Article

D O R A T H E E X P LOR E R ,
CON ST RU C T I N G L AT I N I DAD E S
AND THE P O LITICS O F GL O B A L
CITIZENSHIP

n d e z
Nicole M. Guidotti-Herna
The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

A b s t ra c t
Dora the Explorer, which went into syndication on the Nickelodeon childrens
television network in 2000, marks the shifting terrain of a globalized juvenile Latino/a
television market that has become increasingly multicultural and pro-bilingual, despite
the fact that the most states in the US have slashed the budgets of or altogether
eliminated the presence of bilingual education. Dora the Explorer provides a
post-modern model of globalized Latinidades, citizenship, race, and gender which
express a universal Latino/a subjectivity. At the same time, the show represents
a number of distinct Latino/a cultural practices (like the parranda and the comparsa)
through the representation of space, language, music, and racialized visual representations of Latino/a children. These double discourses express how nation, citizenship,
and identity are a contested terrain most closely illustrated by the show. With a reading
of the cultural work, Dora the Explorer performs in general and a close reading of
the 2001 episode Dora La Musico, in particular, the essay attempts to analyze the
capitalist success of Dora the Explorer in terms of the commercialization of and
marketing of Latinidades that have real-world implications for US Latino/as and Latin
Americans.

Ke y wo rds
Dora the Explorer; Latinidades; citizenship; subjectivity; space; parranda;
race; childrens animated television

c 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/07 $30.00

Latino Studies 2007, 5, (209232)
www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

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RE: Dora show is 90% Spanish nowy

Dora use to be an ok show. Now I do not let my children watch it. There is
way too much Spanish speaking in it. I do teach my kids to be willing to
accept others as they are, but I feel that if the Spanish speaking descent are
going to come here and live then they need to be taught and learn to speak our
language. We should not have to learn Spanish. Its bad that even our cartoon
programs have gone so far as to teach our children Spanish as much as it has.
I feel that if you live here you need to speak our language. If not then leave. It
should be a parents choice to teach our children other languages, not a
cartoon network. (Neciehp, 11/03/04, 11:42 a.m.)

RE: Dora show is 90% Spanish nowy

Ok, this is not about illegal immigration. According to the cartoon Dora is
here legally and is bilingual. Those of you who are complaining about this
need to open your eyes and realize that this country was founded on
immigrants. Most foreign immigrants know our language better than we
could ever hope to know theirs. The world itself is undergoing a daily process
of globalization. In simple terms it means that more countries are spending
more time mixing and matching cultures with one another to further
economic development. It would be more beneficial to all of us to learn a
second language whether it be Spanish or any other language. Whether we
like it or not the world is changing. We can sit here and complain about how
we dont want anything different or we can see Dora as an entertaining
cartoon with an educational twist to it. No matter what you choose, I chose
to let my child watch and learn. (shortvt123, 11/16/04, 02:13 p.m.)

1 Dora is an avid
explorer, always
curious and proud of
her Hispanic roots,
who loves to search
and search some
more.

Dora the Explorer debuted with wild success on the Nickelodeon childrens
television network on August 14, 2000. Within its seven short years of
syndication, the show has garnered several daytime Emmy nominations and has
won two Emmy awards, including Outstanding Childrens Animated Program.
Dora, an animated seven-year-old Latina girl, is the main character in a
bilingual cartoon. She has light brown skin, dark brown eyes, and a voice
bounding with endless enthusiasm. She wears orange shorts, a pink t-shirt, and
pink-and-white tennis shoes, and carries a talking backpack and a map that help
guide her adventures. As El Norte (Ninos intrepidos, 2006) notes, Es una nina
exploradora aficionada, siempre curiosa y orgullosa de sus races hispanas a
quien le encanta buscar y rebuscar.1 Viewers are invited to help the young
explorer through her adventures, accompanied by her best friend, a monkey
named Boots (Figure 1). They read maps, count, and speak Spanish.2 She is
always trying to rescue animals or help her friends and family. Each episode of
her cartoon is laced with the sounds of Latin music, such as salsa, marimba, and
folk songs.3

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2 Valerie Walsh, one
of the shows
creators, argues that
what makes it unique
is that parents tell us
they know when
Dora is on because
theyll see and hear
their kids playing
along with the show:
counting, speaking
Spanish, jumping,
rowing, clapping,
etc. (Interview,
2003).

Figure 1

Dora La Musico.

One cannot walk into a Target store or a grocery store, or even pass a street
vendor in Tepoztlan, Mexico, without seeing dolls, dishes, candy, and clothes
adorned with Doras face. On iTunes, you can even access Dora songs and her
rendition of Oye Como Va as a duet with Carlos Santana.4 The MTV
network is offering Podcasts of the show (Podcast Newsy, 2006). Dora the
Explorer is the first show for preschoolers to be offered via Podcast. Dora was
the first Latina character to appear in the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade.5
Her show is broadcast in 74 countries and 15 languages, and has an estimated
8.8 million viewers ages 211 (Derdeyn, 2005). Because her profile is so visible
in multiple media markets, Dora sparks public debates about race, class, gender,
and citizenship in transnational contexts.
Parents who post messages on the Dora the Explorer Nick Jr. website, who
watch the show with their children, and who buy the consumer products
attached to the show express political anxiety about language, immigration,
citizenship, entertainment, and education. Parent dialogues (like those that
opened the essay) on the Nick Jr. website are just one way to gauge how Dora
the Explorer becomes a site of heated debate regarding Latino/a subjectivity.
As parent testimony indicates, Dora evokes a sense of identification,
disidentification (averse non-identification), and problematic politics. Neciehp
argues that Dora is a medium that teaches English speakers too much Spanish in
an English-only national context where Latino/as are always immigrants who
must assimilate linguistically. To have Spanish at once signify the language of
the other and a place outside of US borders, over there, reinforces the ways
in which Latino/as are perpetually erased from US national narratives except

3 Salsa is a panLatino musical style

that emerged in New
York City. Here, salsa
functions as a
transnational signifier
that references local
and national
constructions of
Latinidad. I use this
term throughout the
essay because the
show draws from
numerous musical
traditions of the
Americas. For more
on the history of
salsa, see Frances
Aparicios Listening
to Salsa (1998).
4 The album Dora
the Explorer Dance
Fiesta includes
tracks with Los
Lonely Boys and
covers of Cool and
the Gangs
Celebration.
5 ANSA Noticero en
Espanol ran a special
article about Dora as
the Primer personaje
Latino en desfile de
Thanksgiving en
Nueva York. The
president of
Nickelodeon, Cyma

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Zarghami, states,
Dora se ha
convertido en un
icono en la
comunidad hispana
y uno de los
personajes favoritos
de los ninos
preescolares (EEUU,
2005).

