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The dog’s name is Dinky, and he’s just a few inches off the ground.
But this Chihuahua, who Taco Bell says was rescued from a pound, has
ignited something of a controversy about advertising images, subliminal
messages, and what they say about Mexican culture.
LATINO USA’s María Martin has this
report.
MARÍA MARTIN:
Two young men ride in an olderwhile happily munching fast food from
you-know-where. Above the back seat sits a bobbing plastic dog. Suddenly,
the young men look in the rear-view mirror and the plastic canine’s been
replaced by a little pointy-eared Chihuahua with bulging eyes.
This dog’s very much alive, and he’ll do just about anything
get his little canine teeth around some of t
DINKY: Yo quiero Taco Bell!
VADA HILL: It
was a line that we thought was a cute, I mean,
it comes right out of our quasi-Mexican image. It comes right out of
what’s unique and distinctive about this brand.
MARÍA MARTIN: That’s Vada Hill, in
charge of the marketing campaign
featuring the Chihuahua called Dinky. The campaign’s been very
successful for Taco Bell. But in recent weeks, it’s also stirred up some
controversy, which appears to have begun with the comments of former
Clearwater, Florida, Mayor GabrielCazares. He’s the former president of the Tampa,
Florida chapter of LULAC, the League for United Latin American Citizens.
GABRIEL CAZARES: I think it was an unfortunate commercial. I
think that the use of a dog to depict Mexicans was very demeaning. If Taco Bell wanted to depict someone that
would reflect Mexican culture we have many live, two-legged artists, singers,
dancers, musicians-some great people in America that could have been selected to give a testimonial for Taco Bell
(and) say, "Yo quiero un taco." And that wouldn’t have
been offensive.
MARÍA MARTIN: But many other Latinos didn’t respond so
negatively to the ads, as did Mr. Cazares.
LISA NAVARRETE: People when there’s sort of a real thing that
crosses the line, we hear from folks, and then we follow up on that. We hadn’t heard at all.
MARÍA MARTIN: Lisa Navarrete is the deputy vice president for
public information for the National Council of La Raza in
Washington.
LISA NAVARRETE: I don’t really see a problem
with the commercial, but I think the issue is a larger one, which is, this
really points to how our community is so sensitive to its image
and negative media image that it has (at) any kind of portrayal at all. Because our portrayals on television are so few and
far between, and when they are on they’re usually negative, that it’s very understandable that people in our
community would be very sensitive to any kind of
portrayal on television. And I think this is one of those cases.
MARÍA MARTIN: As for the League of United Latin American
Citizens, they quickly disavowed Mr. Cazares’ statements and
made clear he was speaking only as an individual. Cuauhtemoc Figueroa
is the organization’s director of policy and
communications.
CUAUHTEMOC FIGUEROA: Mr. Cazares has every right to
believe and think the way he does about those commercials, and there are probably others in our organization that
believe the same way as Mr. Cazares, but they haven’t brought that to
the attention of our organization.
MARÍA MARTIN: Would you say that this is a
non-issue?
CUAUHTEMOC FIGUEROA: I would say initially, that was the
reaction of our president, that it was a non-issue, because it frustrated Belen Robles, our president. Because for her, I mean,
she goes around the country and travels extensively to meet with our state directors and addressing the issues affecting
various Hispanic communities, Dominicans, Puertorriqueños, Mexican Americans, Cubanos. And she extensively travels. And
this wasn’t on the radar screen. It hadn’t come up.
MARÍA MARTIN: In other commercials, Dinky is seen walking up
a fire escape, passing by the open windows of many apartments.
DINKY: What is a logarithm?
MARÍA MARTIN: In one commercial, a couple is watching Jeopardy on television as he resolutely makes his way to get
some of that food.
DINKY: Yo quiero Taco Bell!
AMALIA MESA-BAINS: Advertising has to have some elements of sexuality and aggression to be really successful, and people
have known that on Madison Avenue since the 1950s. So advertising is never accidental.
MARÍA MARTIN: Amalia Mesa-Bains is the director for visual and
public art at California State University at Monterey Bay. She’s a well-known artist and a scholar who studies advertising as a
function of identity formation. For Mesa-Bains, negative images
about Mexican culture are at the core of Taco Bell’s message.
AMALIA MESA-BAINS: So I think to take a Chihuahua, which is of course a dog, it’s an animal, and use it to articulate in
Spanish is really to personify Mexicans as animals. So it has two sides, because it’s so cute and seductive. But I always ask
my students to look at it: What is a Chihuahua? It’s a dog. What is a dog? It’s an animal. What is a female dog? We all
know what those things are.
MARÍA MARTIN: Some people would say this is not a negative image, because you have a little dog that is so
 clever that he
can get from the balcony to the car because he’s so interested in getting to eat the Taco Bell food. In another commercial, he
answers the Jeopardy question correctly on his way to get the Taco Bell food. So it’s a clever little dog, and maybe it
represents Latinos as clever people.
AMALIA MESA-BAINS: But it also represents Latinos as animals
that have to scamper for their food. And I maintain that you have to look at the context in which that dog appears. That a
dog appears near a brothel, that’s a love hotel. That dog appears with low-riders. That dog appears with black people
sitting in armchairs, snacking away while they watch television all day. What is that about? And to look at the dog is to look at
the campaign of Taco Bell over these years-transgressive, seductive images.
MARÍA MARTIN: In the 1970s, Latinos rallied to protest the use
of the image of a sleepy bandit in a large sombrero as an advertising symbol in a commercial for Frito’s corn chips. The
so-called Frito Bandito was eventually taken off the air. Twenty years later, the images, says Mesa-Bains, are not so blatant.
But even seemingly innocuous images, she says, are stillcapable of doing damage.
AMALIA MESA-BAINS: I mean, we live in segregated communities. Half the time, people never meet us, but they
certainly watch television. And this inundates endlessly. I’ll give you a couple of scenarios about what the impact of it is. I have
a friend who has a young boy, who’s a teenager. And she overheard him talking to his friends, and in the voice of the
Chihuahua he was speaking of a girl he liked. ‘Yo quiero,’ and then he named the girl. My husband had a student come into
his class whose daughter came home from school in tears because she had been teased relentlessly by her peers as Miss
Chihuahua, because she was Mexican. So these images and
this concept is probably one of the most profound influences
that we need to deal with, and we have accepted it over and over again. And I really think it’s time for the institutions thatrepresent us to speak up.
MARÍA MARTIN: An informal on-line poll conducted recently by
Latino Net found people equally split among those who were offended by the Chihuahua commercial, those who were not,
and those who thought it was a non-issue.
For its part, Taco Bell says in a statement by their vice president, that the company takes pride in the Mexican
heritage of its food, and that their consumer research, including
that done among Hispanics, indicates that people are being entertained and not offended.
For LATINO USA, I’m María Martin.
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