This is actually one of the big things cited with people taking things too far. Speedy was pulled off the air for being racist, and Latinos (including Mexicans and Mexican Americans) complained. He still was representation, after all. How many other cartoons featured someone like them as not only the protagonist, but the one who outwitted the bad guy?
The main solution has been to just try to stop relying on racist tropes in the newer cartoons. He’s still “the fastest mouse in all Mexico” (and usually even outside that country), and he has the accent. But the humor lacks any feeling of “Ha ha! It’s a smart, fast Mexican! It’s that so whacky!”
Still, it remains a lesson to actually check with the minority in question before assuming how they feel or what resolution they would desire. Though it has led to some not realizing that there can be a difference between what, say, Asian Americans feel and what Asians feel who lack the cultural context.
I am not aware of any attempt to keep Pepe Le Pew, since the problem isn’t just ethnic stereotyping but normalizing stalker behavior. The humor was in “look at how bad this cat feels.” I’m not aware of many kids who found them funny anyways.
And I can’t say I’ve seen Foghorn Leghorn show up in quite a while–I’m not sure the stereotype he depicts still exists, really.
What cartoon character actually has a real first name? There’s Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn. Ok, maybe Sylvester, but he doesn’t have a last name. What are their “actual names.” Would it be better if Speedy was called Francisco Gonzalez?
How many people do you refer to as Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck? It’s the behavior of people that matters here, not the name of a cartoon character, and people were using these names to refer to Mexicans, directly to them expecting them to answer, because they did not see them as humans worthy of having a real name.
It has been quite a few years since I’ve watched mouse cartoons. I had completely forgotten that a Zorro mouse ever existed.
However, for verisimilitude, Speedy Gonzalez could be renamed. I suggest Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Speedy Ruiz Picasso y Gonzalez de Muchissima Rapidez.
I suppose the nicest thing we could say was that Speedy (and the rest of the supporting cast) wasn’t intended in a mean-spirited way. Yes, stereotypes are exaggerated. But the same is true in editorial cartoons. Consider Trump’s hair or Obama’s ears as drawn these last 15 years.
To modern sensibilities it’s hugely tone-deaf. But it’s certainly not racist in the same way that, say, some modern website calling for all non-white American citizens to be stripped of citizenship and “deported” (to where?) or worse is racist.
As someone who grew up on the East Coast, I never knew about the Mexicans-are-lazy stereotype, so his being fast never registered as a contrast to anything. His friends were slow, but it’s hot in Mexico, so I thought it was just a heat thing – we move pretty slowly in NYC when it’s 100 degrees.
So, for what it’s worth, it never struck me as racist, since we had different racist stereotypes on the East Coast in the 1970s.
I understand that the cartoons were pulled from Cartoon Network and then restored when actual Hispanics complained. I think they have a warning in about some negative stereotypes when they’re run now or something.
Anyway, I do think that those cartoons portrayed Mexicans in a racist way, due to the biases of the Hollywood writers at the time. But, it seems that the positive of a Mexican protagonist defeating all enemies made them a net positive, from the point of view of many Mexicans and other Latinos.
I suppose it might be the different eras we grew up in, but I grew up on the East Coast, far removed from Mexico, and was VERY familiar with the “lazy Mexican” stereotype. It was baked into not only cartoons, but also in songs (Manana – Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me) - Wikipedia ), magazine cartoons, television sketches (many of which came from California), and so on.
But that’s almost entirely a function of the fact that there were very few widely recognized Mexican characters in American media at the time, and has almost nothing to do with how the character was actually being portrayed.