when they are located as an immigration problem or source of cheap labor. In

contrast, Shortvt123s description of the daily processes of globalization
keenly identifies the role of capitalism and culture embodied in the production
of childrens television shows as objects of consumption. Shortvt123 testifies
that Spanish has become a global language in a moment of global citizenship.
(S)he uses global capitalism to defend Doras appropriateness as a representation of Latino/a childhood and social realities.
Dora the explorer was an example of how larger media trends have made
Latino/as increasingly visible in the last 15 years. The reconfiguration and
popularization of Latino/a identity is most effectively analyzed through discourses
of Latinidad, which are processes where Latino/a identities and cultural practices
are contested and created in media, discourse, and public space. Latinidad
influences the construction of Dora, which means that she is not merely created
by ideas about Latinas, but she also creates ideas about Latinas. Dora represents
no particular Latino/a national identity, but her otherness is not far removed from
the US context, so most viewers assume she is Mexican or Puerto Rican. For
Latino/a Studies scholars in particular, this blurring of national and cultural
difference demands critical attention. Hence, through a close reading of the show
in general and of a Dora the Explorer episode, Dora La Musico (2001) in
particular, this essay argues that Dora the Explorer engages a number of
competing discourses that situate her at the politically dangerous crossroads
of race, citizenship, nation, and universal Latino/a subjectivity. In particular,
Dora La Musico (2001) stages an intertextual dialogue with other public
Latino/a texts, magnifying cultural practices that are distinctly Latino/a (salsa,
dance, the comparsa, and the parranda) rather than homogeneous. As I discuss
issues of space (three-dimensional continuums of expansion in all directions),
citizenship, and identity I argue that Dora has social and political significance
because her representation has the ability to shape and produce discourses about
Latino/as (i.e. Latinidad). In other words, this essay demonstrates how powerful
mass media texts can become to the point that people can find them necessary
parts for negotiating their everyday lives.

L a t i n i d a d : He c h o p o r Ni c ke l o de o n
Nickelodeons successful marketing of Dora the Explorer is dependent upon the
reaffirmation of Latinidad discourses. Frances Aparicio and Susan ChavezSilverman (1997, 1516) argue that Latinidad describes sets of images and
attributes projected onto both Latin American and US Latino/a subjects by the
dominant culture. In another sense, though, Latinidad is also a way for Latino/as to
create discourses about their own identities. Following Aparicio and ChavezSilverman, I argue that Latinidad is deployed in a flexible sense in Dora the
Explorer as a simultaneous commodification of culture and ask of cultural
contestation. Referencing dominant cultural impositions and Latino/a ideological

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constructions can also problematize sexism, racism, monolingualism, and classism.

In Dora the Explorer, the transnational amalgamations and cultural formations
resulting from the continually shifting patterns of immigration, migration, and
settlement in the multiethnic Latino diaspora are what constitute Latinidad. As a
product of transnational capital interests (Viacom owns Nickelodeon and MTV
Latin America, for example) and as an object consumed in a transnational context,
Dora the Explorer marks how Latinidad is used to create meaning on a global scale.
Latinidad also entails hybridity, a cross between cultures, genres, and media.6
Hybridity is the result of geopolitical conflicts that force people into regions
other than their native ones. Geopolitical movements spawn hybrid, or mixed,
cultural practices because there are unlikely proximities of different cultural and
national communities. Because of these spatial aspects in the creation of
hybridity, I would follow Guzman and Valdivia in calling Dora a transnational
figure because she exist[s] within the representational conflict between hybrid
and authentic (2004, 218). While there is no doubt that hybridity and
authenticity are a part of discourses of Latinidad, I disagree with Valdivia and
Guzman that hybrid and authentic are opposite ends of a spectrum, with
the transnational figure existing somewhere in the middle. For something to be
authentic requires the remembering of some parts of history and the forgetting
of others. For example, when Dora is evoked as a real Latina, it is an active
forgetting of complex national and individual histories of the people relegated
to the racial/cultural category Latina. Therefore, Dora becomes authentic or the
real because history is elided in the representation. Hybridity is often celebrated
as a neo-liberal, ahistorical, uncritical rhetoric of diversity. Since Latinidad is a
social force that has everyday implications for the lives of millions of Latino/as,
it is important to reject claims of authenticity or an uncritical deployment of
hybridity precisely because they are ahistorical. There is no such thing as an
authentic Latina.
Still, as a transnational figure, Dora represents that gray area where meaning
is unstable, where history is not fixed, but rather is controlled by the agency of
viewers and producers alike. This information transmission process is called
encoding and decoding (Hall, 1993). Hall (1993, 505) states that the moments
of encoding and decoding, though only relatively autonomous in relation to
the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments. Encoding
represents the distribution of ideas. These ideas are encoded through the
production and circulation of Dora products. The encoding process is where
objects are consumed and reproduced. Decoding is the process where we
untangle the messages of the text and understand their meaning.
Both decoding and encoding are mutually dependent on and influence each
other, especially with the social production carried out by Latinidad as a
discourse. Nickelodeon encodes Latinidad with the signs embedded in the TV
program.7 It is through the lens of Latinidad that the viewer decodes the sign
referents. These exchanges are circular and create frameworks of knowledge

6 I use hybridity to
indicate anything
derived from
heterogeneous
sources or composed
of different or
incongruous
elements. Homi
Bhabbha (1994)
argues that hybridity
mimics the ways that
the colonial presence
is always ambivalent,
split between its
presence as original
and authoritative and
its articulation as
repetition and
difference (107).
Hybridity is the result
of competing
epistemes, the
colonial, the
postcolonial, and the
neocolonial. With
hybridity, we get a
sense of the markers
of colonial discourse
on formerly colonized
and colonizing
peoples.

7 A sign is something
that indicates or
expresses the

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existence of
something else not
immediately
apparent.

and relations of production, power, and technical infrastructure. When the

meaning of a message is not the same for both sides of the communication
exchange, slippages in meaning, called distortions or misunderstandings, occur
because of the lack of equivalence in meaning (Hall, 1993, 510).
A perfect example of encoding and decoding is found in the ways in which the
Dora texts rework and reinforce mainstream concepts of Latinidad by engaging
in social practices like feminism. There are two possibilities: Goldman et al.
(1991, 333) caution that corporate-generated feminisms are dangerous because
they assemble signs which connote independence, participation in the
workforce, individual freedom, and self-control, but only through the
consumption of goods and services. Images of independence are encoded as
good qualities in the US rhetoric of individualism; however, capitalist-style
individualism is not consistent with the cultural values embedded in Latina
feminist liberation strategies which alternatively propose that all racial/ethnic
groups and identity markers sexuality, race, gender, age, ethnicity, national
origins, class, etc. would carry equal force (Latina Feminist Group, 2001, 12)
when analyzing the lives of disenfranchised people.
To decode feminist aspects of the text is to analyze Doras connection to
gender roles within the context of Latinidad. She is positioned as a symbol of
gender equity rather than of sexuality or gendered oppression because she is a
child who is less threatening to traditional gender roles than a woman would
be. Ellen Seiter (1995, 156) suggests that recent girl-centered cartoons exist
outside the world of mommies, grocery stories, automobiles, schools, and
shopping malls. Dora the Explorer also follows this pattern. Doras mother is
rarely depicted, and Dora is unconnected to womens work and domesticity,
suggesting a kind of independence. For Latinas especially, the show critiques
prescribed gender roles. Doras exploration and her sociopolitical mobility
contradict the messages that Latina girls are often raised with: obedience to the
church, submission to men, and limited participation in public discourse, shifting the
meaning of Latindad to a discourse that is potentially empowering (Garca, 1997).
Like other contemporary cartoons featuring female heroines, such as The Power
Puff Girls and Kimpossible, Dora the Explorer constructs a shared experience of
young, empowered girls with the ability to help others. Dora the Explorer also
appeals to both boys and girls because she signifies gender equity, empathy, and
solidarity across individual differences, demonstrating the potential nature of
decoding Latinidad as a liberating social force, with feminist underpinnings.
Hence, Latinidad is a double-edged sword. It can be socially and politically
dangerous and socially and politically liberating. Viewers can decode and
manipulate discourses of Latinidad for self-empowerment purposes like
feminism. On the other hand, Latinidad can be decoded as a homogenization
of race, language, ethnicity, and culture. The show encodes a monolithic,
consumer-ready Latino identity that is accessible to members of the dominant
culture (Sandoval-Sanchez and Roman, 1995). Herein lies the problem: when

