Dating back a hundred years to 1923, Disney as an industry has carefully and successfully constructed a transnational conglomerate whose content and products have become synonymous with the United States, largely sparking curiosity if not outright seduction. Consider, for example, that when Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, marking a first for a Soviet or Russian leader, he wished to visit Disneyland—something that was cancelled at the last minute due to security reasons, which reportedly angered Khrushchev. Not even the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could resist the lure of the mouse. The fact is that in the United States more people can name the seven dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) than members of the US Supreme Court. From Latin America, a rite de passage for middle class families is to visit one of the Disney theme parks, either in Orlando, Florida or Anaheim, California. In the classes that I have taught, students come to the first session as unabashed fans of different Disney properties and characters. However, Disney engagement was not as high in my Latinx Disney classes as it was in my Global Disney classes. Rather than detail the long and excellent list of scholarship on Disney Studies, I will proceed through a set of lessons, beginning with general ones to Latinx specifics.

Lesson #1: Disney is about the USA. No matter what the title or location of the movie, television show, or the location of the theme park, Disney represents US fears and desires. Despite a surface location in another continent or country, the narrative engages themes resonant in the US. Take for example The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994), unambiguously situated in Africa yet fuzzy about the actual location on that huge continent. Flying over Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and much of the action taking place in unnamed savannas that could be in Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana or Zimbabwe, The Lion King represents the US’ view of Africa as a continent, without national specificity, whose vast land mass can only be represented through undeveloped wildland with wildlife. Nonetheless, aptly described as “Hamlet in fur” due to its narrative’s undeniable similarity to that Shakespearean classic, The Lion King also addressed issues of ethnicity and border crossing. For example, the hyenas living in the marginal badlands were voiced by recognizable African American actor Whoopi Goldberg and Chicano actor Cheech Marin, articulating environmental destruction as an undesirable effect of racialized populations.[1]

Similarly, Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, 2017), widely touted as Pixar/Disney’s culturally conscious approach to Latinx populations, represents a Mexico stuck in tradition: the fictional city of Santa Cecilia appears to be temporally located in the mid nineteen fifties rather than the present (2017) that the narrative suggests it to be. Disney’s original attempt to trademark Día de los Muertos, a cultural and religious celebration, was met with fierce backlash. Pixar/Disney then hired cultural translators who provided much needed input for the final product.[2] Nevertheless, its writer and director Lee Unkrich steadily conflated Latinx with Mexican people and culture, and reiterated stereotypes such as “The Latino community is a very vocal, strongly opinionated community.”[3] Additionally, the bridge to the land of the dead triggered border crossing trauma in audiences, leading Orquidea Morales to re-genre this film from “family” to “horror” depending on the positionality of audiences.[4] Coco is situated in a Mexico forgotten by time, and speaks to issues of belonging and border crossing so contemporary to US politics in the late twenty-teens and up to the present.

Lesson #2: Disney is a capitalist corporation. As such, its main goal is to make profit with minimum risk-taking. Every corporation has a (hopefully successful) strategy to maximize profit. Disney trades in happiness via (mostly) family friendly mainstream media content. If you want to foment the revolution, don’t count on Disney.[5] When Disney makes a progressive move, it is in response to careful market research—sometimes influenced by public demands or outcry and seldom ahead of a cultural or political shift. This does not mean that progressive or even transgressive moments and themes do not appear in Disney. It does mean that the main thrust is always profit: progressive content exists only if it concords with the main thrust. Moreover, Disney narratives often derive from previously popular and profitable cultural stories, a move that also minimizes risk taking. Both The Lion King and Coco are very profitable ventures. The Lion King, as the older of the two properties, has spawned a number of sequels, prequels, and other ventures—in addition to the licensing that Disney does so well. Its musical circulates globally and has grossed over $8.2 billion, making it the highest grossing musical on Broadway and the world.[6] Coco did not set out to consciously represent a culture. Rather, it sought to maximize profit by targeting expanded audiences—Mexico, Latin America, and US Latinx. Its use of specificity was laudable—for example, the Xoloitzcuintle dog is a recognizable Mexican breed among canine connoisseurs. References to a golden age of Mexican music, the vivid alebrijes, and even having the matriarch chase errant characters with a chancla resonated with audiences as authentic. But do not be mistaken, the investment on authenticity generated profit.

