By Josh Kun

jksfbg@aol.com

The explosive century has arrived.

Daniel Valdez, "América de los Indios"

FREQUENCIES

The Ford Taurus with chipped silver paint and missing rims was heading east, away from Los Angeles and Chino and Fontana, away from all the fast-food off-ramps and Korean dental marts, and aiming straight for the desert suburbs of the Southwest. The guy behind the wheel had on a black leather jacket and a cowboy hat. An Olde English decal that spelled out "NOGALES" was laid out across the back window like a chest tattoo. There was a Mexican flag whipping over the driver's side and an American flag over the passenger's side.

It was barely 7 a.m., usually too early for a good metaphor about American life, but this one was easy. Welcome to California: Mexico is driving, America is riding shotgun, and Nogales is on the move. "We are the new world. You are so old," Pepito, the San Francisco-via-Tijuana and Havana duo, were singing through the speakers over a quiet electric storm of blipped beats. "We are your best hope, get out, get out, let it go."

The argument with "the new world" as a colonial PR slogan was that it was bankrolled by European myopia and conquistador arrogance. The new world was new only to the guys in the armor, to those for whom it wasn't already centuries old-hat. But Pepito and the Taurus inspire another interpretation. The problem with "the new world" – even when Colin Farrell gets involved and it's beautifully shot by Terrence Malick – was that it left newness in old-school hands. To see the future these days, better to look south than east. "Old Mexico," brought to you by a next-gen branch of the same cultural marketing firm that came up with "the new world," is new America, where millions of Mexican Indians brave Border Patrol bullets in the back to build a binational civilization with no pyramids, just factories and farm fields.

Or meat-packing plants. That's the hub for SoCal's Sesshu Foster, anyway, whose debut novel, Atomik Aztex (just out from NoCal's City Lights), casts the future as a Mexi-dystopia headquartered at the Farmer John plant in East Los Angeles. His lead visionary is Zenzontli, the Keeper of the House of Darkness of the Aztex, and in this new world the Aztecs have won and the conquest of the Americas is rewritten as just one of many lost Spanish battles. European hearts were pulled out and sacrificed then, and Zenzontli and his crew of trash-talking Aztek warriors are doing the same in the 20th century, now off to Russia to pull a suicide blitz on Stalingrad and out-Nazi the Nazis. For Zenzontli, the old world is in the domination seat, "new" only makes sense if it's in Nahuatl, and California is the kingdom of "Aztek teknospirituality and kommunist economics."

Foster knows borders don't just divide worlds, they also mirror them, so this Aztek world is the A-side of a hallucinatory hit single. "The Wurlitzer of the Universe is packed with 78 RPM realities side by side," he tells us early on. "Get ready to drop your dime." Turns out the B-side of the Aztek present is a nightmare of working-class Mexican California. The Aztek warriors are haunted by the possibility that in another world – a previous one or one to come – they are not supreme warriors with plumed feathers tucked into their hair but beaten-down Mexican illegals holding down night shifts as pork-slaughtering factory workers who haven't won a thing. "I crossed deserts to get here," Zenzontli's alter ego bemoans. "When 19 other vatos were asphyxiated in a boxcar locked in the Arizona sun, who do you think was the last left alive sucking air out of a tiny rust-hole?"

So forget the Taurus with dual citizenship. For Foster, the master metaphor belongs to Farmer John, a blood-and-guts-drenched killing floor where 1,800 hogs lose their heads to circular saws and get their bellies ripped open before each sunrise. This is how history happens, how cultures take first place, in bloodbaths covered up by industrial-strength chlorine, on meat hooks that dangle rows of splayed, dripping carcasses. Civilization, Foster warns, always comes with an unbearable smell.

Zenzontli ends up as the Skidrow Slasher, becoming a "night stalker"-style serial killer with an MO of Aztek human heart sacrifice, but he just as easily could have become an activist with a Brown Buffalo alias (Oscar Zeta Acosta) or, even more fitting for Foster's rogues' gallery of urban dread, an R&B singer who goes by Cannibal and leads a quartet of Headhunters (Frankie Garcia). Cannibal and the Headhunters, who also had a Scar and a Rabbit in their ranks, didn't do the one about being in love with Farmer John's daughter (that was another Eastside unit, the Blendells), but they did do the one that Farmer John workers probably danced to most in the '60s, "Land of a Thousand Dances."

Though they were influenced by a black band from a nearby housing project that Zenzontli would have loved, Zulu and the Warriors, there's little ferocious and bloody about the album they put out on East LA's Rampart Records in 1965 (just reissued by Vampisoul). Their music, deft R&B howled by the son of Mexican immigrants, was neither strictly Aztec nor strictly meat plant, but it was certainly the beginning of California rock's new world. It didn't even need lyrics, just a few naa-na-na-na-naa's, an improvised urban chant as ancient as the future.

JOSH KUN READS FROM HIS BOOK, AUDIOTOPIA : MUSIC, RACE, AND AMERICA (UC PRESS) Jan. 25, 7:30 p.m. Cody's Telegraph Avenue 2454 Telegraph, Berk. (510) 845-7852 SESSHU FOSTER READING AND EVENTS Thurs/19-Sat/21 www.citylights.com