No Laughing Matter: Anti-Latino Humor Has Entered the Mainstream

Late night funny man Conan O'Brien recently tickled his studio audience as he touched on immigration, a hot button topic heard with growing frequency on late night talk shows: "A man in Mexico weighing 1,200 pounds has lost almost half that weight and might enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most weight lost. The Mexican man lost the weight when the family inside him moved to America." Then at the Emmys on September 16, O'Brien, who won an award, provided a clip of his writing team depicted as Latino day-laborers.

During a "New Rules" segment of his show broadcast in late August, liberal late nighter Bill Maher went to the well of immigrant humor: "New Rule: No more produce-scented shampoo: avocado, cucumber, watermelon. Gee, your hair smells like a migrant worker."

Jay Leno, who has gone out of his way to tell people, "I'm not a conservative," has also joined in. During a show in mid-September, he joked, "Well, police across the country now say they're arresting more and more illegals who are prostitutes. But proponents say, 'No, no. They're just doing guys American hookers will not do.'"

And during a recent sketch making light of Latino criticisms of Ken Burns for his exclusion of the more than 500,000 Latino veterans in the filmmaker's epic War documentary, Jimmy Kimmel deployed images of sombrero-wearing Speedy Gonzalez-a cartoon long considered racist by Chicano activists-yelling "Arriba. Arriba." Kimmel's shtick includes placing parking lot attendant Guillermo in compromising positions as when the heavily accented Latino immigrant participates in spelling bee contests with young champions. In another humiliating sketch, Kimmel begs him, "Please do not resort to violence."

While the immigration debate in Congress ended months ago, the immigrant jokes haven't. This is not so much because the late night hosts are at the tail end of a political trend, but because they are, in fact, at the front end of a major cultural trend: the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Immigrant rights activists have concentrated much energy on challenging rightwing radio as well as blatantly racist, formerly fringe video games like "Border Patrol" in which players shoot immigrants for points. But little attention is paid to the more mainstream fare: Top-selling video games in which white good guys kill immigrant bad guys and black and Latino zombies; popular television shows like NBC's The Office, in which immigrant characters are ridiculed for their accents, nationality, and other traits; movies like the supernatural thriller Constantine or last year's comic hit Nacho Libre, in which immigrant characters embody evil and stupidity.

The proliferation of anti-immigrant messages in pop culture moved UCLA linguist Otto Santa Ana to study what he calls an "explosion" of anti-immigrant representations in pop culture.

"There've always been racist, anti-Latino stereotypes in the media, but things are getting quite bad now," says Santa Ana, who started documenting anti-immigrant language and imagery he found in California newspapers in 1993, the year that launched the political battles around that state's Proposition 187, which sought to deny education and social services to the undocumented and their children.

Since then, says Santa Ana, anti-immigrant themes have become more intense.

In his efforts to document these trends, Santa Ana, author of Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public
Discourse, and several of his students have gathered more than 100 YouTube clips that he says represent only a small portion of a growing number of "extraordinarily racist, anti-immigrant jokes and other content in sitcoms, film, standup comedy, and other mediums." Santa Ana's collection includes a wide spectrum of mainstream programming and movies.

"Some of the clips will make you laugh," he says. "But once you see the stream of those clips, you stop laughing. You see ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and then you recognize that they're actually laughing at you."

In an episode on Fox's popular Family Guy animated comedy, for example, a couple of bandanad, knife-wielding, Chicano-accented gangster cockroaches in a dirty motel threaten intruders by saying, "Hey, you're on our turf, man," and, "Hey, man, I gonna cut you up so bad, you gonna wish I no cut you up so bad." One of the white characters responds, "I blame the schools."

In a different episode, after Peter Griffin, the family guy, complains about another character, "He's a bigger mooch than the Mexican Super-friends," the scene moves to a tall, crowded building called the "Mexican Hall of Justice" that is packed with people. A white landlord walks up to Mexican Superman and says, "Hey, Mexican Superman, when you signed the lease, you said there were only going to be five of you here."

Or take the Academy Award-winning hit Happy Feet. Santa Ana explains how the protagonist, Mumble, a blue-eyed emperor penguin, leads a group of bungling, Spanish-accented, smaller, weaker penguins known in the film as the Amigos. Mumble is exiled from his land and scapegoated by elders for allegedly causing a fish famine. Mumble then vows to find the "aliens" that, he says, are the true cause of the famine. Along the way, Mumble, says Santa Ana, has to "teach" what is right and wrong to the Amigos. "It's striking to see these penguins speaking in Mexican accents, walking funny, and being subservient," he says.

Santa Ana worries about the effects on his students, most of whom said at the beginning of the class that they enjoyed and even bought the Happy Feet DVD. He also worries about the effect of the $384 million blockbuster on children worldwide, many of whom will also play the Happy Feet game that is part of the gigantic and expansive world of video, a more interactive world that may portend the future of funny and not-so-funny depictions of immigrants.

Depictions of Latino immigrants do not all fall into the negative category, however. The Emmy award-winning Ugly Betty sitcom treats immigrant and immigration in a funny yet respectful manner. It's no accident that the show is produced by immigrant Salma Hayek. A new video game, "ICED! I Can End Deportation," developed by the New York-based nonprofit Breakthrough, turns players into undocumented immigrants as they flee from cruel border patrol agents. The same Spanish-language radio jocks who played definitive roles in last year's immigrant mobilizations are continuing citizenship and voter registration campaigns. Comedians such as George Lopez draw attention to racial issues in much the same way African American comedians have done for decades. Columnists such as Gustavo Arellano, who writes the popular "Ask a Mexican," similarly use judo-like methods to deflect and draw attention to an anti-immigrant streak that grows.

For his part, Santa Ana, who lives in Los Angeles, takes the long view: "In twenty or thirty years we will be absolutely astonished that people could consume these racist depictions."

Roberto Lovato is a contributing associate editor with New America Media. He is also a frequent contributor to The Nation. His email is [e-mail].

Comments

[realitytrumpsbull]

Well, there certainly is a 'diversity' of views
above, my view is that the reason we don't
have a well-patrolled US/Mexico border is
because Washington, D.C. is effectively
surrounded and cut off from the voters.
Liberate Washington! Woohoo!

[Cathexis]

I wonder if the people who get offended when called on racist humour (e.g., lighten up, it was only a joke, etc.) ever stop to consider that perhaps ... just perhaps ... their inability to recognize the problem might be yet another symptom of their xenophobic, racist perceptions.

I had a guy get furious at me for calling him on his "joke" (on BestandWorst site) about alternate substances to be used as female "hygeine" products. He really did not see the deeply offensive, hostile, and misogynist perceptions that his laughing at suggesting "bleach" or "bug spray" as a douche revealed.

Folks, before you get all "You're too politically correct" on the author, try to take a second to honestly evaluate yourselves and your behaviours. In my experience, 98% of the people who scream "too politically correct" are actually guilty of the offense on which they have been called -- whether they choose to acknowledge it or not.

Yes, you really ARE probably racist or misogynist. Be grateful for the clue provided.

[vejzagic]

If government really wanted to stop illegal migration they would do it, bur big business likes to have a cheap labor so that is not gonna happen.
How come no one is bitching about the really good jobs that moved to India. Those were the good paying jobs that Americans don't have anymore.
In any case, wait for a few more years/months when dollars goes down, nobody will want to come to US and work.
P.S. If illegal alien is a term reserved for Mexicans, then how do you call an crash landed ETs?

[Overd0g]

It's not anti-immigrant. It's anti illegal alien humor.

[mamacat]

Mr. Lovato, I agree with your overall message, but I disagree with you about the movie Nacho Libre.
No one I know objected to the movie on the grounds that it portrayed hispanics in a bad light. Mexicans were portrayed as being poor, but that should not come as a surprise to anyone. It was enjoyable. Although not as good as it could have been, the movie was not hateful or mean spirited.

[Counterglow]

When, oh when will dishonest, dishonorable people stop muddying the line between anti-illegal and anti-immigrant?

I wonder how you'd like it if you waited patiently in line for tickets to a concert, only to have a bunch of rude, selfish, dishonest jerks shove in front of you and scoop up the best seats.

The wages and working conditions of honest immigrants are being depressed by dishonest lawbreakers. You take food out of their children's mouths to feed liars and cheats.

[darker]

"Politically correct" is part of cynical right-wing conservative think-tank jargon invented to legitimize attacks on people and things right-wingers don't like and want to destroy.

Their many dozens of think-tanks produce sound-bites, ad campaigns, propaganda, entire policy plans to screw the average middle-American and enrich the rich.

