http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/20/latinos-sabado-gigante-racism-misogyny-lended

Latinos outgrew Sábado Gigante's racism and misogyny long before it ended

Aura Bogado

Monday 20 April 2015

Saturday nights for Latinos are usually family nights, and the variety show Sábado Gigante – the Miami-based Spanish-language hybrid of Benny Hill, Saturday Night Live and The Price is Right, which aired across the Americas for 53 years – has long been a big part of that. I didn’t watch the show of my own volition too much after immigrating to the US as a child (I was a nerd who preferred to read books), but it was often on at home following the family meal on Saturday evenings; if we had friends and family over at our apartment on Saturday night, spending time with them meant watching the show. If I happened to be at a friend’s house on a Saturday night, watching the show was a big part of our entertainment...

the 3-hour Univision show (which will come to an end this fall) has remarkably soothed generational, geographical and linguistic divides. Latino families in the US and throughout the Americas still gather around the television screen to watch it, as generations did before us, and many are mourning its end. When Latinos in the US say they’ll miss Sábado Gigante, they sometimes mean they’ll miss the way that it allowed them to connect with other Latinos, and the anxiety over losing the bond that only Sábado Gigante makes possible – and made possible for so long – is predictable.

But coupled with a certain willing silence over the show’s problematic themes, sketches and host, that melancholy illustrates how Latino misogyny and racism is perpetuated in the US. Sábado Gigante and its host are representative of some of the worst supposed Latino culture, and both should have been rejected ages ago.

Sábado Gigante’s host, Mario Kreutzberger – better known as Don Francisco – has become synonymous with Sábado Gigante for more than half a century. Those of us who grew up watching Don Francisco also grew up having to accept his persistent objectification of women to enjoy (or endure) his show. Although I didn’t have the words to articulate it as a child, seeing the way Don Francisco treats women made me cringe – and still does. One of the Sábado Gigante’s best-known segments, for instance, is Miss Colita (roughly translated, it means Miss Ass); a pageant in which women parade around the stage in thongs while Don Francisco comments and audience members vote for their favorite buttocks. Miss Colita contestants willingly sign up for the segment – but also have to cope with Don Francisco’s constant ogling and groping.

But it’s not just Miss Colita contestants who are objectified by Don Francisco on Sábado Gigante: the host also picks women out from the audience – grabbing women of all ages and body types by the hand, wrist, elbow or waist – and comments on their bodies. I don’t know that any woman ever directly rejected Don Francisco’s physical prodding on an aired episode of Sábado Gigante – but he was sued for sexual harassment by a cast member (it was settled out of court).

And, when he’s not busy groping women the show regularly uses little people as caricatures, employs exaggerated gay characters for laughter and regularly fat-shames people – including children.

When it comes to blatantly racist portrayals, the show’s mockery of indigenous peoples in the Americas is profoundly demeaning. Sábado Gigante’s interracial sketches illustrate the stubborn inequity among Latinos in the Americas: although we share a geographic region, Latinos are not one race of people. There are black, indigenous, white, Asian and mixed Latinos who are all subjected to a racial hierarchy – an order that Sábado Gigante doesn’t challenge. As a Latina who’s also indigenous, I connect with the show’s use of the Spanish language yet strongly reject the way that indigenous peoples are portrayed.

The show’s racism doesn’t end with its mockery of indigenous peoples: one of the Sábado Gigante’s best-known recurring characters is La Cuatro, which is short for La Cuatro Dientes (“Four Teeth”), a reference to the character’s social status – poor people, it’s assumed, can’t afford to fix their teeth. Although the actress who portrays her is light skinned and blonde, La Cuatro is often referred to as being savage and wild. In one episode from the show’s later years, viewers learned that La Cuatro is expecting an inheritance from an uncle in Africa, which is eventually delivered by an “African” character sporting a cheetah-print cloth and disheveled hair held together by a large bone.

As English language television struggles to figure out how to portray and serve a Latino audience – from Cristela to George Lopez to Jane the Virgin to Modern Family and beyond – I can’t imagine Sábado Gigante-type antics would ever hit mainstream screens. The stereotypes it employs don’t represent us – but we would also never want non-Latinos to know that those offensive stereotypes are humor in which any of us should continue to traffic. Sábado Gigante symbolizes an outdated thinking about Latinos and comedy that hinges on fetishizing and ridiculing people for ratings; it is ostensibly Latino, but it’s not an indication of who we are or who we’ve striving to become.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27732712)

http://i.imgur.com/Ro3zXjm.jpg

I detect a pattern here...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27737225)

1. what are the mechanisms through which elite opinion is imposed upon the masses, how effective are those methods, and under what conditions do they fail, and

2. why does the current elite propagate the opinions it propagates?

the first set of questions is affected by factors like mass-media and the centralization of economic power. how easy is it for tastemakers and others in positions of influence to "secede" from the party line without being ostracized? or perhaps worse, merely ignored and nonpersoned?

the second is perhaps more interesting because it concerns the nature of modernity itself. i did a post a while ago where i tried to argue that small government is impossible in modern developed western powers:

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&mc=17&forum_id=2

i stand by most of that, and would add this: modern mass-market economics as a force has an individualizing effect. individuals are consumers, they are the direct objects of marketing, and the notion of subsuming one's consumption habits to a larger community is now quite foreign.

when the individual is the economic locus of an entire society, shitlibbery hops aboard and seems to flourish. there are direct relations here - look at how modern shitlib shaming language approximates the language of someone who is chastizing a customer service rep for alienating a client.

individuals become economic units, interpersonal interactions acquire a sort of market logic, and the natural emergent religion of the new social order appears to be very shitlib in nature.

this is why individualist creeds such as libertarianism are in fact completely hopeless against this sort of thing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27733184)

modern 'liberalism' is basically the ethos of bland, corporate 'don't-offend-the-customer'/sensitivity training, extended to society at large. it's not radical. it's simply 'good for business.'

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27733246)

but logical attempts to explain their errors always seem to fail.

that's because these lib activist groups have transferred what in previous decades or centuries would have been a community identity into a new sort of identity facilitated by modern technology and late capitalism.

in the olden days, if you insulted someone's clan, that would cause furious offense, even if the insults were true. this makes a direct sort of logical sense, since the weakening of one's clan by whatever means has a direct negative effect on your life and future prospects.

but clans and local communities have been largely dismantled in the modern era. so we have these very odd re-emergences of clan identities with the same level of fervor, but coalescing around abstractions.

this happens on the right, too. but in either case, neo-clans that stand in opposition to modern capitalism tend to be attacked and eliminated, while those which reinforce or do not threaten the modern order are able to strengthen.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27738569)

you know, people always say, 'capitalism is not a cabal. capitalists don't actually sit in a dark room and conspire to organize society; it's just an emergent phenomenon of the capitalist system'

but i simply can't believe it. someone has to be explicitly masterminding all of this stuff, socially engineering it, at the behest of transnational capital. it all works out too perfectly.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27738684)

just spitballing here

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27733510)

German Jew becomes folk hero on beaner network, gets SJWed on his way out the door.

only in America

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27733540)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HlrZhDgQ9Y

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2860296&forum_id=2#27734820)