar todos los gringos

Qui viennen por ferrocarril!

(I have a pistol

With a marbel handle

With which to kill all the Americans

Who come by railroad)

-Folk tune popular in Chihuahua durring the

Mexican revolution

and the Mexican american war.

HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI

Never was there a more dense, multi-faceted tome. Every sentence, capitalization, indentation, and alliteration has secondary and tertiary meanings. The author, still unknown for certain was a cryptomaniac. Even the illustrations contain coded messages.

It was printed in about the year 1500 in a language created by its author using italian grammar with words from latin, tuscan and greek. Translation of the book into english was not even attempted until 1952, but not completed uuntil 1999. Translator Prof. Joscelyn Godwin of Colgate U. did his best to hold the original authors neologisms. The result is gorgeous but also nearly unreadable.

"In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral and most miserable site of the algent and fetorific lake stood daevious Tisiphone, efferal and cruel with her vaparine capillament, her meschine and miserable soul, implacably furibund."

The original pseudo tuscan texts are here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp000.htm