Lesson #3: Disney has learned from the many criticisms of its representation of global populations and of internal minorities in the US. Yet the changes are not revolutionary (see lesson #2). In the case of Latin Americans and US Latinx, tropes dating back to Saludos Amigos (Bill Roberts, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson, 1942) and The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney, and Bill Roberts, 1944) have remained remarkably and disappointingly consistent. Moreover, Disney continues to elide the distinction between the hemispheric and the national category, what Media Studies scholars call a flattening of difference. As a throwback, The Emperor’s New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000) is temporally located in the Incan Empire and geographically located in Peru, without naming either specifically.[7] Both Coco (2017) and Encanto (Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith, 2021) are widely touted as Disney’s redemption for decades of problematic tropes about US Latinx. Fact is, Coco is located in Mexico and Encanto in Colombia. As well the former reiterates the familiar trope of tradition via the Day of the Dead celebration and the latter repeats the approach of magical realism applied to Colombia as well as the jungle trope. The latter is alive and well in recent Disney movies such as The Jungle Cruise (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2021) located in the Brazilian jungle. In addition to the specificity already noted in Coco, Encanto contains references to Colombia’s recent political turmoil of narcotraffic and displacement, with its accompanying generational trauma. Moreover the use of “vallenato and salsa and marimba and alpargatas and Tejo” in addition to specific food, flora, and fauna, resonated with Colombian and other similarly affected audiences.[8] Finally, Elena of Avalor (2016-2018) weaponized specificity to create a hot mess of flattening of difference, with an unnamed Mexicanidad muddled by insertion of signifiers from throughout the Americas and Spain.[9]

So as we celebrate one hundred years of Disney, we should note both some continuities and ruptures in their globally circulated repertoire. The tropes of tradition/pre-modernity, stern matriarchs, remote locations, music and dancing, and extended families continue to frame the appearance of Latin Americans as Latinx in Disney. In Disney movies, one can still head to the continent to search among inscrutably thick jungle with magically infused native populations—in 2021. Nonetheless, we also encounter themes of racial diversity as in the residents of the casita in Encanto. The unexpected break out musical hit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” based on the beyond closeted character who comes out, speaks to a sexual orientation inclusivity that would have been unthinkable in the 1940s. The research and inclusion of cultural translators generates a specificity highly valued by particular audiences yet cast in universal themes designed to appeal to all. And that is the Disney magic.

1. Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, “Hyenas in the Pride Lands: Latinos/as and Immigration in Disney’s The Lion King,” Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies 25, no. 1 (2000): 47–66. ↑

2. Litzy Galarza and Paulina A. Rodríguez Burciaga, “Un Puente a la Mesa: The Role of Cultural Translators in the Production of Disney/Pixar’s Coco,” in Immigrant Generations, Media Representations, and Audiences (Cham, SE: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). ↑

3. Lee Unkrich, quoted in Reggie Ugwu, “How Pixar Made Sure Coco Was Culturally Conscious,” New York Times, November 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/movies/coco-pixar-politics.html. ↑

4. Orquidea Morales, “Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco’s Border Politics,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2020): 41–49, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.73.4.41. ↑

5. Angharad N. Valdivia, The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). ↑

6. “List of Highest-Grossing Musical Theatre Productions,” Wikipedia, accessed October 17, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_highest-grossing_musical_theatre_productions&oldid=1178199784. ↑

7. Helaine Silverman, “Groovin’ to Ancient Peru: A Critical Analysis of Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove,” Journal of Social Archaeology 2, no. 3 (2002): 298–322, https://doi.org/10.1177/146960530200200302. ↑

8. Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez, “Breaking the Encanto,” Journal of Refugee Studies 35, no. 3 (2022): 1415–1419, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feac027, and Laura Zornosa, “I Watched Encanto With My Dad. It Brought Him Back Home,” New York Times, December 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/movies/encanto-disney.html. ↑

9. Diana Leon-Boys, Elena, Princesa of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023). ↑