Bradley HankinsA comic-book character that has been charised for generations in Mexico has now been brought down by one complaint, one of political correctness. In a Wal-Mart in Texas, a customer seen a cover of Memin Penguin, and fell into shock. The customer, Shawnedria McGinty, said “I was like, OK, is that a monkey or a boy? To me it was an insult.”
After consulting with her boyfriend about this comic, she got the help of Houston activist Quannel X, and both called for Wal-Mart to take down Memin Pinguin, and to stop future sells of the comic book.
The article follows with this:
But Mexican readers who grew up following the shenanigans of Memin say critics need to look beyond the cover and understand the stories.
“They will bring a smile to their face because we’re so fond of that character,” said Javier Salas, a Spanish-language talk show host on Chicago radio station WRTO. “We respect him, we love him. And that’s why it’s so absurd for us to hear complaints from people who don’t know, don’t understand Memin.”
Memin is a poor Cuban-Mexican kid with bug eyes, thick lips and protruding ears. The mischievous and caring boy helps his mother by selling newspapers and shining shoes.
“We grew up reading, learning and educating ourselves with a lot of the topics they always touched on, which was honesty, justice, tolerance. He was a very unique character,” Salas said.
Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez said the retailer has instructed stores to remove the books from shelves and discontinue sales.
“We received the customer complaint regarding the book, which we knew was based on a popular cartoon character in Mexico. We looked into it further, and we decided to no longer distribute the book and are in the process of removing the books from the stores.”
The store has received no other complaints about Memin, Lopez said.
“We have a wide array of products that we provide to Hispanic customers, but when we looked at this more carefully and given the sensitivity of the topic, we thought it was best to no longer carry the book in our stores,” he said.
He did not know how many copies of Memin books the chain had or how long it would take to remove them from displays.
The article goes on saying that this isn’t the first problems created by Memin Pinguin. Supposedly three years ago Memin was featured on stamps, and out came the outrage by the black community. Even our dear friend Rev. Al Sharpton got involved saying: “This is saying we respect and regard the African-American community by making them look like Sambos on a stamp? This goes over the line.”
Quannel X called the comic book “a disgrace.”
“Look how they portray his mother, with huge ethnic lips, dark skin, making her look like the big gorilla and him like the little monkey.”
The fans of the comic-book say they will still love it, and that the valuable lessons tought when reading it has been lost in translation.
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(4 out of 5)
on Jul 13th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Well, I have to say. It is easy to see how the physical description of the characters would be considered offensive. That being said, I did some research into the books and as the Mexicans families say, the stories tell good stories about an honest family that works hard to survive. Always with a moral. In fact, very little in the stories is mentioned about his race. So, in conclusion, it’s easy to see these images as offensive, but when you dig into the plot and story it is good.
on Jul 13th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Yup, that was the main thing I seen about it - the fact of the good morals and such, which is really what we need. Who cares how the cartoon looks like, as it is a cartoon, and according to my sources Penguin is a Cuban-Mexican… I believe not so offensive to blacks… but I could be wrong. I mean, I really don’t know what a Cuban-Mexican looks like to be honest.