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the viewers cannot distinguish or decode specific national histories and cultural
practices of different Latin Americans and Latino/as within the show, Dora
distorts Latino/a identity, making it seem that there is one singular, authentic
Latino/a culture. Such single, authentic representation appeals to essentialist
racial, cultural, and physical traits instead of presenting cultural practices and
racial identities as fluid, differentiating depending upon region. Some parents
call Dora whitewashed whereas others firmly assert that she is phenotypically
Latina, reinforcing Arlene Davilas argument that it is in the market and
through marketing discourse that they [people of color] debat[e] their social
identities and public standing (2001, 2). Doras light cinnamon colored skin
and good hair read straight, non-African hair (Negron-Muntaner, 2002)
construct a version of Latinidad that emphasizes the Spanish European legacy of
Hispanics, ignoring their indigenous and black roots (Oboler, 1995, 83). In
addition, Doras ambiguous ethnic and national identity reflects the deliberate
choices of her creators. The shows creator, Chris Gifford (Interview, 2003),
states that with regard to cultural aspects, we realized to do it right we need to
be as authentic as we can be. Such a flawed essentialist understanding of
authenticity reifies the universal, singular (not plural) racial/cultural category of
Latino, instead of referring to Latino/as as a complex group exhibiting
difference on multiple levels. A Nickelodeon executive further states that in the
shows development, There was a great deal of education y about diversity
within the Hispanic community. All of us discovered how different Puerto
Ricans are from South Americans who are different from Mexicans, and so on.
And then there are the regional differences in music and clothing (Jackson,
2003). Yet, despite this alleged education in cultural competence, cultural
specificity is lost in the shows portrayal of one seamless Latino culture. While
Nickelodeon executives congratulate themselves on knowing the difference
between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, they still somehow manage to forget that
South America is a continent of 23 nations, not a single country, that a number
of languages besides Spanish are spoken in Latin America, that there is much
more to diversity than music and clothing, and that there is more to the
Caribbean than Puerto Rico. This thinking is politically dangerous because it
uncritically informs masses of people globally that may or may not know about
the histories of Latino/a peoples from multiple nations. Nickelodeons portrait
of Hispanic diversity sounds more like a stereotype than a representation of
race, gender, class, and national stratifications that are the legacy of
colonization in the Americas. These acts typify sanctioned ignorance
(Donaldson, 2002). This practice condones ignorance when histories are
reproduced in such a way as to create a singular, ahistorical narrative, which
perpetuates a seamless construction of the universal Latino/a subject and history
that circulates in global popular cultures. Contemporary displays of neo-racism
and sanctioned ignorance perpetuate colonialism and reify the colonial past by
collapsing past and present (Kraniauskas, 2000, 243).

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8 Another way to
think about these
dominant images of
Latino/as and
Latinidad is Clara
Rodrguezs definition
of the Latin look
(1997, 14).
Rodrguezs critique
of the universal
Latino/a subject
steers us away from
an essential category
of Latino/a identity or
Latinidad.
9 In an effort to make
the show reflect
historically grounded
and culturally specific
practices,
Nickelodeon
established a cultural
advisory board. Each
episode of Dora the
Explorer undergoes
scrutiny by the
cultural advisory
board, which shapes
notions of Latinidad.

In Doras case, uncritical Latinidad collapses past and present with the
secondary discourse of mestizaje. In Latin America, mestizaje obliterates race
because all ethnic groups are blended, thus convoluting a fixed ideology of
social mobility (Guss, 1998, 264). Social mobility linked to mestizaje indicates a
particular amount of privilege (social, class, and economic) that is most closely
associated with whiteness rather than black or indigenous identities. When
Dora is evoked as Latina, Afro-Latino history and indigenous identity are
subsumed under the sign mestizaje, which blurs the history of color, gender,
and class hierarchies in Latino/a communities in the Americas. Such a conscious
projection constructs Dora as a universal Latina subject. While this is a useful
way to understand the contradictory position of Dora the Explorer in this
moment of global capitalism, it is politically dangerous because the dominant
viewing group can assume that all Latino/as are like Dora and thus are all the
same. The creators purposefully do not specify her ethnic background,
preferring that she have a pan-Latino appeal (Interview, 2003). The creators
even changed her eyes from their original green to brown so that she would be
more representative of the majority of Latinos (Cabrera, 2002). There is a
common assumption about what Latinos look like, which is both specific (the
majority have brown eyes) and vague (brown eyes are a genetically dominant
trait).8 Clara Rodrguez (2000, ix) argues that race, ethnicity, and nation are
conflated in the United States, particularly with regard to US Latino/a
populations. Dora is the representation of the universal Latino/a subject that
Rodriguez critiques. Yet despite these problematic constructions, US Latino/as
and Latin Americans remain avid consumers of the show because it reflects a
version of their identities, cultures, and a potentially positive role model for
Latino/a children (Davila, 2001, 7). Suzanne Oboler (1995, 136) cautions,
these cultural commonalities should not be confused with automatic adherence
to political and ideological panethnicism. Latinidad and Latino/a identity can
potentially create a false sense of universality of cultural practice, language, and
skin color.9 Ahistorically decoded media discourses of Latinidad effectively
produce a seamless, all-encompassing ethnic yet simultaneously ambiguous
Latino/a identity. At the same time the viewers social imagination becomes
extremely crucial in decoding meaning. Just as the producers of the show encode
a kind of amalgamated Latino/a culture that is diverse and somewhat reflective
of actual cultural practices, the audience uses points of identification or
disidentification to produce a secondary level of cultural meaning that may or
may not be historically informed (Munoz, 1999).

