Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

chapter 13
Film Foray: The Three Caballeros
When World War II was looming in Europe and Asia, the United States,
under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, introduced a plan it called its
Good Neighbor policy. It was an attempt to secure Latin American allegiances
and hemispheric unity as a protection against foreign invasion, as
well as to boost export revenue in the economically depressed years following
the stock market crash of 1929. In this climate, fi lm was thought to play
an important role in shaping popular belief. Between 1941 and 1943, Walt
Disney and his staff were contracted by Nelson Rockefeller, director of the
Office of Inter-American Affairs, and his assistant, John Hay Whitney, head
of the motion picture section, to travel to Latin America in anticipation of
creating animated fi lms that would demonstrate that the United States understood
Latin America and was offering its southern neighbor democracy
and friendship in lieu of aggression and occupation.
Of course, the epistemological fl aw in this idea was that, despite the
apparent focus on Latin America, the spotlight remained squarely on the
United States, though it seemed ready to view the Latin American “other”
through new lenses. Presumably, the new disposition by the U.S. government
in commissioning these fi lms could be traced to its desire to put a
great deal of distance between itself and the typical movie portrayal of Hispanics.
In those fi lms, Hispanics were seen as lazy ignoramuses or cunningly
dangerous bandits and Latin America itself was a beautiful, lightskinned
woman, as willing and ready for the taking as a banana from United
Fruit Company, the monopolistic U.S. fruit exporter. However, despite the
different characters, settings, media forms, or objectives, the treatment of
race, class, gender, and nation in those fi lms continued to fall in line with