"Gordo" - Mexican comic strip

                            

    “Gordo” (strip) ran from November 24, 1941 to March 2, 1985 and chronicled the life of Mexican bean farmer Gordo Lopez. The character was design to reflect popular conceptions of Mexicans at the time, with a highly caricatured style and a lazy overweight title character who spoke in heavily accented English and took naps under a tree wearing a sombrero.

    The strip’s author - Gus Arriola was born in Florence, Arizona, the youngest of nine children. He was raised in a Spanish-speaking household. He learned English by reading the Sunday comics.

     The early strips were criticized for Hollywood - style cultural stereotype— partly because that's an understandable shortcut when introducing an audience of one culture to characters from another. But mainly, the author later explained, because that was simply the way things were done at the time, and it took a little while for him to realize it didn't have to be that way. As his characters developed, they became richer and more fully rounded, and author felt less need to saddle them with dialect and stylized behavior. Eventually, Gordo even started wearing American-style clothes — sometimes, at least. American who lived where people could go years without hearing Spanish spoken on the street, were exposed to the everyday lives of ordinary folks in Mexico. Without Gordo, tortillas, tamales and burritos might not be quite so popular in English-speaking America today.

    At the height of its popularity the strip appeared in 270 newspapers. The strip was praised by the Mexican government, and the California's state legislature voted a resolution commending Arriola's professional excellence and thanking him for his many years of promoting inter-ethnic understanding through entertainment.

        Stereotype represents the false understanding of a culture by a group of people from another culture. But the reason why Gordo be accepted by Americans so quickly in the beginning is probably because the character was created under American stereotype to Mexican. Stereotype shouldn’t always be defined negatively, sometime it can make a culture introduction become more acceptable to another group of people under different culture.


Reference:
1. "Gordo (comic)." wikipedia. n. page. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordo_(comic_strip)>.
2. "Gus Arriola." wikipedia. n. page. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Arriola>.