Friz Freleng, Warner Bros., Speedy Gonzales, Slowpoke Rodriguez and "Mexican Boarders" (1962)

updated 03/07/16     updated 02/28/14     updated: 9/30/14     reposting: 9/15/09     original posting 3/31/07 

It is May or June 1962, and as I frolic in my crib, 6 months old, at my house on Hendricks Avenue, things are happening at The Tivoli Theatre (opposite) in downtown Laredo. There, screening for the first time, is the latest animated short feature out of the genius hands of a crazy cohort of driven, twisted imagineers at Warner Bros. studios.

"Mexican Boarders," directed by Friz Freleng, with Hawley Pratt, and written by John Dunn, tells the story of a visit to Speedy Gonzales by his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez.

I am writing about it here on the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog as it throws a wrench (perhaps heaves an ACME bomb is better, it is Warner Brothers cartoons I'm writing about) at a key chapter of my University of Texas book, chapter 3, which has the unfortunate distinction of sporting the longest title I've ever published: "Chapter Three. Autopsy of a Rat: Sundry Parables of Warner Brothers Studios, Jewish American Animators, Speedy Gonzales, Freddy López, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium; Parable Cameos by Jacques Derrida; and, a Dirty Joke."

What's remarkable about "Mexican Boarders" is the mise en scène, that old war-horse French term from film criticism that speaks to the setting, background and tableau, if not the "actors" themselves. For in this 1962 classic, Speedy Gonzales is living the highlife in an upper-class Mexican town, "in the fine [bourgeois] hacienda of José Álvaro Meléndez." Most other Speedy shorts from the 60s feature Speedy and his cohorts living in trash ("Cannery Woe," 1961) or falling out of cantinas ("Tabasco Road," 1957)--and the bulk of my argument on Speedy, Autopsy of a Rat, keys on this. "Mexican Boarders" is different. Here, as you can see to your left, Speedy lives the life of a Patrón, in his "Casa de Gonzales." This Speedy is what we call in Laredo, Texas in our licentious and salacious patois, a high sosiégate, which literally means high calm-down, and figuratively means "high get-over-your-own-damn-self" and sounds like "high society."

So this bourgie ratón lives the good life, stealing cheese and such from Sylvester, who is so run down in "Mexican Boarders," that he has to resort to amphetamines to get him through his days.

That's when the key plot twist in this fable occurs and Speedy's country mouse cousin Slowpoke Rodriguez arrives to visit--he is slow-talking, more heavily accented than Speedy (his voice provided not by Mel Blanc, Warner's heralded man of a thousand voices, but by Tom Holland). All the sight gags revolve around Speedy saving his slow, country bumpkin cousin, from Sylvester owing to said bumpkin's obsessive compulsive drive for more food--"Ahhmm, steeeeel hawwwwwwwngreeee" becomes his Godot-like mantra. One particularly cool sight gag fuses the cubist sensibility of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

But what is most striking about "Mexican Boarders" is the intellectual capacity of Slowpoke Rodriguez. Freleng et al capitalize on his largely American audiences expectations not only of a "Mexican," but of a rustic "peon" from the country--an urban/agricultural antagonism that transcends even nationalistic biases. For this slow-talking, slow-moving mouse is nobody's fool. Let him speak for himself: "maybe Slowpoke is pretty slow downstairs in the feet, but he is pretty fast upstairs in the cabeza.” Stopped by Speedy from emerging one evening to feed his ever-present appetite, Slowpoke demures for a second, only to confess resignedly to his perplexed cousin, "it's a far, far, better thing I do than if I starve."

Striking. Freleng ventriloquizes his animated Mexican as a Sydney Cartonesque, Dickens-alluding literati; moreover, in the next scene, Rodriguez emerges as a Svengali-like mesmerist (no, I am not exaggerating!) who converts Sylvester into a fan-bearing lackey.



