Mickey Mouse was at SanTana's Mexican Independence Day Festival yesterday, wearing a costume of imperceptible ethnicity and a sarape. That's the best you can do, Disney, to Mexicanize the Mouse? Even Minnie wore a baile folkórico dress, for chrissakes.
Disney should've contacted us–we have muchos tips to make Mickey a total wab, or at least get in contact with his Mexi roots. To wit, and in no particular order:
*Cast Mickey anew in a new Tijuana Bible: Mickey was just one of the hundreds of Hollywood legends cast in pornographic comic books during the 1920s (they're commonly known as “Tijuana Bibles” because, hey, everything perverted comes from Tijuana, right? I can't find any full comics online, but here's a funny image of Donald Duck walking into Mickey and Minnie doing it. Yes, Virginia: it's NSFW.
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*Play up Walt Disney's fantasy Mexican heritage: Many scholars have already disproved the long-whispered rumor that Disney has Spanish blood in him–hell, even I did that in the column. But that hasn't stopped Mexicans from continuing to believe in that myth. I say Disney embrace the lie–not like the company is innocent of distorting racial history in the past.
*Let Disneyland's hotel workers play Mickey Mouse, as they have before: Members of UNITE HERE Local 11, the union that represents Disney's hotel workers, have long dressed up as Disney characters during protests in a great bit of guerrilla theater. Which led to the jarring sight a couple of years ago of Mickey getting arrested by Anaheim police officers for being part of a blockade in the Disneyland Resort. Embrace the chaos, Disney: Mickey had never been so relevant as then, fighting for la raza.
*Welcome Migra Mouse into the Disney familia: Migra Mouse, of course, is the legendary political cartoon (above, at right) drawn by legendary cartoonista Lalo Alcaraz. In 1994, seething that Disney had donated thousands of dollars in political contributions to then-California Governor Pete Wilson's reelection campaign, Alcaraz re-imagined the Mouse as a border patrol agent, in an image that still shocks and enthralls nearly 20 years later. Disney didn't even bother with a copyright infringement lawsuit, because the First Amendment covered Lalo's ass.
