He blazed through my childhood like a sombrero-clad comet, terrorizing gringo villains in the name of us downtrodden Mexicans.
His war cry went straight from our televisions and movie screens into our hearts and minds. My family and so many others cheered on his exploits, imagining ourselves as soldiers in his brigade. Polite society told us we shouldn’t worship this bad hombre because he made Mexicans look bad. So they tried everything possible to dim his star — but we Mexicans always fought loudly against any attempts to cancel our compadre.
Pancho Villa? Emiliano Zapata? Vicente Fernandez?
Try Speedy Gonzales.
The Warner Bros. cartoon mouse debuted in 1953 and immediately became a hit on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. His plots were always simple — Speedy antagonized Sylvester the Cat and other assorted felines, usually in a dispute involving cheese — but effective. 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:
Problematic. A stereotype. No doubt about it.
His name comes from a popular 1950s-era anti-Mexican sex joke. The non-Latino voice actor Mel Blanc voiced “the fastest mouse in all of Mexico” with a stereotypical accent and nonsense Spanglish. 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. Did I mention the sombrero? It’s as big as his body. Sombreros are big — but not that big.
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. 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. The Cartoon Network did the same in the late 1990s. Recently, New York Times columnist Charles Blow said Speedy cartoons “helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans.”
And yet time and time again, Mexicans — the very group you’d think would hate Speedy the most — rose to defend his honor.