He danced our dances and dressed like a jarocho (a native of Veracruz) and sounded like my country cousins, to be honest. I never saw a stereotype when I first saw his cartoons as a boy - I saw my culture at a time when the English-language media didn’t bother with us outside of crime and immigration. I’m no spoilsport or wokoso (a portmanteau of “woke” and a mocoso - a snot-nosed brat) about the cute rascal. What other “Mexican” thespian has two big-budget projects slated for next year? Not Edward James Olmos or Salma Hayek. But Latinos are mostly shut out from the top categories. The 2021 Oscar nominations celebrate actors, actresses and directors of color. Movies Yes, the Oscar nominations are more ‘diverse.’ But they largely leave out Latinos that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” Decrying the lack of representation in Hollywood, Rock cracked “You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.” His sole win, for an eponymous 1955 cartoon, places Speedy behind Quinn’s two Oscars for most earned by a Mexican actor… because no other Mexican man has ever won an Oscar for acting ever.Ĭhris Rock put this outrage best in a 2014 Hollywood Reporter essay where he described Los Angeles as a place where “there’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people. 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. He blazed through my childhood like a sombrero-clad comet, terrorizing gringo villains in the name of us downtrodden Mexicans.
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