Abstract
Dora the Explorer, which went into syndication on the Nickelodeon children's television network in 2000, marks the shifting terrain of a globalized juvenile Latino/a television market that has become increasingly multicultural and pro-bilingual, despite the fact that the most states in the US have slashed the budgets of or altogether eliminated the presence of bilingual education. Dora the Explorer provides a post-modern model of globalized “Latinidades,” citizenship, race, and gender which express a universal Latino/a subjectivity. At the same time, the show represents a number of distinct Latino/a cultural practices (like the parranda and the comparsa) through the representation of space, language, music, and racialized visual representations of Latino/a children. These double discourses express how nation, citizenship, and identity are a contested terrain most closely illustrated by the show. With a reading of the cultural work, Dora the Explorer performs in general and a close reading of the 2001 episode “Dora La Musico,” in particular, the essay attempts to analyze the capitalist success of Dora the Explorer in terms of the commercialization of and marketing of Latinidades that have real-world implications for US Latino/as and Latin Americans.
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Notes
“Dora is an avid explorer, always curious and proud of her Hispanic roots, who loves to search and search some more.”
Valerie Walsh, one of the show's creators, argues that what makes it unique is that “parents tell us they know when Dora is on because they'll see and hear their kids playing along with the show: counting, speaking Spanish, jumping, rowing, clapping, etc.” (Interview, 2003).
Salsa is a pan-Latino musical style that emerged in New York City. Here, salsa functions as a transnational signifier that references local and national constructions of Latinidad. I use this term throughout the essay because the show draws from numerous musical traditions of the Americas. For more on the history of salsa, see Frances Aparicio's Listening to Salsa (1998).
The album “Dora the Explorer Dance Fiesta” includes tracks with Los Lonely Boys and covers of Cool and the Gang's “Celebration.”
ANSA Noticero en Español ran a special article about Dora as the “Primer personaje Latino en desfile de Thanksgiving en Nueva York.” The president of Nickelodeon, Cyma Zarghami, states, “Dora se ha convertido en un icono en la comunidad hispana y uno de los personajes favoritos de los niños preescolares” (EEUU, 2005).
I use hybridity to indicate anything derived from heterogeneous sources or composed of different or incongruous elements. Homi Bhabbha (1994) argues that hybridity mimics the ways that “the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its presence as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (107). Hybridity is the result of competing epistemes, the colonial, the postcolonial, and the neocolonial. With hybridity, we get a sense of the markers of colonial discourse on formerly colonized and colonizing peoples.
A sign is something that indicates or expresses the existence of something else not immediately apparent.
Another way to think about these dominant images of Latino/as and Latinidad is Clara Rodríguez's definition of the “Latin look” (1997, 14). Rodríguez's critique of the universal Latino/a subject steers us away from an essential category of Latino/a identity or Latinidad.
In an effort to make the show reflect historically grounded and culturally specific practices, Nickelodeon established a cultural advisory board. Each episode of Dora the Explorer undergoes scrutiny by the cultural advisory board, which shapes notions of Latinidad. Within a corporate structure, how can one effectively make political and social change? Having academics lends cultural capital to the show and gives it credibility. It is a tough relationship (corporate interest meets academia) from which to make political and social change. The executives believe the show is a production of authenticity. I would venture to guess that the advisory board is working against paradigms of authenticity. At the same time, only so much social intervention can be made if the Nickelodeon conglomerate has the final say in the edited product. Some of the notable members of this board are Carlos Cortes, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California at Riverside; Clara Rodríguez, Associate Professor of Sociology at Fordham University; Marta Moreno Vega, scholar and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City; Valerie Lovelace, former Vice President of Sesame Street Research; and David Anderson, Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Massachusetts.
On the nickjr.com website, parents debate where Dora is from and what her ethnic/national identity is (postings from 7/22/03 to 8/6/03).
I want to stress that salsa is a transnational signifier of Latinidad.
These songs have not maintained their original African forms, but they have been influenced by African aesthetics as well as American jazz and other sources. See Robin Moore's Nationalizing Blackness (1997) and Wilson Valentín-Escobar's unpublished dissertation, “Freedomland at the New Rican Village: Latin Jazz and the Making of a Latino Avant-garde Arts Scene in New York City,” for more on this point.
Each 25-min episode starts with a close-up of a computer, then ventures into an animated full screen showing Dora and her animal friends while the theme song plays. Once the song ends, the camera cuts to a close-up of Dora in which she says “hola” or “hello, I'm Dora.” She asks the audience a question, and the adventure begins. The premise of the show is built around helping and sharing. Dora then calls upon her magic map. Once the map sings his song (which has a very bluesy quality), he leads the audience through the three steps necessary to solve the problem. Dora repeats the three markers of progress to the audience so that the children are familiarized with the spaces. As Dora and the audience collectively travel through each place on the map, they learn Spanish, help each other, sing, and engage in physical activities. In addition, Dora has a bilingual backpack that seems to have every tool imaginable inside it; children are encouraged to help the backpack select the proper tools to help Dora with that day's adventure. As each obstacle is overcome, a three-piece brass band made up of snails, the fiesta trio, plays a tune to mark their progress. When Dora and the audience have accomplished all their tasks, they sing the “We Did It! Lo Hicimos!” song, which provides closure to the adventure.
Because the show is for preschoolers ages two to five, the structure relies upon an interactive format and repetition of new concepts and Spanish words. Often the interactions take the form of Dora directly asking the audience a question to encourage participation, movement, or Spanish-language skills (Interview, 2003).
The parranda alludes to the history of slavery, Afro-Latino identities, and ethno-musical practices in the Americas. Hortensia Caballero's Parranda de San Pedro is one study of the history of the parranda in Venezuela. See www.elboriqua.com for more on the Puerto Rican parranda.
The casitas in Dora the Explorer are representations of vernacular architecture. These casitas create a sense of space that is defined as Latino/a. Luis Aponte-Parés argues that the casitas in the Bronx are sources of pride and memory (1995, 8). Here, the casitas establish a collective spatial memory that evokes Latino/a communities.
“[She] has traveled to the beach, the mountains, the river, the North Pole and many other locations and continually encounters mysteries that she must resolve.”
Episodes like “Super Map,” (2004) or “Dora's Pirate Adventure” (2004) take place outside of exclusively tropicalized settings.
Aggrieved communities are defined by injustices committed against minority religious and ethnic communities by majority communities.
While Flores's discussion focuses on the elision of Puerto Ricans in the United States from the national narrative, similar elisions are staged in this Dora the Explorer episode through the parranda because it refers to multiple Latino/a traditions that vary in origin and importance. Their staging on mainstream television is a rupture of the dominant US national narrative (see Flores, 2000, 49–50).
According to Angharad Valdivia (2004, 109), one discourse caters to a traditional, Hispanic, Spanish-dominant group, the other to bilingual, English-dominant Latinos.
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Guidotti-Hernández, N. Dora The Explorer, Constructing “LATINIDADES” and The Politics of Global Citizenship. Lat Stud 5, 209–232 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600254
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600254