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Old Myths in Different Packaging: How Pop-culture Affects Interpretation

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According to the National Council for Evaluation of Social Development policy (CONEVAL), 71% of Mexico’s indigenous population live in poverty, with 19.8% of the population between ages 30 and 64 not knowing how to read or write (Evaluation of Social Development Policy). Mexico’s indigenous are disproportionately affected by displacement, lack of opportunities, racism, and poverty, in part due to how they are misrepresented or outright erased both historically and in modern media. 

Through explicit representation, such as with characters like La India Maria, and implicit representation that hollowly homogenizes the Mexican experience into a mestizo, “mixed” identity such as The Book of Life and Disney’s depiction of Latin America through characters like Donald Duck, Mexico’s real-life indigenous people are being actively silenced, infantilized, and erased. 

As a result, we as consumers grow to believe the racialized narrative began by colonial, casta society that Mexican society has assimilated its indigenous, attributing to their erasure, and those that remain are a backwards group that just hasn’t yet “got with the program.” 

A History of Erasure

casta painting

Anibal Quijano’s Coloniality of Power provides a framework for this discussion, in which marginalized groups are encouraged or forced to assimilate into universal identity. This identity is based around the historical context in which Latin America fell under the authority of European rule, its societies restructured into a racial hierarchy that benefitted white Europeans and denied important resources that would allow for social and economic successes to marginalized groups, including the indigenous. This restructuration naturalized the idea of European dominance and the subservience of people of color and is kept alive through its modern depictions until they are associated with reality. But first, some historical context. 

After the implementation of Spanish colonial rule on an indigenous population decimated by European-born disease and Black population forced into enslavement, society was restructured socially and economically along capitalistic racial lines, in which only white, wealthy Europeans could develop more wealth and power. Quijano states, “This was, above all, through a quasi-exclusive association of whiteness with wages and, of course, with the high-order positions in the colonial administration. Thus, each form of labor control was associated with a particular race. Consequently, the control of a specific form of labor could be, at the same time, the control of a specific group of dominated people” (Quijano, pg. 537). As a result, only Europeans could advance socially, and were cemented in their positions as the top of the social hierarchy through a system built of exploiting Black and indigenous people. 

The consequences of this framework on indigenous communities can be seen by the conditions most face in modern-day Mexico, most being displaced, in poverty, and denied access to formal education. In the media, dark skin and indigenous are denied spaces, and in films and pop-culture, they are dehumanized and infantilized. These trends stem from racialized colonial society, as further described by Quijano, “The fact is that from the very beginning of the colonization of America, Europeans associated nonpaid or nonwaged labor with the dominated races because they were “inferior” races. The vast genocide of the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not caused principally by the violence of the conquest nor by the plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place because so many American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced to work until death” (Quijano, pg. 539).

This framework will be applied to how pop-culture and how it represents marginalized communities, especially regarding how stereotypes and misconceptions stemming from the coloniality of power are used to convince the greater public that their depictions are “truths.” 

Explicit Indigenous “Representation...”

The aestheticized images of Mexico and its indigenous in cinema does work to both uplift working-class voices, but also harms by putting out a narrative of homogeneity– that the entirety of Mexico’s working class comes in the same image, fits in the same box, and can be portrayed using the same buzzwords and character tropes to be easily consumed by audiences instead of portraying the indigenous experience with honesty and nuance. 

“La India Maria” played by actress and director Maria Elena Velasco over a decades-long career, became a household name in Mexican families as the underdog character of various movies, but also a major representation of how indigenous women were thought to look like and behave– often to the detriment of real-life, living indigenous people. 

Characterized by her naivety, traditional dress, and limited formal education, La India Maria is portrayed as the backwards indigenous woman comically oblivious to urban Mexican society. The socioeconomic disparities faced by the indigenous working class make it so that affording and receiving a formal education is incredibly difficult, but it is more harmful that characters like La India Maria are infantilized, her quirks and “nativeness” comical. 

Such depictions feed into a prejudiced narrative associated with colonial notions of race and social hierarchy– portraying indigenous in a way that makes them seem like wayward, aimless children in need of assimilation into the bettering system of European colonial society. 

