Last year I borrowed the movie Happy Feet from the library.  The main character, Mumble, is befriended by a group of South-American penguins with Mexican accents.  The Mexi-South-Am-penguins are stupid, girl-crazy, party-centric and subservient to the morally superior Mumble.  A movie is a movie, and after wishing I hadn’t wasted the time on watching it I for the most part forgot about it until I watched a couple of episodes of Jimmy Kimmel earlier this spring. 

I hadn’t followed this Jimmy Kimmel guy, but then I found myself with a sick child, and then sick and uncomfortable myself, up all night and with nothing to do but rock to the rhythm of the flicker on the television.  Up way past my bedtime, I found out that the Kimmel includes a segment with a parking lot attendant named Guillermo.  After seeing two of these Guillermo segments, I looked through YouTube to find more. 

Jimmy Kimmel is supposed to make everyone laugh.  But the Guillermo skits weren’t funny; they were tragically sad.  In segment after segment, Guillermo participates in compromising skits that tend to revolve around his exaggerated accent and poor English language skills.  He only needs to say "Hey, Yimmy," and the studio audience is already primed to laugh.  Watch enough clips, and you realize he can indeed pronounce "Jimmy" just fine.  But then, nobody would think that’s funny.

Jimmy Kimmel’s show is on a major TV network, a network owned by the same company that brings us Mickey Mouse and so-called family programming.  A lot of people watch the Guillermo skits on television, and then watch them again on YouTube.  So what does it say that these skits are on the air?  And what does it say that somebody is actually watching them far beyond the studio audience?

Are viewers beginning to think that all Latin Americans are like Guillermo’s exaggerated persona, uneducated and clueless, no matter the engineer from Venezuela, the doctor from Peru, the millionaire from Mexico?  Are viewers beginning to think that Spanish-speaking immigrants are nothing but the brunt of jokes made at their expense?

Maybe viewers think this already.  Jimmy’s simple-minded, culturally-ignorant slapstick resonates with at least some late-night network TV watchers of the country, otherwise it probably wouldn’t be on television every night.  And Happy Feet was written, edited, and produced and funded mightily by scores of people who must have all thought the Mexican-South-American amigos were pretty appealing to their audience.  After all, it is the job of the movie, like late night shows, to make money.

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There have always been anti-immigrant feelings in the U.S. from those who were here first.  Every generation finds a new "other" to dislike and misunderstand.  But I worry that recent feelings against illegal immigrants, most from Latin America, have rolled into a great avalanche of essentially anti-Hispanic sentiments, fed by ignorant assumptions by those who claim a moral and intellectual superiority.

Carmen and David–Carmen Sierra and David Celestino–are three years old, old enough to listen, old enough to ask questions.  How will we all answer?  And what narrative can I weave for them first to wrap themselves against the chill of ignorance?

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Does anyone make fun of Jimmy Kimmel for pronouncing Guillermo’s name poorly, misspelling Spanish words, or inaccurately reading Spanish-language newspapers mistranslating them on camera?  It’s worth thinking why not.

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Completed 19 October.  Still not sure it makes any sense; it’s hard to write past the hurt, frustration, and anger.