History is what accounts for the different reactions Mexicans and Americans (including Mexican Americans) have had to the news that the Mexican postal service just issued a sheet of Memín Pingüín stamps.
Having grown up in Mexico in the early 1960s, I was one of those children who read the Memín Pingüín comics religiously and awaited each new issue with great enthusiasm. Memín was everything the press reports have mentioned: lovable, silly, lazy, bumbling, disobedient and adoring of his mother. His mother, in fact, was a hardworking single woman doing every possible domestic job available to her to support herself and her mischievous child. She was strict with him, punishing him severely for his foolishness in an attempt to ensure a better future for him.
Memín's mother was also every inch a stereotype familiar to Americans: short and heavy and dressed in a white turban, just like Aunt Jemima. She also spoke Spanish "poorly," with an imagined Afro-Caribbean accent of some unidentified type. I loved her, just as much as I loved Memín. They were the only black personalities, real or fictional, I ever knew in Mexico. [...]
| Continue Myrna Santiago's excellent San Francisco Chronicle essay "Mexican comic character -- lovable or loathsome?: Different past, different perception"
posted in articles on July 6, 2005 11:52 AM | t (0)
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