This ironic and surreptitious re-figuration of the "Mexican" as cunning, mesmerizing subject--not to mention the Machiavellian potentiality embedded in this animated marionette will have to be documented in the second edition of Tex[t]-Mex.


Here's a streaming version of Mexican Boarders via DailyMotion:

09 - Mexican Boarders by ALEXAGORDON28771 

 Here are some recent images I dredged up on a google image search:

A Warner Brothers' animation character style sheet from 1992

source

A next-generation 3-d version of Slowpoke:

source

High Fashion Chicana Metamorphosis: Eva Longoria in Citizen K Magazine

There are high-resolution scans of the fashion spread here (other versions are here). The most curious image for the purposes of Eyegiene is the one above. It is a montage of three shots of Eva, as "patient," "doctor/cinematographer (16mm, no less)/voyeur," and gurney attendant. Most of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America was a meditation on the history, consequences, and legacy of Mexican figuration in the mass media--Ruven Afanador, an illustrious fashion photographer from Bogotá, Colombia, has, with his brilliant lens and his equally compelling Mexican-American model/actress, said all I said there, and all I can hope to say in my next volume, Eyegiene, with a few snaps of his camera and maybe a quick session with photoshop.

Eyegiene Text: Cannes Film Festival Award Winner!

source; also worth a peek!

While this Study Deals Exclusively with Erotic Stimulation...

While this study deals exclusively with erotic stimulation, no doubt some similar mechanism is afoot when it comes to stereotypes--an instance where the diverse and sundry concerns of Tex[t]-Mex and Eyegiene overlap (and communicate, no doubt, via osmosis).

Somewhat related and utterly believable!

Nothing to Do With Stereotypes, Everything to Do With the Politics of Visual Technologies

Rita Moreno and Rex Reed, A Cultural Studies Duet

A blast from the past! As I am trapped on this hotbed of peculiar islanders called England, I am far away from the tools that make the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog a go-to site for nourishing tidbits of Latino/a-stained culture. As such, you guessed it!, reruns!

original posting: Thursday | January 25, 2007

Who would have thought that the veritable grandfather of celebrity-blogging, Rex Reed, would have the cultural studies skills to parse the depths of Latina semiotic complexity and notoriety, But I guess if Gene Shalit can be outed as a pre-Derridean seer (viz p.44, Tex[t]-Mex), then why can't Reed (film fetishist and would-be kleptomaniac) join the ranks of Art Aldama, Rosa Linda Fregoso, and Chon Noriega as knowing arbiters of the Latino visual culture?

This link does double service as our Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog has done a woefully poor job warehousing untoward representations of Puertorriqueños, Dominicanos, and our other and various Latino/a hermanos y hermanas. Reed's take on Moreno begins to redress this pernicious imbalance.

Stylistic Varnish? Or, the Future of Information Culture?

With a massive tip of the sombrero to the folks at drawn.ca for the headsup on this curious, dynamic, and diverting youtube video.

Chris Ware, Cameras, and the Psyche

Just a quick link to the Obscene Machine Blog, where Chris Ware shows what happens when cameras start messing with the psyche! The Tex[t]-Mex project is nothing more and nothing less than a sustained (some might say obsessed) interrogation of what happens when words and images are simultaneously deployed in the interest of telling a story--in the case of this book, the "seductive hallucinations" and ethnic mannequins that pass for "Mexicans" in America. What one gets is a semantic, semiotic, ontological ménage-à-trois that tests the wits of all--as if the various and sundry superpowers of a literary critic, art historian, visual theory maven, and existentialist philosopher had to be brought to bear in an instant (someone call a psychoanalyst quick!). Ware's work calls our attention as it is an example of an art that forces our aforementioned mix of simultaneously deployed critical methodologies and it advances said quad-cluster of skills at the same time--imagine a cocktail of Remedios Varos [2] and Jacques Derrida, some odd cloned fusion or Man Ray and Roland Barthes and you begin to, wait for it.... , get the picture. These issues are at the heart of, or, to hone the metaphor, infect the retina of Eyegiene--my follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex.