San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Dora, the Latina cartoon character, is rediscovered.
Latina cartoon character rediscovered as a teenager in ‘Lost City of Gold’
She’s a beloved cartoon character who both exemplifies and transcends her Latina roots with bilingual exclamations, clever problem-solving and a primate friend with great taste in footwear.
Can you say cultural icon? Allow the all-new Dora the Explorer to guide you.
“She’s just a multidimensional character,” said actress Isabela Moner, who plays a teenage version of the kiddie adventurer in a new live-action film. “So multidimensional that you just forget that she’s Latina altogether.”
Moner looks to remind audiences of Dora’s cultural impact and then some when she swings into theaters as the star of “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” which opens Friday.
Based on the hit Nickelodeon animated series “Dora the Explorer,” “Lost City” finds a teen Dora navigating the wild jungle that is high school, only to be thrust into a far more dangerous quest with her cousin Diego and a couple of classmates to save her parents and find an ancient Inca civilization.
It’s a big-screen debut that casts the little Latina icon in a whole new light. But Moner and her “Lost City” co-star and executive producer Eugenio Derbez stress that the movie is intended to showcase Dora beyond her cultural background while still honoring it.
“It just happened that the cast is Latino, but it’s a universal story,” Derbez said. “It’s a story of adventure about a girl that is amazing, about a girl whose superpowers are that she’s smart and she’s good and she believes in herself. … It’s a great story about a girl who happens to be Latino.”
Of course, that girl happens to speak her share of Spanish in the film, too, much as she does in the classic cartoons. And universal story or not, “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” does include a treasure trove of Latino talent.
In addition to Moner, who’s half-Peruvian, the film also stars Eva Longoria and Michael Peña as Dora’s parents and Derbez as Dora’s bumbling jungle partner Alejandro. Even the CGI spins on Dora’s sweet monkey pal Boots and their masked nemesis Swiper the fox have a Latin connection, with Danny Trejo as the voice of the simian sidekick and Benicio del Toro as the voice of the stickyfingered fox.
It’s the kind of showcase of Latino diversity for a broader audience that excites parents and educators such as Sonya Alemán.
An associate professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Alemán said she practically raised her three children on “Dora the Explorer.” She recalled how excited they were to see a character who reflected their own culture as well as their intellectual curiosities. She credits Dora’s success to how her creators present her as a bilingual and bicultural girl who’s also complex and, as Moner said, multidimensional.
“I think ‘normalize’ is really the best word to describe what she did,” Alemán said. “It wasn’t central all the time but it wasn’t ignored and it wasn’t stereotyped. It was treated respectfully and there was this beautiful balance between her being a young kid and her being a Latina.”
For Moner, that meant bringing more to the role than just Dora’s trademark bangs and talking backpack.
Dora is quite the quirky knowit-all in the film, Moner said, so the actress learned how to speak Quechua, the indigenous language of the Peruvian Andes and South American highlands. She said she also fleshed out the character with more comedic facial expressions and mannerisms,
including a hilarious animal dance that has her strutting like a peacock.
“I wanted to make it more like a tribute to the character rather than a complete copy,” Moner said.
That little character has quite the large legacy. “Dora the Explorer” debuted in 1999 as a pilot before Nickelodeon launched it as an animated series in 2000. Dora has since graced countless toy aisles and various media formats, including stage productions and even a cartoon spinoff that featured a tween version of Dora with Moner as the voice of one of Dora’s friends.
And while Dora still speaks Spanish in programming on both sides of the border, she also educates and entertains children around the world. Foreign language productions of “Dora the Explorer” have covered just about every dialect from Arabic to Turkish.
Credit that global appeal to a simple formula. Each episode sends Dora on a mission. Along the way she talks to the viewers for help in overcoming obstacles often related to riddles, counting or Spanish phrases. Dora ultimately reaches her goal and sings the triumphant song, “We Did
It!”
The new film features plenty of winks to those franchise hallmarks, including an early scene where a young Dora turns to the camera and asks the audience to say the word “delicioso,” only for her parents to look around for who she’s talking to. There’s also a downright trippy sequence that weaves in the original cartoon depictions of Dora and Diego right down to their giant heads.
But the film departs from its source material in a big way by flying a teenage Dora across the globe to spend time with other family members in the United States. Yet Moner sees that facet of Dora’s story as a tale that’s also fairly familiar.
“I think the perfect embodiment of a situation like high school, where you feel completely alone and like a stranger where you’re supposed to fit in, I think is the immigrant experience,” Moner said. “I think coming as a foreigner to a new country and having to assimilate without losing those crucial parts of yourself is a true story that people can relate to.”
Nickelodeon has referred to Dora as “pan-Latina” to represent the many diverse Latino cultures. That description came in 2010, in response to a meme that featured a mugshot of a beat-up Dora as an illegal immigrant.
As ABCNews.com reported at the time, the image originally was created for a late 2009 contest on the fake news site Freakingnews.com but got co-opted by both opponents and supporters of Arizona’s controversial immigration bill, which allowed state law enforcement to stop anyone they suspected was an illegal immigrant.
Alemán said such memes just go to show Dora is an icon in both Latino and pop culture.
“It speaks to the impact that she had on mainstream culture that she was recognizable,” she said.
Of course, Alemán would prefer to see the latest incarnation of Dora on the big screen, as much out of nostalgia for her children’s upbringing with the franchise as for how this new Dora may inspire a new generation of children across all races.
“I want to see this version of her out in the real world, if you will,” she said.
And if the new Dora the Explorer has her way, that adventure will continue.
“If it’s the same writer and director and cast I’m definitely down,” Moner said. “This was definitely magical.”