Feces, swastikas for Trump at Mexico Caricature Museum
MEXICO CITY: His golden hair twists into smelly, fly-infested excrement. In other cartoons, his trademark locks are shaped into a tongue or a wall. His silhouette also serves as Adolf Hitler’s mustache. Donald Trump has been such a well of inspiration for cartoonists that a gallery is dedicated to the Republican presidential candidate at Mexico City’s Caricature Museum. The exhibit’s title takes aim at Trump’s threat to make Mexico pay for a giant barrier across the border: “Trump: A Wall of Cartoons.”
By calling Mexican migrants criminals and rapists, and vowing to deport millions back to their homeland, he has inspired a plethora of cartoonists from Mexico and other nations who contributed to the exhibit. Other Mexicans have vented their anger by bashing pinatas of his likeness or burning his effigy. Among the cartoonists, there are some recurring themes: the bouffant hair, brick walls, fresh feces and Nazi symbols.
One by the Mexican artist Antonio Rodriguez Garcia shows the Republican Party’s symbol-a red and blue elephant-defecating dung shaped like Trump’s unmistakable hairdo. Another signed Rodriguez shows Trump as Uncle Sam pointing his finger, with the phrase “I hate you” instead of the famous “I want you” message of the military recruitment poster. In a similar far-right vein, the Spanish cartoonist Jose Rubio Malagon drew Trump’s hair into the shape of a hand doing a fascist salute. Belgium’s Luc Descheemaeker, or OSekoer, drew Hitler’s own distinctive haircut and small mustache, which, if you look closer, is Trump’s silhouette. Others were less subtle, depicting Trump as a gorilla wearing a swastika armband or as a Hitler figure with blond hair.
‘Involuntary comic character’
The cartoonist behind the exhibit is Arturo Kemchs, who as president of the Ibero-American Union of Graphic Humorists had requested contributions from his peers for a book on Trump a few months ago. He received hundreds of cartoons and fit 350 of them in the book, of which 2,000 copies were sold. The idea for the exhibit, which began October 13, came after the book.
“It’s a character who made our work easier,” Kemchs, 57, told AFP. “He’s an involuntarily comical character.” “This character has taken over spaces in the sense that some cartoonists no longer do caricatures of Mexican politicians. They go with the Donald Trump theme because he gives us a lot of material,” he said. Kemchs shows two of his Trump cartoons: one with a brick wall replacing Trump’s hair, the other with his crest shaped like a tongue. “I picked the tongue precisely because of his ability to talk and talk nonsense,” he said.
‘You build it’
The exhibit will go on tour in two other Mexican cities, Chicago, New York, Panama and Colombia. Meanwhile in Mexico City, locals and tourists marveled at the cartoons this week. Saki Kameo, a 21-year-old woman from Kobe, Japan who is studying Spanish in Mexico, had her favorite: a Russian nesting doll of Trump over Hitler, North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Un and Italy’s Benito Mussolini. “There is a historic base for racism and that’s why now there’s Trump. It’s not accidental that he has appeared,” Kameo said. Luis Antonio Engfui Amaya, a Mexican cashier at a sushi restaurant, liked a cartoon of a Mexican imagining himself whipping Trump as the real estate tycoon applies cement to a brick wall. “It’s as if the Mexican citizen is telling him, ‘you want your wall, you build it,’” Engfui said with a smile. —AFP