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

232 reframing latin america
enslavement has been conveniently omitted.) In the fi rst segment’s closing
narrative, Gauchito captures and enslaves the donkey-bird because the
instant he stumbles upon the creature, he immediately perceives that he
“must be worth a fortune!”
Fourth Proposition: Hierarchies of the Willing-and-
Waiting-to-Be-Conquered The chronology of conquest in The Three
Caballeros recapitulates a hierarchy that goes from claiming territory (Pablo’s
tropical isle) to capturing and taming the local fauna (Gauchito’s fl ying
donkey) to Donald’s designs on the female homo sapiens. Each rung in this
hierarchy is represented as simply waiting to be taken; Donald’s conquests
fail not because his targets aren’t willing but because he is not able.
Fifth Proposition: Donald’s Un–Don Juanly Ineptitude as
Sop to the Excessive Machismo of His Avian Accomplices If
Donald’s conquest is displaced (from geography onto the female body), it is
also disguised or “de-fused” by his ineptitude, his failure to consummate
his desires. The mechanisms of geopolitical and sexual conquest here enjoy
a convenient congruence. Anxious to allay potential fears that this “neighborly”
North American presence will be too potent, too overpowering, the
fi lmmakers place the brunt of the fi lm’s humor on the sheer ludicrousness
of Donald Duck as Don Juan—his impotence, his childish polymorphousness
or, in baldest Lacanian terms, his lack of the phallus.
The charra sequence, part of the climactic second half of the Mexican segment,
makes Donald’s phallic inadequacy most glaringly apparent. Dressed
in a feminized version of a traditionally male costume and carrying a riding
crop, the phallic woman (Carmen Molina) stomps her high boots in a selfconfi
dent zapateo. She is surrounded by a phalanx of dancing cacti which,
as they deploy and metamorphosize, alternately squash, obscure, fragment
and otherwise overpower Donald. At the end of the sequence, Donald runs
through a forest of elongated cacti, their prominent appendages dangling
high above him, in futile pursuit of Carmen Molina who has herself “congealed”
into a cactus before he can reach her. Green, the color of lust for the
Latins and envy for the gringos, dominates the sequence. The imagery of
inadequacy has seldom been more overdetermined.
In marked contrast to Donald, Joe Carioca and Panchito are more generously
equipped. Each comes armed with a pair of phallic objects: a cigar and
umbrella in the parrot’s case (in the Mexican sequence, the umbrella more
than once turns into a machine gun); and a pair of pistols liberally deployed
in the case of the rooster, whose species itself is—needless to say—an emblem
of male sexual prowess.