Nation and the construction of the child-citizen

I have argued thus far that Dora the Explorer produces convoluted national
narratives of Latinidad and universal subjectivity. Further, Dora the Explorer
intercedes into childrens self-identities. In other words, children explicitly

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engage with the concepts of nation-space and citizenship when they watch Dora
the Explorer. Children, argues Walter Benjamin (1999, 116), do not
constitute a community cut off from everything else. They belong to the nation
and class that they come from. Their toys cannot bear witness to any
autonomous separate existence, but rather are a silent signifying dialogue
between children and the nation, a signifying dialogue to the decoding of which
this work provides a secure foundation. Play (amusing or diverting oneself)
and playthings produce child-citizens. Citizenship and childs play are not
usually associated with each other. Citizens are enfranchised members of a state,
as opposed to aliens, who are not entitled to full exercise of civil rights and
publicly funded benefits. The child-citizen is constructed when children play
together with Dora the Explorer objects. When children watch the show,
purchase Dora products, and play with them in their homes, they participate in
a mass-media-generated community, as do the parents in the chatrooms.10
Doras identity is intimately linked to the nation as children enact consumer
citizenship through their object of play. Each Dora the Explorer episode stages a
signifying dialogue about questions of Latino/a heterogeneity and the
production of diversity that are taken up individually in the ways children
play and imagine, and collectively among parents and other viewers who
contest citizenship through Dora.
Citizenship is also configured through representations of space (threedimensional context for revealing social meaning), or what Herman
Gray (1995) calls the televisual landscape, in Dora the Explorer episodes.
The televisual landscape is socially constructed to normalize moments of
bilingualism as mediated, fun opportunities for learning. Even if the creators
of Dora do not claim a particular political orientation, and they do in fact
represent a discourse of tolerance and pluralism, the show in and of itself
embodies a kind of political and pedagogical ethos of multiculturalism,
consumerism, and Latino/a identity embodied in spatial configurations. The
creators of Dora the Explorer have positioned and imagined Dora in a panLatino spatial and cultural landscape. Space and Latina bodies appear in the
mass media as contested zones where cultural, political, and racial struggles
take place (Rojas, 2004, 134). As borders and definitions of ethnic identity
migrate with shifts in spatial location, there is a slippage in the meaning
of space and power. Space is reconfigured through immaterial communication evinced in the mass media, which publicly modifies constructed or
mass-produced and private understandings of identity (Garca-Canclini,
1995, 208).
In this pan-Latino space, where power is constantly negotiated, Dora is
marked with the social mobility (the ability to move freely throughout society)
tied to a compulsory middle-class identity. Mobility signifies social privilege.
She moves through space uninhibited and unpoliced; her brown body is not
criminalized as are the majority of Latinos we see on television in this post-9/11

Within a corporate
structure, how can
one effectively make
political and social
change? Having
academics lends
cultural capital to the
show and gives it
credibility. It is a
tough relationship
(corporate interest
meets academia) from
which to make
political and social
change. The
executives believe the
show is a production
of authenticity. I
would venture to
guess that the
advisory board is
working against
paradigms of
authenticity. At the
same time, only so
much social
intervention can be
made if the
Nickelodeon
conglomerate has the
final say in the edited
product. Some of the
notable members of
this board are Carlos
Cortes, Professor
Emeritus of History
at the University of
California at
Riverside; Clara
Rodrguez, Associate
Professor of
Sociology at Fordham
University; Marta
Moreno Vega, scholar
and founder of the
Caribbean Cultural
Center in New York
City; Valerie
Lovelace, former Vice
President of Sesame
Street Research; and
David Anderson,
Professor of Child

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Psychology at the
University of
Massachusetts.
10 On the nickjr.com
website, parents
debate where Dora is
from and what her
ethnic/national
identity is (postings
from 7/22/03 to
8/6/03).

period of racial profiling. Her access to multiple tools: books, a backpack, and a
flute, among others, suggest a kind of power that is tied to social mobility.
The various spaces that Dora occupies configure social mobility as horizontal,
not vertical (Soja, 1989, 134). That is, Dora moves across social strata
instead of up and down class hierarchies, again presupposing a middle-class
identity. For certain viewers, spatial signifiers facilitate a sense of familiarity
and cultural citizenship. Interacting with the narrative enables people
who identify with the show to claim space in society and, vicariously, rights
(Flores and Benmayor, 1997). Space, as it is evinced in consumer culture,
provides children with a shared repository of national and global images
(Seiter, 1995). This shared repository evokes nation-space because it designates
both geographical boundary and political entity. Through the dissemination
of Doras images within transnational contexts, children are exposed to
multiple discourses of Latinidad, global citizenship, and space. The ambiguity
surrounding the exact place where Dora lives, for my purposes here,
would suggest that Latino/as are simultaneously everywhere and
nowhere because mass media in the post-nationalist period make nation an
unstable category (Saldvar, 1997, 135), further putting their citizenship in
question while reaffirming the citizenship of others.

Race, c ultura l p ra ctice, and i nter textuality

11 I want to stress
that salsa is a
transnational signifier
of Latinidad.
12 These songs have
not maintained their
original African
forms, but they have
been influenced by
African aesthetics as
well as American jazz
and other sources. See

The production of citizenship, Latinidad, and space in Dora the Explorer are
most clearly represented in the episode Dora La Musico (2001), where
viewers participate in a genealogy of the Latin music scene. As Robin Moore
(1997, 10) argues in Nationalizing Blackness, Music and related forms of
expression thus constitute a primary source of information on racial conflict.
Biased attitudes about music are a part of an ongoing social dialogue on race
and must be understood as a component of the larger phenomenon manifesting
itself as racial segregation, discrimination and overt physical repression. While
the rhythms that circulate throughout the 25-min program are identifiable
primarily as salsa11 and marimba, they mirror ongoing dialogues of cultural
practice where the content of race, difference, and segregation indirectly play
out. Despite Doras light skin, a constant reminder that Afro-Latinidad has
literally been erased from her body, the show does include African-influenced
musical expressions like salsa.12 These eruptions of blackness signify the
presence of both an integrated musical tradition as a part of the show and
Latino/a cultural landscapes.
Following the standard format of each episode,13 Dora La Musico opens
with the Dora theme song. Set to the strong beat of the clave, the joyful melody
is an onomatopoeia of sorts that mimics Doras movement. The lyrics solidify a
feminist repositioning of the violent trope of the explorer in the Americas:

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(bright salsa feel)

Boots: Dora!
Dora: Boots!
Boots: Come on Dora!
Kids: D-D-D-D-D-Do-ra y Do-ra, Do-ra, Do-ra the Explorer, Yeah! Boots
and super cool Ex-plo-ra-Do-ra need your help. Grab your backpack! Lets
go! Jump in! (Vamanos!) You can lead the way. Hey! Hey! D- D-Do-ra, D-DDora, D-D-Dora, D-D-Dora. Swip-er, no Swip-ing. Swip-er, no Swip-ing! (Oh
man!) Do-ra the Ex-plo-rer! [the click and beep of a computer mouse].
(Sitron et al., 2000)

The musical structure of the song, the layering of specific instruments (the clave,
guiro, timbales, and keyboards), the production of particular sounds, and the
centering of Dora, a brown-skinned, seven-year-old Latina child as agent and
explorer create a radical cultural revision of what we traditionally see in the media.
In the Dora La Musico episode, after the theme song, Dora asks the
audience if they like music and then plays her flute.14 Dora is joined by her
friend, Boots, and they soon learn that in the local town a man named Senor
Shush has locked away all of the instruments to prevent the townspeople from
continuing their parranda, or parade of musical instruments.15 The most
interesting thing about Senor Shush is that he very closely resembles the late
salsa superstar Tito Puente (Figure 2). Ironically, although Shush may look like
Puente, he hates music and constantly clamors for silencio! In addition to the
Puente parody (which functions as a cartoon homage), the episode engages salsa
as a part of the textuality of the show.

