A note on the cover image

This Cultural Dynamics cover turns the viewer’s gaze toward a constellation of LatinX social bodies and LatinXness, while questioning reoccurring motifs and habitual patterns of meaning. Titled “Snapshots of Madrid’s Rastro,” the illustration was created by VenidaDevenida, an art collective formed by Ana Olmedo and Elena Águila. The piece is informed by a cluster of signs and symbols encountered in the triangular maze and cultural terrain that is Madrid’s oldest flea market, running since 1740. The Rastro has an endless proliferation of artifacts, vintage tchotchkes, clothes, and collectibles—turning it into a bustling, public exhibition space. This journal’s image is filled by a visual rhetoric of Spanishness and otherness: Curro, the mascot for Sevilla Expo ’92; the Conguitos figures for dark and white chocolate; a Spanish produce sticker for peeled bananas; a Grammy; a Mafalda comic book; the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española (“Dictionary of the Spanish Language”); peanut shells; Churruca’s Panchitos; and a poster for the Museum of the Americas. VenidaDevenida’s creative activity incorporates the scope of topics assembled in this volume through objects that are visible everywhere and in ordinary life. Their pervasiveness—as well as their “tradition” of otherness and objectification—compels the humans behind these objects to write themselves into history every day.

A rich catalogue of representations with salient narratives operates here, and more streams of interpretation are encouraged. We stray away from presenting a complete and unified body of thought around the image. These artifacts are out in the world and they are not innocuous. How do we critically examine them when the context that produces them does not situate them as signifiers of a colonialist and racist past? We are inclined to reflect on two quintessential stars from the pop canon that appear: Mafalda, a global comic strip about the titular character that debuted in 1964, and the original Conguitos mascot logo for Spain’s chocolate-covered peanuts that were launched in 1961. They both give a general sense of historical perceptions and misperceptions, along with the spectrum of impersonations in yellow-, brown- or blackface. They push us into the realm of ethico-cultural perspectives.

A rendering of an actual comic book cover by Joaquín Salvador Lavado—or, simply, Quino—Mafalda is sporting a monochromatic yellow dress, yellow socks, and a yellow bow on her hair. She is drawn with slanted eyes, as she looks at South America with Africa and Western Europe on the horizon. Mafalda and the globe are on the same scale. She casts the Asian as outside these continents, yet simultaneously appears to search for them in these geographies. The theatrical slanting of the eyes reproduces a common form of yellowface, while potentially defying, if not mocking, the anti-Asian world. But why resort to this facial modification and this kind of racial knowledge in kiddie form? The character’s qualities—worldliness, political savviness, sarcasm, and rebelliousness—might assist us in laboring through this conundrum. They urge some contemplation involving the Asian subject as the Cold War escalated. The conflict in Vietnam served as the hotbed of an East-West struggle for domination. Young people across the world challenged this geostrategic agenda. In her cultural history of the Mafalda comic strip, Isabella Cosse (2019) posits that Latin America’s political and cultural upheaval during the 1960s “questioned the hegemony of the United States and made it possible to imagine a new world order” (3). This alternative arrangement resisted the erasure and vilification of Asians. Mafalda’s unsettling gesture harbors more than meets the eye.

Mafalda, the collectible comic strip, has a place in El Rastro. Quino’s character invites consumption that goes beyond humor or a facile racial register. Yet Mafalda is almost on the cover’s margins. The visual iconomy underpinning this issue propels us to not just read about a particular ensemble of enduring problems. It is the driving force behind taken-for-granted media images, cultural representations, and the routinized, material forms that those who are “sealed into thingness” (Fanon, 2008: 170) undertake, as political philosopher Frantz Fanon theorized it. Conguito is centered in “Snapshots of Madrid’s Rastro.” But the cover’s portrayal is not an attempt to consign ourselves to—or glorify—the language and the visuality of the past and its extension into the present moment. The objects animating VenidaDevinda’s work speak to the visuality and troubling politics of Spain’s sociocultural landscape. El Rastro’s excess and textures impact lived experience, and it is in this location, too, that one encounters the saturation of blackface memorabilia that US collectors have termed “Negrobilia.”

One of Spain’s most popular sweets—Conguitos—have a roaring marketing success unquestionably tied to a strong brand identification with its representative symbol: a dark brown anthropomorphic figure. The Conguitos display doll pops up, in assorted iterations, as a secondhand commodity in El Rastro. Conguitos mean “Little Congolese,” and connote “‘small’ Congo,” as writer and activist Lucia Asué Mbomio has elucidated, to say nothing of “the fact that the Belgian Congo was the site of one of the greatest genocides in recent history, with forced labor and the mutilation of human beings” (Ortuño, 2020). Conguitos are owned by Spain’s oldest chocolate-making factory, Lacasa, otherwise known as “the Spanish Willy Wonka” (Taulés, 2020). Many have a soft spot for them: an estimated 30 million bags of Conguitos are consumed each year (Taulés, 2020).

Literary and film scholar Diana Palardy (2014) substantiates that “the original Conguitos were caricatures of spear-wielding African natives, [while] modern-day Conguitos are anthropomorphic blobs that lounge around swimming pools in an atmosphere of fun and leisure. Even though the advertisers have gradually disassociated the product from its ‘primitive’ origins, they continue to benefit from the nostalgia generated by the original name and logo” (38; cf., Jones, 2019). In her telling, Conguitos’ version of blackness arises from Africa’s presence in the media vis-à-vis pan-Africanism and the economic and political independence of many African nations. “During this time period,” Palardy puts across, “Spaniards became fascinated with representations of other cultures and events such as the 1960 fight for political independence in the Congo that appeared in the international news. This overall interest in the Other was also sparked in part by the increased liberalization of the Spanish economy, growing exposure to films and literature from abroad, and expansion of the tourism industry. In this respect, the construct of blackness served as a means of symbolically overcoming the isolationism of Franco’s autarchical regime” (39). Conguitos are a historical referent to US anti-black racism on the one hand, and a Franco-designed racial innocence on the other.

The white chocolate Conguitos mascot was added to Lacasa’s visual catalogue in 2000. Clearly not all Conguitos are the same. The racial connotations of the 1960s icon and Spanish ingestion in the form of candy—“the edible and delicious black subject” (Tompkins, 2012: 1)—are always open to questions. This Spanish icon for dark chocolate—which some, including Conguitos’ chocolate maker, find “adorable” (Ortuño, 2020)—mimics constructions of sambo’s unifying features as nonhuman. Sociologist Shirley Ann Tate’s analysis (2020) of global sambo configurations offers some fruitful parameters for interpreting these caricatures’ stereotypical dissemination in advertising and mass entertainment. Cultural investments in sambo’s “marketing of racial difference as commodity” (Tate, 2020: 61) demonstrate what Tate calls a “white sambo psyche” (1), particularly in advertising circles where the blackface image is tied to sweets. The sambo takes form as “dark-skinned, big-eyed and […] having large red lips, the prototypical white sambo minstrel. Sambo links to sugar and chocolate and points to Africa, the Caribbean, and American colonies” (60). Conguitos are suitable here, for as Tate submits, a market in commodity racism for children inculcates a love for sweets that “goes hand-in-hand with learning one’s place as dominant or inferior, as lacking ‘race’ or racialized” (60). Children have a centrality in popular culture and racism is masked within it. There’s a darkness at work: Conguitos’ life span coincides with growing up side-by-side with other children, an intimacy of sorts that transforms the offensive representation into a cute, if not comforting teddy bear.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement and as US corporations removed racist images, Spanish consumers petitioned to retire Conguitos (Hsu, 2020; Ortuño, 2020). “The problem with the adorable Conguitos figure is that it is only adorable for people who are not black. There was a ‘They called me Conguito in school too’ Facebook group once and it wasn’t exactly funny,” Mbomio has said (Ortuño, 2020). The cover’s illustration is a literal representation of a plastic Conguito—with its severed top-half on a scale, almost trashed, but it still has value—at an El Rastro kiosk. The ersatz mascot is indicative of something that is fifty-fifty: half dead, half alive; half there, half missing; half intruding, half removed; half legible, half unintelligible; half predictable, half unpredictable. Something that is partially desired, and partially avoided. This is not to say that only half of Conguitos matter. Clearly the whole thing is off, the whole thing is wrong—indeed, the whole thing is false. But we still need to defy it and think about its other parts, as it is all a full site of interrogation.