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Launched with considerable media coverage in 2000, Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History, with illustrations by comic-artist LaIo Alcaraz, aimed to render accessible the history of the U.S.A.'s heterogeneous Latino sectors (further references to Latino USA are indicated in parentheses).' In the Foreword Stavans justifies the book's comic format by distancing it from Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer a! Pato Donald, which in English translation became How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. That 1971 study targeted the Disney comic as paradigmatic of U.S. cultural imperialism, a mass-cultural form capable of corrupting Third World youth with nefarious "American" capitalist and bourgeois individualist values. Stavans dismisses this argument as simplistic, tired, and tied to a bygone era of left-right Latin American antagonisms. Rather, Stavans insists, the worldwide popularity of the comic medium confirms that "Our global culture is not about exclusion and isolation, but about cosmopolitanism, which, etymologically derives from the Greek terms cosmos and polis, a planetary city" (xi). This appeal to an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism underwrites Stavans's desire for his cartoon history "to represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes," and thus to avoid "an official, impartial tone, embracing instead the rhythms of carnival" (xv).
Concomitant with Stavans's ambitions to generate a highly playful historical text, Latino USA is also committed to elucidating the author's own personal history. As Stavans puts it, "History, of course, is a kaleidoscope where nothing is absolute. The human past and present are far more malleable than the future. This, in short, is my own account, a pastiche of angles I have made my own" (xv). Indeed, Mexican-born and raised Stavans consistently describes the genesis and final form of Latino USA in autobiographical terms: 'The opportunity had arrived to become, finally, a manufacturer of kitsch, while paying tribute to a core aspect of my upbringing that I had cast aside when I focused my professional career on the muses of literature and academia" (xiv). This mix of avowed professional academic status and nostalgically qualified autobiographical desire has a direct authorial effect on the narrative's capacity both as history and as a contribution to Latino Studies. Not only...