Figure 2

Senor Shush clamoring for silencio!

Robin Moores
Nationalizing
Blackness (1997) and
Wilson ValentnEscobars
unpublished
dissertation,
Freedomland at the
New Rican Village:
Latin Jazz and the
Making of a Latino
Avant-garde Arts
Scene in New York
City, for more on
this point.
13 Each 25-min
episode starts with a
close-up of a
computer, then
ventures into an
animated full screen
showing Dora and
her animal friends
while the theme song
plays. Once the song
ends, the camera cuts
to a close-up of Dora
in which she says
hola or hello, Im
Dora. She asks the
audience a question,
and the adventure
begins. The premise
of the show is built
around helping and
sharing. Dora then
calls upon her magic
map. Once the map
sings his song (which
has a very bluesy
quality), he leads the
audience through the
three steps necessary
to solve the problem.
Dora repeats the
three markers of
progress to the
audience so that the
children are
familiarized with the
spaces. As Dora and
the audience

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collectively travel
through each place on
the map, they learn
Spanish, help each
other, sing, and
engage in physical
activities. In addition,
Dora has a bilingual
backpack that seems
to have every tool
imaginable inside it;
children are
encouraged to help
the backpack select
the proper tools to
help Dora with that
days adventure. As
each obstacle is
overcome, a threepiece brass band
made up of snails, the
fiesta trio, plays a
tune to mark their
progress. When Dora
and the audience have
accomplished all their
tasks, they sing the
We Did It! Lo
Hicimos! song,
which provides
closure to the
adventure.

The episode then shifts to the secondary marker: the talking map that
operates like a map to social justice. The map sings a bluesy song: If theres a
place you wanna go, Im the one that you should know, Im the map, Im the
map, Im the map. The map then states that Dora and Boots want to help the
people of the pueblo regain their instruments and continue the parranda. There
are three landmarks that always track progress on the journey (Figure 3). The
three landmarks are memorized and become the cartography for agency and
aiding the community in restoring their parranda.
Landscape is a shifting but primary focus of each episode. In Dora La
Musico, the landscape is both tropical and arid, sort of like a visual contrast
between Ponce Puerto Ricos arid landscape and El Yunque. Tropicalization
(a landscape that visually references the tropics) evokes place (like Puerto Rico)
as a metaphor. The televisual landscape moves from a tropical world filled
with jungles, beaches and rainforests (www.prnewswire.com) to settings of
snowy mountains, artic ice, water formations, and arid landscapes populated
with adobe houses or casitas16 that are universally associated with Latinos.
El Norte (Ninos intrepidos, 2006) adds that Dora ha viajado por la playa, la
montana, el ro, el Polo Norte y muchos otros lugares, y continuamente
encuentra misterios que resolver.17 Multiple landscapes make categories of
nation-space and citizenship unstable, yet vernacular and local.18 In this
episode, the setting could take place in Latin America, as one Associated Press
article claims (Rogers, 2003), or in the United States, the Isthmus of Panama, or
any number of other geographic locations. The shifting landscape becomes a

14 Because the show

is for preschoolers
ages two to five, the
structure relies upon
an interactive format
and repetition of new
concepts and Spanish
words. Often the
interactions take the
form of Dora directly
asking the audience a
question to encourage
participation,
movement, or
Spanish-language
skills (Interview,
2003).
15 The parranda
alludes to the history
of slavery, Afro-

Figure 3

The Map.

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contact zone, where bodies and identity resist stable categories and meaning as
ambivalent, contradictory and historically shifting (Guzman and Valdivia,
2004, 214). In extreme contrast to migrant workers who have physical mobility
because they come from aggrieved communities19 and are forced into particular
types of manual labor, Doras mobility in space is tied not to proletariat labor
but to class privilege, which facilitates her ability to help others.
The next spatial cue comes when Dora reads the talking map with the
audience so that they can negotiate space and plan their adventures as part of an
interactive learning process (Figure 4). Attentiveness to space and maps
demonstrates how historically cartography is about locating, identifying and
bounding phenomena and thereby situating events, processes and things within
a coherent spatial frame (Harvey, 2001, 220). Cartography has always been
about power relations. Cartography facilitated the colonization of the New
World. How ironic, then, that a seven-year-old Latina animated character
would be teaching cartography (especially as a mechanism for problem solving)
to children across the globe. As Dora facilitates a discussion of how to negotiate
space within the televisual landscape, she is figured with a fair amount of power
that has historically been denied to Latino/as. One need only look at the history
of Spanish colonization of the Americas, Mexican land loss in the Southwest, US
military intervention in Central America in the 1980s, or the continued
colonization of Puerto Rico for examples of exclusion from power. Dora creates
a cognitive map as movement through space marks time and creates a coherent
narrative. Repetition based on the map defines the space as bilingual. As maps
have facilitated political and economic power, Doras work with the map
solidifies her position as a representative of global Latino/a citizenship and
feminist agency, instead of as a limited, spatially colonized body. Doras use of
the map shapes how Latino/a spaces are understood, envisioned, defined and
experienced (Brady, 2002, 7). Representing a particular set of Latino/a cultural
practices in spatial configurations as shifting deploy Dora as an explorer and
global citizen with physical mobility (Clifford, 1997, 22). Such awareness of
geography in the postmodern world is evinced through the shows political
investment in cartography.
Spatial movement further positions Dora as geographer and leader of the
parranda in Dora La Musico. She explores her native lands (which are
everywhere as she is everywhere), suggesting that space is not static and is itself
a field where meaning is produced (Brady, 2002). Space determines Doras
observations and activities. In fact, one could argue that Dora is performing
auto-ethnography; that is, instances where colonized subjects undertake to
represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers own terms
(Saldvar, 1997, 135). If we think of her as performing auto-ethnography, then
locating her brown body within a particular space or continent becomes even
more urgent politically because it would suggest that Latino/as have distinct
national origins and yet are geographically dispersed because of annexation,

Latino identities, and

ethno-musical
practices in the
Americas. Hortensia
Caballeros Parranda
de San Pedro is one
study of the history of
the parranda in
Venezuela. See
www.elboriqua.com
for more on the
Puerto Rican
parranda.
16 The casitas in
Dora the Explorer are
representations of
vernacular
architecture. These
casitas create a sense
of space that is
defined as Latino/a.
Luis Aponte-Pares
argues that the casitas
in the Bronx are
sources of pride and
memory (1995, 8).
Here, the casitas
establish a collective
spatial memory that
evokes Latino/a
communities.
17 [She] has traveled
to the beach, the
mountains, the river,
the North Pole and
many other locations
and continually
encounters mysteries
that she must
resolve.
18 Episodes like
Super Map, (2004)
or Doras Pirate
Adventure (2004)
take place outside of
exclusively
tropicalized settings.
19 Aggrieved
communities are
defined by injustices
committed against
minority religious

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and ethnic
communities by
majority
communities.