...And Their Implicit Consequences

When The Book of Life (2014), Mexican children and their families were happy to find a fun, charming movie that related to their lives and culture, but there was one interaction that left a bad taste in the mouths of many who expected proper representation by a film embracing Mexican culture. Attributing further to this infantilization of indigenous people are the interactions between two characters: Jorge Sanchez, a conquistador, and Carmelo Sanchez, an Aztec warrior.  Jorge is portrayed as refined, singing opera songs quoting poetry and often mocking the burly and foolish Aztec, calling him a “savage.” 

The portrayal is uncomfortable, and their scenes together are meant to be a dismissive punchline, but what is more concerning is how their roles seem to be naturalized. The “cultured and clever European” and the “dim-witted native clueless to modern life” feel like familiar roles but contribute to a misconception that the indigenous during the time of the conquering of the Aztec empire were foolish, their conquest inevitable. With both of these characters being representative of Manolo's (the main hero) oldest ancestors as part of his European-Indigenous, mestizo heritage, the audience who can relate to him instantly associate one identity more positively than the other.

But no, as described in the Throughline podcast episode “Tenochtitlan: A Retelling of the Conquest,” covering Barbara Mundy’s book The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City, which provides a sincere overview of the fall of the Aztec empire, the Aztec people were highly educated, their city a technological marvel. Carmelo Sanchez, as a stand-in for main character Manolo Sanchez’s Aztec ancestors, is instead depicted as a hulking man-child, completely disregarding historical fact and instead perpetuating the myth of European superiority, especially regarding the conquest of ancient Mexico.  

The fact that this notion continues with modern indigenous through the depiction of characters like La India Maria (and The Book of Life, released less than a decade ago!) despite modern historical discoveries alludes to a conscious misrepresentation of indigenous people in favor of preserving a status-quo depiction of Eurocentrism as favorable against the “backwardness” of indigenous practices. 

Reestablishing a Hierarchy Through Popular Characters

la Virgen de Guadalupe (right) and her Nahuatl counterpart, Tonantzin (left)

Just why are narratives such as this so harmful in popular media? How could figures like Donald Duck, when he travels to Aztecland and Inca-Blinca (fit with all the stereotypes of Latin America possible), be weaponized? How and why are industries such as Disney a threat?

If the intended audience is the working class of underdeveloped countries, who read the comics and see members of a modern metropolis explore and exploit mythical backwards lands, then the consequences are serious. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's article, "The Culture of Imperialism," functions to associate the formation and maintenance of a racial-ethnic hierarchy through easily accessible and widely consumed media, such as Disney. They describe this phenomenon, stating, “The primary reason is that [Disney’s] products, necessitated and facilitated by a huge industrial capitalist empire, are imported together with so many other consumer objects into the dependent country, which is dependent precisely because it depends on commodities arising economically and intellectually in the power center's totally alien (foreign) conditions… Underdeveloped peoples take the comics, at second hand, as instruction in the way they are supposed to live and relate to the foreign power center” (Doc No. 102, 1972, Holden and Zolov. 2011). 

Misrepresentation in this form, rampant with harmful stereotypes, uses caricatures that categorize real-life groups of people in ways that make one group (often the European, “modernized” character, who often wins at the end of the day) seem like a positive role model to look up to, while the other group is a cautionary tale to warn young audiences of (the backwards, clueless stand-in for indigenous working class people, who often loses to the other character). As a result, real life people who find themselves relating to the second character type are influenced to change themselves and assimilate to a different identity, one prioritized by a white, Eurocentric narrative, perpetuating a status quo that inspires feelings of shame towards an indigenous identity. These tropes and characterizations may seem like harmless “aspects of their time,” but they perpetuate in their ability to influence modern audiences with movies like The Book of Life and Coco. 

The lack of proper representation– within politics, media, or even pop culture– means indigenous issues, such as poverty and displacement, too often go unnoticed, and commodifies the sympathy of the greater public by controlling the opinions of their viewers as well as the types of issues they are exposed to. They become desensitized to the ails of a seemingly backwards group of people that refuse to adapt to modern times, as if that will magically solve the world’s problems, and structures aren’t in place that systematically prioritize the wellbeing of certain groups over others. Such ways of thinking are ignorant, in a way that is much more genuine than the products of stereotyping like La India Maria or Carmelo Sanchez.