Swarthy Speedy Gonzales Shilling Enchiladas

It was the early 1990s and unbeknownst to me, travailing in an Eastern Connecticut land grant university, Tyson Foods came out with a line of Looney Tunes tv-dinners. One of these, touting enchiladas, featured the loving mug of our good friend Speedy Gonzales. You can read about it here--a high-res image of the box is also available here on your right.

What's most curious about this box is just how dark and brown Speedy becomes in this incarnation of his corporate-America-forged "Mexican" being. Something about hawking sub-edible frozen culinary delights moved the hand of his marketers to give Speedy something akin to the brown-face applied to Charlton Heston in Orson Welles's' Touch of Evil. Commonly, he does not appear this way--especially not in his heydays during the 1960s. Just more to worry about as we attempt to parse the evolution of stereotypes in the good ol' USA.