20 While Floress
discussion focuses on
the elision of Puerto
Ricans in the United
States from the
national narrative,
similar elisions are
staged in this Dora
the Explorer episode
through the parranda
because it refers to
multiple Latino/a
traditions that vary in
origin and
importance. Their
staging on
mainstream television
is a rupture of the
dominant US national
narrative (see Flores,
2000, 4950).

immigration, and migration. These conflicting discourses about space,

cartography, and citizenship express a larger anxiety about who is a native,
who is an immigrant, and who is a global citizen within the context of Dora La
Musico.
Further, mass-produced understandings of identity are modified and broken
down because Dora moves through space in a way that signifies her access to
power. Thus, arguably, the parranda staged in Dora La Musico evinces Doras
power through an alternative, hybridized reach of memory that is, as Juan
Flores describes it, a process without closure and conclusion. Flores then argues
that memory is what allows for the reestablishment of historical continuities
and the uncovering of new histories that fill in the gaps in Puerto Rican and
Latino/a histories (Flores, 2000, 4950).20 In this vein, I want to consider the
parranda in Dora La Musico as having vestiges of the Puerto Rican parranda
of Christmas, the Venezuelan parranda, and the Afro-Cuban comparsa as they
configure power in space and self-determination.
The parranda is part of multiple oral and musical traditions, reflecting
multiple Latino histories simultaneously. In Puerto Rico, the parranda is linked
to Christmas and the Da de los Reyes celebration. This Puerto Rican version of
Christmas caroling with a double text conceals public resistance (Quintero
Rivera, 1994). The Spanish government feared revolt, and the Spanish colonial
police prohibited public congregations, especially if they were secular (political)
rather than religious. Thus, parranderos went from house to house, singing
political songs that doubled as religious songs, seeking refuge from the Spanish
police. The singing goes along with the spontaneous playing of instruments.
In Venezuela, the parranda is held to honor saints in particular pueblos. It is a
cultural response to colonization and a form of transculturation. La Parranda de
San Pedro, for example, which takes place in Guatire, Venezuela, every year, is
said to have begun as a slave cultural practice in 1818. In interviews with
Hortensia Caballero (1991, 4951), residents of Guatire stated that the
parranda originated with a slave named Mara Ignacia. One of her daughters,
the little negrita in her arms named Rosa Ignacia, was gravely ill with the evil
eye. Maria Ignacia was very desperate and prayed on her knees to Saint Peter,
asking that he cure her daughter. Then she began to sing and dance. In only a
few days Saint Peter performed a miracle, the child was cured, and there was
general happiness and excitement among all the slaves in the haciendas. The
slave community then began to celebrate the parranda of Saint Peter on June 29,
to commemorate Mara and Rosa and honor Maras promise to Saint Peter
(Caballero, 1991, 87).
Because the parranda was associated with a patron saint, it was less
likely than more Africanized celebrations to be censored by the colonial powers
in Venezuela. The guatirenos are aware that the Parranda de San Pedro is
the result of years of lived domination and exploitation embodied in a childs
illness. Symbolically, it has come to represent what slaves suffered during the

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colonial epoch. The ritual of the parranda returns the parranderos to their
history, reconstructing not only the miracle and devotion to a saint, but also
the suffering of the slave population in the sugarcane fields. According to
Caballero (1991, 67), With the songs, the dances and the attitudes assumed by
the groups of the participants in relation to the Parranda of Saint Peter,
a therapeutic process takes place y during the promise and the worship of
the saint y [t]he slaves of the haciendas tried to alleviate their potential
conflicts: with multiple oppressions, injustices, and reprimendas. [As they]
celebrate, protest and revelarse in opposition to the system, what was reinforced
was the union and solidarity between the slave population (Caballero,
1991, 67). Many subaltern ritual practices, argues Nestor Garca-Canclini
(1995, 157), reproduce traditional structures of meaning and yet transgress
them. Thus, while ostensibly paying homage to a traditional Catholic saint
(San Pedro), the parranderos engage with a specific history of African slavery in
Venezuela that counters the traditional narrative of the nation as exclusively
mestizo.
What is radically different between the Venezuelan parranda and the
parranda staged in Dora La Musico is the role of religion. There is no
Santo worship or overt religious practice in the Dora episode, but the
parranderos do perform a miracle of sorts: When they arrive and play their
instruments, the townspeople are freed of Senor Shushs spell, the music box is
opened, and their instruments are returned. The parranda in Dora indirectly
references blackness and Afro-Latinidad in a televisual landscape, even though
it does not visually represent it. If the Venezuelan parranda was a means
to alleviate the multiple oppressions and injustices of slavery, as Caballero
suggests, then the parranda in Dora La Musico performs a similar function
of resisting oppressive forces.
Given the ways in which the parranda engages a history of Afro-Latinidad, it
makes sense to think about Doras parranda as an intertextual dialogue with the
Cuban comparsa as well. The parranda and comparsa share similar histories
because they originate within aggrieved Afro-Latino communities and practices
of self-determination. Afro-Cuban street bands perform the Cuban comparsa
during Lent and Carnival. The most famous groups often come from the most
socially and economically marginalized parts of Havana. Comparsa music has
an oppositional quality because the European-origin majority characterized it as
a barbaric African form of cultural expression located in the past. As Robin
Moore (1997, 7071) notes, attitudes among the white majority in Cuba had
reached a general consensus by the mid-1910s: whatever concessions would be
made to integrate Afrocubans more fully into the nation would entail as a
prerequisite the elimination of degenerate West African-derived (and slavery
associated) cultural forms. The comparsa has a contested history because it is a
distinctly Afro-Cuban practice that reflects African cultural retentions and
resistance to colonization. Such histories reinforce how in the Latino world

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21 According to
Angharad Valdivia
(2004, 109), one
discourse caters to a
traditional, Hispanic,
Spanish-dominant
group, the other to
bilingual, Englishdominant Latinos.

blackness is suppressed by and embarrassing to the elite, who perpetuate

internalized racism within and amognst national groups.
The parranda in Dora La Musico also has a racial subtext. Senor Shush,
in his desire to prevent the townspeople from playing music, references the
history of repression of Afro-Latino traditions. While the show does not
represent any phenotypically Afro-Latino characters (unless we read Shush/
Puente this way), the music itself provides an Afro-Latino text. That is, the
musical production, the use of salsa, and Senor Shushs desire to suppress
the music all replicate a historical chain of signification around Afro-Latinidad.
Doras response to the pueblo losing their instruments is to create her own
parranda to recover the instruments. This countercultural practice, which
references the comparsa as a musical mode of resistance to hegemony, creates
spectral references to an alternative racial history of slavery, blackness, and
mestizaje in the Americas.21 Whether intentionally or not, these alternative
means of signifying race disrupt the paradigm of the universal Latino/a subject
that the show constructs by articulating blackness as a part of a larger history
of the Americas.
The musical heritage of comparsa and parranda recalls urban spaces instead
of the countryside. Yet the parranda/comparsa in Dora La Musico is
performed in the countryside as well as in the town plaza. Thus, the parranda/
comparsa completely shifts the topography of the politics of resistance. Moores
(1997) work on the comparsa and documentaries like Calle 54 and Buena Vista
Social Club situate the production of both Cuban and Puerto Rican Afroinflected hybrid musical traditions within the topography of the city (Havana
and the Bronx). In contrast, the staging of the parranda and the secondary text
of salsa in Dora La Musico make the televisual landscape distinctly Latino/a
by geographically shifting the setting to a tropicalized, rural setting. In Dora La
Musico, the comparsa/parranda does not represent the rural in Cuba, Puerto
Rico, or Venezuela per se, or the expression of a particular nationalism. Rather,
the textual allusions to comparsa and parranda function as a pan-Latino form
of musical/cultural production tied to the histories of Carnival, slavery,
resistance (Lipsitz, 1990), and in this particular case, the rescuing of the
townspeoples instruments. If one does not know this history, the parranda and
comparsa just look like depoliticized celebrations and not acts of selfdetermination.
As a part of a larger set of Latino/a-specific cultural referents, Senor Shush,
who resembles the late Tito Puente, provides yet another discursive and
televisually explicit link to Latino popular cultural production and Latin music.
Puente, a native of Spanish Harlem, recorded more than 100 albums and won
four Grammies during his lifetime. Known as El Rey de Timbal, Puente
remains one of the most recognizable Latino/a icons. He represents a melding of
many musical traditions, an icon of Nuyorican (i.e., New York Puerto Rican)
nationalism, and a figure of pan-Latinidad. Wilson Valentn-Escobars (2002,

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163) description of sonero Hector Lavoe rings equally true of Puente: Deceased
cultural heroes like Lavoe are reincorporated into overlapping and competing
narratives of the nation. The Puente look-alike embodied in Senor Shush
creates another challenge to the imagined, monolithic Latino/a subject.
The Senor Shush/Tito Puente character is a counterbalance to the image of
the universal Latino/a subject portrayed in Dora the Explorer. Shush/Puente
visually recalls another realm of referents linked to Afro-Cuban music, Latin
jazz, and salsa through his physical appearance (he is the signifier): curly white
hair, portly stature, excited voice that breaks, and highly emotive facial
expressions. At the end of the episode, Dora invites Shush/Puente to join the
parranda, and he plays the cymbals. Although not timbales, cymbals are a
percussion instrument, and percussion is something Puente will forever be
associated with (Loza, 1999, 118).
The performances within the text of Dora La Musico also echo restored
behaviors (Roach, 1996). Restored behaviors represent repetition and reimagining of the self through the memory of the performance of others and by
appropriating old signifiers, making them into potential sites for the expression
of memory and imagination. Restored behavior is not merely recapitulation but
transformation of experience through the displacement of its traditional cultural
forms (Roach, 1996, 29). Doras performances transculturate traditional salsa
narratives when we read the music from the show as text. The Shush/Puente
parody is performed in a Latino/a, girl-centered landscape, thus destabilizing
hypermasculine notions at the center of musical production and performance,
enabling Dora to become La musico. Doras performance of Latinidad, when
juxtaposed with the Puente parody, transgresses prescribed gender norms and
references a range of texts and performers: salseras, salseros, dancers, a
tropicalized landscape, the parranda, and the comparsa. In general, music of the
comparsa and parranda create a historically complex setting for Doras actions,
thus further inscribing the presence of Latinidad as a way to envision selfdetermination.
As Dora sings the song for this episode: A musician I am and a playing
I will go, she is positioned with agency as the leader of the parranda. She
moves through space uninhibited. She decolonizes the trope of the explorer
because she is a bilingual, brown little girl. Social constructions of race and
space also allow Dora to intervene into the discourses of Latino/a diplomatic
relations because she is marked with a mobility that is afforded only to U.S.
passport holders in the post-9/11 world (again, she is not marked as an
immigrant). Sarah Banet-Weiser (2003, 153) has argued that innocent
children (like Dora) have enormous symbolic value in US cultural, political,
and economic history. They fuel political battles and symbolically determine
Americas future. Dora is an example of innocent, asexual worldly knowledge,
which makes her aware of political geographies; what else could a Latina
child explorer be at this moment in history? She also has adult knowledge

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as a bilingual and seasoned world traveler, but she does not pose a threat to
power structures because she is a child rather than an educated woman of color.
Dora makes her own decisions in her narrative; she remains a feminist
representation of girlhood, which we could call girl-power. Following BanetWeisers argument, Dora symbolically represents the fate of transnational
capitalism and Latino futures within and between multiple nation-states. Her
position in the parranda that recalls the comparsa ensures that Afro-Latino
traditions will continue because she can mitigate power structures, enacting
restored behaviors, in a way that serves a community rather than just the
individual.
Dora as explorer (because of her knowledge of geography and cartography)
and global citizen is a radical departure from the original script of colonizer of
the New World. It reappropriates the colonial and violent past of the explorer
and forms a counter-narrative to the brutal narratives of Columbuss voyages,
where brown womens bodies were made visible through their extreme violation
and humiliation. The first radical revision of positioning Dora as explorer is that
explorers have always been gendered male. Second, Dora is linked to a
geopolitical history of colonization, violence, struggle, and survival in the
Americas when she is labeled a bilingual explorer and leader of the parranda
that references the comparsa. Traversing terrain, facing danger, navigating with
a map, and teaching children basic math and a second language (or speaking to
children in their native language) all contribute to the shows ethos and
pedagogy of helping. Trespassing into the traditional realm of male-centered
action-adventure cartoons, Dora is positioned as an expert and action hero
because she is the leader of the parranda (Seiter, 1995, 179). Empathy,
community, and participatory democracy in their most consumer-oriented and
idealized forms are imagined in the shared interactive space created between the
Latina icon, Exploradora Dora, and her viewers. Doras resourcefulness creates
a positive image of Latino/a children and bilingualism. Gender, race, and
linguistic skills do not function as debilitating stereotypes about Latino/as, but
instead are associated with a successful child-citizen/explorer in a global world
that can mediate and solve a communitys problems through collective
organizing.
At the end of Dora La Musico, the parranda reconvenes, the townspeople
are given back their instruments, and the child/citizen/explorer celebrates the
success of her adventure with the pueblo. The parranda and the We did it!/Lo
hicimos! song that ends every episode of Dora the Explorer recall cultural
discourses of dance, song, and movement. The lyrics, We did it, we did it! We
did it! Hooray! Lo hicimos! signal the successful conclusion of an adventure.
The music in Dora La Musico links movement to communal histories of both
migration and salsa dancing. Movement and spatial familiarity create the basis
of transcultural exchange (Calafell, 2004, 200). Dance is a performative means
of expressing a cultural identity. Bodies like Doras engaged in dancing