Witness the current Bush-Cheney government mess that's screwing the average US Taxpayer while creating a NANNY STATE FOR THE RICH and corporate welfare queens that PROFITEER from war, disasters, conquest of Middle East oil fields, deregulation -- in a massive shoveling out of tax dollars from the USTreasury.

Enjoy the Bush-Cheney out-of-control, deregulated, greed-driven, irresponsible
frat-bratty, war-profiteering economy.

[GQTaste]

Look it, you want to come to this country? Fine, just make it legal. You know, this is exactly what the dumbass elephants do. They play the ones that are picked on constantly. What better ex. then of Bill O's yearly assult on christmas? You're doing the same thing. After all, it's is a tough world out there last i checked.

Also, go try to live in another country w/o doing it legally. See how far you get moving to Paris? London? Canada?

[marko77]

Carlos Mencia spends most of his time joking about latinos and hispanics in a warm and friendly way - illegal workers and their family members are treated in the same way. Even latino gang-bangers are lovable to Carlos. He shows them its better to hold pistols upright instead of sideways, and the Mexican Mafia gangbangers thank him - lots of laughs all the way around. "Whites"....well they're meant to be made fun of with an edge. That's what turns me off to Carlos.

[1will]

Someone needs to lighten up.

So the author has gone from his normal weekly column in which he confuses illegal aliens with immigrants to worrying about a few jokes. As a white guy that loved the Chapelle show I think the author is a bit thin skinned.
I wonder what the racist theme will be in Lovato's next column.

[Spookcatcher]

Isn't it funny how we all fit into some category of stereotype, whether it is behaviorally identified, traditional history, culture, or the basic ones like sexual persuasion/gender, and of course race or color. Most of the time I get a chuckle out of being stereotyped, it helps either to remind me of how I am tied to something I forget about myself that I too think is funny that I can't seem to stop projecting, or I reflect on what I hope I am not really "like". When someone pokes fun out of spite, hate?, or to purposefully be mean or offensive, I try to deal with it as appropriately as the environment allows that I am in when I am recieving it. And Don't go see Don Rickles if you can't handle being singled out for public ridicule. Don't watch programs that you know are offensive and lokk for a security blanket to cry on from the cruel real world we live in. In real life grow up!

[NABNYC]

Roberto Lovato, formerly a teacher at Cal State Northridge? Same guy?

The article is a little scattered.

There has always been anti-Hispanic "humor" that is premised on certain stereotypes: an accent, the siesta, the lazy Mexican, the stupid Mexican. And that's certainly offensive, but not new.

I'm a little bit confused, though, about the comments about illegal immigrants, since that seems very different. Illegal immigrants are an enormous source of attention in this country because there are so many of them, the federal government has essentially opened our borders and, working with Fox, encouraged illegal immigrants to flood into our country. Our businesses hire them and are throwing Americans out of work. And no one will do anything to stop it.

Whenever local municipalities try to pass a law to stop the flood of illegal immigrants which, after all, is creating a terrible financial burden on local communities, some court or another strikes it down and says only the federal government can control immigration. Except that they don't.

Democrats and Republicans both receive millions of dollars in bribes from corporations to allow this flood of illegal immigration. And they all say to the public: Well, what do you expect us to do? We can't deport 12 million people.

And the public is saying right back to the politicians: oh yeah, you don't want to do your job? Well get out of the way and let someone else do it.

Humor about illegal immigration is probably the best you're going to see. Because all around me I see mostly really pissed off people who do not understand why all these people are allowed to come into the U.S., work illegally, put their kids in our schools, use our hospitals, police, fire, and we are expected to pay for it. And no, it's not really funny at all.

[DatelessNerd]

God forbid an American comic should offend people who are here illegally.

[Abaddon]

That is right, jokes hurt. Unless they are about white males. Then they are awesome and should be repeated ad nauseam. Screw the white man for God's sake!!

[Rrhain]

(*sigh*)

When making a legitimate claim, try not to let illegitimate ones come in lest the bad claim be used to dismiss the good ones.

Why Spanish-speaking penguins in Happy Feet? Because Antarctica is not that far away from South America...where they speak Spanish. There are penguins down Tierra Del Fuego way. It would be appropriate to then consider that perhaps some penguins are Hispanic.

And Mumble doesn't "teach" the South American penguins about right and wrong. Instead, they "teach" Mumble about standing up for yourself and what you know is right, believing in yourself and striving for what you want.

If you want to complain about the Hispanic imagery of Happy Feet, ask why the lead South American penguin is voiced by a white guy, for a start.