5/9/2023 0 Comments Crazy la paint 2 hours![]() Speedy’s four Academy Award nominations tie him with Anthony Quinn for most ever by an actor of Mexican descent. When we don’t have much, we gotta protect what we have, you know? I actually get it: In the 100-plus years of Tinseltown, he remains the most popular and successful Mexican character ever created. Meanwhile, just a handful of Latinos were nominated for this year’s Academy Awards - but Iglesias, Derbez, and other Speedy defenders don’t seem to care. “We LOVE Speedy because he’s smart and fast,” wrote Eugenio Derbez, another comic who will voice him in his upcoming Speedy feature. Recently, New York Times columnist Charles Blow said Speedy cartoons “helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans.”Īnd yet time and time again, Mexicans - the very group you’d think would hate Speedy the most - rose to defend his honor. The Cartoon Network did the same in the late 1990s. ABC banned him from its airwaves during the 1980s “because the title character presents a stereotypical image that is not offset by any other Latino television characters,” according to a 1981 Los Angeles Times story. Speedy turned into a pariah in the decades after his heyday, placed by Hollywood executives and pundits in the same racist purgatory of Old Hollywood as Stepin Fetchit, “We don’t need no steenkin’ badges,” and Charlie Chan. Did I mention the sombrero? It’s as big as his body. The typical Speedy plot casts him as a thief and a cad, and his fellow Mexican mice as lazy, drunk and happily living amongst trash. The non-Latino voice actor Mel Blanc voiced “the fastest mouse in all of Mexico” with a stereotypical accent and nonsense Spanglish. His name comes from a popular 1950s-era anti-Mexican sex joke. ![]() The raza rodent quickly picked up awards (four Oscar nominations and one win in just six years) but also critics who saw Speedy for what he is: His plots were always simple - Speedy antagonized Sylvester the Cat and other assorted felines, usually in a dispute involving cheese - but effective. cartoon mouse debuted in 1953 and immediately became a hit on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Pancho Villa? Emiliano Zapata? Vicente Fernandez? So they tried everything possible to dim his star - but we Mexicans always fought loudly against any attempts to cancel our compadre. ![]() Polite society told us we shouldn’t worship this bad hombre because he made Mexicans look bad. My family and so many others cheered on his exploits, imagining ourselves as soldiers in his brigade. His war cry went straight from our televisions and movie screens into our hearts and minds. As a rising power, China should be invited to share in these discussions, by both exercising its voice and implementing its share of policy changes.He blazed through my childhood like a sombrero-clad comet, terrorizing gringo villains in the name of us downtrodden Mexicans. The right way to approach the Asians, and particularly the Chinese, is by discussing their responsibility for the health of an open world economy on which all depend. Serious multilateral discussion in which the US leads but does not attempt to dictate. Which leaves only one viable policy course Under this alternative, the US would bully China into making a big adjustment of its exchange rate and macroeconomic policies.įirst, China is far from the only country that needs to change its policies second, the Chinese would find making such concessions to public pressure from the US an intolerable repetition of the humiliations they endured in the 19th and 20th centuries and, third, they would almost certainly do the bare minimum, which would exacerbate ill will without rectifying the situation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |