How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney

How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney was a Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition of over 150 works by 48 Latin American artists who investigate and challenge nearly one hundred years of cultural influence between Latin America and Disney. Spanning painting, photography, graphic work, drawing, sculpture, video, documents, and the critical responses generated, the joint exhibition explored the idea that there are no clean boundaries between art, culture, and geography, and deconstructs how such notions are formed and disputed.

The exhibition’s curators, filmmaker/writer Jesse Lerner and artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres, thoroughly examined Disney’s long engagement with Latin American culture, from Donald Duck’s first featured role in the 1937 Mexican-themed short Don Donald to the company’s 2013 attempt to trademark the Day of the Dead. Lerner and Ortiz-Torres’s research further drew from a pivotal trip Walt Disney took with his team to South America in 1941. Along with a group of fifteen animators, musicians, and screenwriters, Disney flew to over five South American countries as part of a U.S. government-directed effort to promote the “Good Neighbor” policy during the Second World War. In addition to the celebrated film The Three Caballeros, this trip produced the feature Saludos Amigos; a “making of” documentary titled South of the Border with Disney; and propaganda films such as The Grain that Built a Hemisphere.

The infamous 1971 Chilean book by scholars Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), was brought to Ortiz-Torres’s attention while studying with artist Michael Asher at the Disney-funded CalArts in the 1990s. The book (formerly banned in Chile and threatened by legal action in the U.S.) provides a structural analysis denouncing the ways in which Disney comic books were used as vehicles to justify and promote U.S. policies and cultural imperialism.

Softcover
304 pages
Black Dog Publishing
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1911164722
12.1 x 1.1 x 9.1 inches

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Jesse Lerner and Rubén Oritz-Torres each brought considerable knowledge to the exhibition project and publication. Both are artists and academics—teaching at Pitzer College and UC San Diego, respectively—whose work explores the boundaries of culture and art; their fields of expertise and methodologies, though distinct, complement each other and often overlap. They previously collaborated in the production of the film Frontierland and in curating MEX/LA, ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985 for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach in 2011. Scholar Fabián Cereijido was the assistant curator of the exhibition.