Learning to labor with Handy Manny: immigration politics and the world of work in a children's cartoon

Abstract

This article provides a textual analysis of Handy Manny, a popular Disney cartoon featuring a Latino handyman. Specifically, it explores how the debut of the television series does important ideological work that moderates a more provocative image of Latina/os that appeared less than five months earlier during “A Day without an Immigrant,” a nationwide protest against conservative immigration reform in the US that sought to amplify the importance of migrant workers to culture and economy. While Handy Manny offers a nuanced portrayal of “Hispanics” through a set of Latina/o signifiers like food, festivals, and a Spanish vocabulary, it also draws an obvious connection between ethnicity and manual work, particularly in construction, domestic, and service industries that have historically relied on Latin American migrants. As such, the cartoon promotes a saccharine image of Latina/os as “productive” potential citizens, but mostly within the confines of employment. Although Handy Manny both recognizes and participates in the “ethnicization” of labor in ways that reproduce the relations of production, it contains some disruptive possibilities that arise ironically from the same characters designed to attract young viewers and deflect serious criticism: the anthropomorphic tools.

Keywords:

• cartoons
• Latina/os
• labor
• anthropomorphism
• Disney
• immigration

Notes

1. As Arlene Dávila suggests, while the collapsing of Latin American and US-born populations into a single identity category like “Hispanic” or “Latina/o,” for instance, “veils the variable social statuses of the constituent groups” and obscures the legacies of US colonialism in Latin America “it has proven to be the most significant force in the [Hispanic] marketing industry's development” (2001, 40). While both terms obfuscate significant differences in nationalities and ethnicities, “Hispanic” usually signifies a Spanish-speaking demographic and is “evocative of Spanish conquest and colonization” whereas “Latina/o” is often associated with identity-based politics and social struggles against institutional racism and US imperialism (Dávila 2001). In this essay, I use “Hispanic” occasionally but in scare quotes to signal the racially “neutral” parlance of the multicultural marketing industry in the US. I use “Latina/o” more frequently to emphasize civil rights struggles as well as the processes of racialization in the US which routinely and carelessly situate “Hispanics” beyond the geopolitical borders of the nation tout court.

2. Despite their privileged occupations in the series, Mayor Rosa and Señor Lopez are part of a narrative working class in what Alex Woloch calls the “labor theory of character” (2003, 26). Such minor characters are in some ways the proletariat of the series, “the subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves while performing a function for someone else” (Woloch 2003, 26). They shape the narrative community in which Manny is the centerpiece, adding to the cartoon's layered class tensions. While this particular tension may not compromise the working-class setting of Handy Manny, it raises important issues of representational labor and cultural production within and beyond children's media.