Mexican Postage Stamp Pushes Racial Envelope - 2005-07-01 9:21 AM
Quote:
June 30, 2005
Mexican Postage Stamp Pushes Racial Envelope
By Chris Kraul and Reed Johnson,
MEXICO CITY — A newly issued series of postage stamps showing a once-popular black comic book character with exaggerated thick lips has reignited controversy over racial attitudes in Mexico, six weeks after President Vicente Fox was forced to apologize for remarks perceived as insensitive toward black Americans.
The five new stamps show a cartoon figure named Memin Pinguin, a picaresque urban child who gets by on wits and moxie, that has been one of Mexico's best-selling comic book characters.
Created by Yolanda Vargas Dulche in 1947, the character remains well known, though its popularity peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.
'PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE OFFENDED': The new stamps show a cartoon figure called Memin Pinguin, a popular Mexican comic book character that was created in 1947.
(Dario Lopez-Mills / AP)
A day after the stamps were issued, an outcry ensued, with civil rights groups and prominent Afro-Mexicans, including pop singer Johnny Laboriel, calling the images outrageous.
"Of course people are going to be offended by the caricature," Laboriel said Wednesday. "The idea to put out this postage stamp is the biggest stupidity.
"They do this without thinking of the consequences."
Gustavo Islas, director of Mexico's postal service, emphasized that the stamps were intended to have nostalgia value. There was no plan to recall them, he said.
"Whoever sees the character as something offensive is looking at things completely wrongly," Islas said, adding that the comic book figure was "a beautiful personage with no importance given to color."
Mexico's Foreign Relations Ministry issued a statement saying that no offense should be taken, "just as Speedy Gonzalez has never been interpreted in a racial manner by the people in Mexico because he is a cartoon character," the statement read.
The dust-up comes in the wake of the indignation caused by Fox's remark in mid-May that Mexican migrants do jobs that "not even blacks want to do in the United States." Fox spent several days explaining and finally apologizing for "any hurt feelings."
He did so personally to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who visited Fox at his official residence, Los Pinos, on May 18.
Reached by telephone Wednesday night in Little Rock, Ark., Jackson said that he found the "Sambo-type" stamp demeaning and "in many ways worse than what President Fox said last month."
"I called the Mexican ambassador in Washington and asked him to call President Fox and ask him to apologize and to take the stamp off the market," Jackson said.
Now the stamp is forcing Mexico to reexamine an issue that usually remains below the surface.
Many here and in other parts of Latin America say that their societies are more classist than racist in explaining discrimination suffered by indigenous and black people. Money and family history, they say, are the real social markers.
But many social commentators say that light-skinned Mexicans of European heritage are generally seen as having a leg up in competing for jobs, social prominence, education and other public services.
The social pages in local newspapers infrequently feature Mexicans of color, and Indians are rarely seen in television programming.
"Mexican society is fundamentally racist and classist," said Guadalupe Loaeza, a newspaper columnist. "The color of your skin is a key that either opens or shuts doors. The lighter your skin, the more doors open to you."
Racism extends to political preferences, she added. Many upper-middle-class Mexicans are expected to vote against front-running presidential candidate and Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party because he is partly indigenous and brown-skinned, Loaeza said. That group of voters might tend to support Santiago Creel of the National Action Party because he has light skin and blue eyes, she said.
Racism is one of the many forms of discrimination practiced in Mexico, according to a survey published last month by the federal secretary of social development. It said 80% of Mexicans, among them women, children, indigenous and disabled people and the elderly, suffered discrimination in some way.....