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Figure 4

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Celebrating La parranda.

communicate meaning while simultaneously producing the signs that create

discourse (Foster, 1996, ix). Dance and music here work in tandem to produce
yet another site of imagined community between Dora and her audience. In
conjunction with the use of spoken Spanish, the theme song and supplemental
music allude to an Afro-Latino past and present. Dora La Musico, then
produces a narrative that imagines a pan-Latino community that is mobile,
culturally complex, and contextualized by a history of differentiated cultural
practices.
Bodies moving in space through rituals of dancing and music, as Lise Waxer
(2002, 3) notes, are built by histories of movement (social, migratory, etc.) In
the introduction to Situating Salsa, Waxer states salsa means many things to
many people, but a basic part of its attraction has been its ability to make people
move together to dance. At the end of every episode of Dora the Explorer,
Dora and Boots dance to the closing theme song, suggesting that Dora dances in
community, makes community, and expresses her agency in negotiating space
and power.

Conclusion
One of my central arguments of this essay is that we can see how Latinidad is a
social force and culturally produced discourse, which explains why images like
Dora the Explorer are unavoidable at this moment of global popular culture.
Dora the Explorer is an excellent example of the commodification of Latino/a
identities and cultural practices. She is a cultural icon that represents universal

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subjectivity and a conflicting set of social realities, two ideas that have
consequences for shaping dominant views of Latino/a populations around the
world. At the same time, the show creates a Latino/a episteme by deploying
musical and linguistic signifiers. Performance of these signifiers also plays a
critical role in larger debates of authenticity and race, enacting the complex
intermingling of racial formations, structures of power, citizenship, and
domination in the Americas (Whitten and Torres, 1998, 35). The show does
not always encode historically grounded representations of Latino/as in the
Americas, yet informed viewers can decode the distinct Latino/a cultural
practices that are making their way into mainstream animated childrens
television and this is significant as Latino/as are becoming a part of global
popular culture.
Further, the construction and transformation of global Latino/a identities
in Dora the Explorer demonstrate how culturally imbricated Latinidad is in
the mass media. As we think more explicitly about Dora as a cultural
icon, discursive links between the iconographic text and the tropicalized
landscape (which could be anywhere in the Americas or the world), the images
of the comparsa/parranda, the sounds of salsa, Doras racialized body, and
the figure of Senor Shush (Tito Puente) create an index of signs that reference
a pan-Latino cultural episteme. On the one hand, these referents can be
decoded as practices from multiple Latino nations (Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Mexico, and Venezuela). On the other hand, the seamless final product
presented to the viewing public encodes a universalized, conglomerate, Latino
culture/identity that is completely outside of historical context, and this is
potentially socially and politically dangerous. While we cannot control the way
the texts are produced or interpreted, there is something fundamentally
important about having Dora the Explorer on television. Indeed, marketing
Dora has real-world domestic and global effects on US Latino/a and Latin
American populations and public perceptions of citizenship, immigration, and
globalization and this is why Dora is the epitome of how mass media shapes
subjectivities.
Further the Dora texts critique narratives of Latino/a colonial legacies with
music and visual iconography. Naming Dora an explorer revisions the history
of violent conquest through feminism and social mobility. Dora La Musico
presents a alternative subjectivity to that in which salsa music implies a high
degree of anxiety and expressions of violence against women, who are defined
as traitors and bandoleras (gold diggers) (Aparicio, 2002, 147). This episode of
Dora the Explorer becomes an expression of the potential for Latina feminism
within a global television market. In broader terms of gender analysis and Latin
music, Doras agency is reinforced by the Shush/Puente parody. Locating her
within a male-dominated cultural form shifts the way that Latin music is
gendered. The music, which functions as a secondary text within Dora the
Explorer, is not a reference just to a musical history but also a reference to space

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and power. The spaces in Dora the Explorer destabilize cartographies of power
as the child conveys social mobility devoid of the stereotypical Latina sexualities
that have been commodified and replaces them with a picture of gendered
equality and self-determination. Further, Afro-Latinidad and blackness are
staged as musical and visual ruptures throughout the text, but not as phenotypic
markers. Without overt physical representations of blackness, the show reminds
us of contradictory ideologies of race in the Americas. Blackness is, as Whitten
and Torres (1998, 35) argue, significant in human social relations and
historical and contemporary discourse.
For Latino/a Studies scholars, Dora ultimately represents a complex symbolic
blend of capitalist and cultural contradictions because the show stages an
identity that marks her as a global citizen (having social capital and power),
transnational figure, and Latina (a somewhat marginalized identity). Her
transnational popularity attests to what happens when race and gender are
marketed to adults and children alike. Consumption and production, as I have
argued, enable a transnational pattern where migrants, media, capital, tourism
and so forth [provide] the means for imagining areas [as] global and widely
distributed (Appadurai, 2000, 119) to produce global consumers/citizens of
all classes, races, and genders. To ignore the global impact of Dora the Explorer
is to fail to see the social forces of capitalism, media, and Latinidad as they
infuse our everyday lives. Dora the Explorer reminds us how we cannot forget
that media and market forces of Latinidad do in fact have an effect on public
life. Ironically, one of the most monolithic and simply a-Dora-ble constructions
of Latino/a identity has brought visibility to Latino/as as a social/political
group, and it is children who will eventually find themselves exercising their
own citizenship and power by other means because they already know what it
means to be a consumer/citizen.

A b o u t t he a ut h o r
Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernandez is Assistant Professor of Womens Studies at the
University of Arizona. She is author of Reading Violence, Making Chicana
Subjectivities, in Techno/Futuros, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and
Agustin Lao-Montes. She is working on a manuscript entitled Unspeakable
Violence: Narratives of Citizenship, Mourning and Loss in Chicana/o and US
Mexico National Imaginaries. The manuscript is grounded by theories of
subjectivity as she reexamines actual lynchings and Indian Wars in the US and
Mexico and other forms of state sanctioned and intimate violence, both real and
imagined, to demonstrate the ways in which terrorist acts of torture,
dismemberment and rape against individual bodies and communities influence
gendered and racialized forms of citizenship. Her teaching and larger research
interests are centered on US Third World Feminism, critical race theory,
Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, feminist theory, and American Studies.

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Latino Studies (2007) 5, 209232. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600254