Comics have often been used to instruct audiences about social and political issues, including those related to concepts of racial identity. Some target adult readerships. Others children. But many such comics have played a part in embedding ideas about racialised identities and structures. Though some of the works in this section fomented racism, often from a young age, other comics highlight both comics themselves and childhood as sites of struggle for ideas of race.
Breve guía técnica del dibujo popular is a manual produced in Lima in 1981 by Comisión Evangélica Latinoamericana de Educación Cristiana (CELADEC). In the introduction, it is stated that the material was conceived by the Equipo Pueblo Foundation of Mexico. This Christian organisation was established in that country around 1977 and was directed by Alex Morelli and Ángel Torres. This Mexican publication aimed to promote tools to improve graphic communication in communities. It sought to serve the most disadvantaged sectors in rural, Indigenous and marginalised urban areas. The organisation opted for the strategy of regionalisation and collaboration with the different Basic Ecclesial Communities, such as the one in Lima, to work from the perspective of the defence of the poor and social justice from a transnational religious perspective. The guide presents keys to the production of graphic materials: the function of the media, the explanation of how to work with visual resources, the characteristics of the use of drawing in print, layout and format, as well as tools for drawing people, scenarios and animals. Most of the representations have been standardised, without any particular ethnic specificity, nor the presence of Black populations.
Malena Bedoya
The top of the page says "El Tony." Underneath, on the left side, it reads: "KID: Put on this mask and joke with it to your friends in the neighbourhood." In the centre of the page is an illustration of a face is drawn in black-out ink on a white background, which occupies most of the surface of the page. The face has a wide nose, large eyes, very large and thick lips with large white teeth and large ears that read "cut-out". Around the nose is a dotted line. On its upper left side, a small black top hat drawn on top of the head, which reads "El Tony is out on Wednesdays." Below the image, in the lower left corner of the page, it reads: "In next Wednesday's "El Tony" you can read: "The Mysterious Hand. By Farrigdon Detective. It's a nice adventure." In the lower right corner of the page is a small-scale illustration showing a group of white children surrounding two children wearing the mask, one of whom says to one of the white children "Don't you recognise me?", while another of the white children, looking at one of children wearing the masks, cries out, frightened, "Mom, help!"
These cut-out masks belong to the themes and tropes of blackface minstrelsy, a white supremacist theatrical tradition of anti-Black racism created in the US in the XIX century, where performers darken their faces with black paint and pretend to act as Black characters. In systemic racism, which operates at all levels of society, from institutional and public to interpersonal and private, the indoctrination of racist values in children is key to perpetuating racial hierarchies and white supremacist ideologies. Through storytelling and play, children are socialized into normalizing and enacting racial violence. This example, and the one below, come from the early XX century mainstream Argentine and Colombian press, a mass media industry which, like others in the Western world, already operated under a systemically racist, whiteness-privileging paradigm.
Abeyamí Ortega
The top of the page reads "Children's Page" in cursive letters coming out of the mouths of a white boy and girl. Below, an inset shows a black-and-white drawing of cut-out figures of a head drawn in black ink, with large white eyes, a large, round mouth, and ears adorned with large hoops. The holes in the eyes that read "cut-out". On the underside of the head is drawn a long tab that reads "Lever B".
To the right of this illustration is another illustration, a drawing of the body of a child figure filled in black ink. They wear a short skirt, bracelets, and a necklace of round beads. The head is only traced, so that the head described before is put there.
Next to the drawing of the body there is a background showing a reed hut, a palm tree, a clay pot, and a puppy. Underneath the box with the illustration, a text reads: "The two drawn pieces must be glued onto cardboard before being cut out. Open the dotted lines of the neck with a penknife and highlight the white spaces on the head that mark the eyes and mouth.
Insert the lever of the second piece through the cut of the neck and fix points A and B with a clasp. When you want to see the blackie move his eyes and mouth, all you have to do is touch the lever."
Children's sections in mainstream newspapers often featured deeply racist imagery, perpetuating harmful stereotypes, and reinforcing dehumanizing portrayals through the lens of white supremacy. In Latin American societies, where both light-skinned mestizo and whiteness privileging ideas are predominant, it was not very different. Here, two powerful institutions converge to educate and reinforce the violence of racism in children: the media and the family. Parental collaboration is needed to enable children to access the blackface mask.
Abeyamí Ortega
In this episode, we see how Mojicón invites his friend Gelatina to the cinema. However, they come up against an obstacle: minors cannot enter without the company of an adult. Clarita, the black maid of Mojicon's house, enters the scene. Mojicon plans to paint their faces with charcoal to pass himself off as Clarita's children. She knows the plan will not work. Finally, the owners of the cinema discover the deception."
Mojicón is a comic strip created by Adolfo Samper for the Colombian newspaper Mundo al Día between 1924 and 1938. This character is a white-mestizo middle-class boy who plays with his street friends, who are depicted wearing espadrilles, ruanas, torn trousers or barefoot. This attire is associated in the comic with the Indigenous, the Black, poverty and non-urban geographies. According to Robin Bernstein, childhood innocence is never innocent and is always racialised. In this episode, we see how racist representations operate in the construction of the characters and their interactions. Clarita is a Black woman whose name alludes to whiteness. Thus, the artist uses the diminutive as a form of affection and at the same time sarcasm, as he transforms its meaning into a positive emotion while showing us the black colour of her skin. Mojicón wants to have his way in this scene and decides to paint his and his friend's faces with charcoal to look like Clarita's children and thus enter the cinema. This exercise in blackface, as a racist disguise, seeks to generate humour in the readers in the face of what appears to be an innocent childish prank.
Malena Bedoya
A group of Brazilian professional male, light-skinned, wavy-haired football players are practicing skilfully moving the football. They players are drawn looking human in a ‘naturalistic’ way. Next to the players, there is a figure, representing the character Boquellanta. This figure is not drawn in the same ‘naturalistic’ human-looking way as the players, but rather drawn as a grotesque figure that looks not human but like a cartoon, drawn fully in black ink representing black skin, with a big, squared head, huge ears, curly hair, a thick white circle in place of the mouth, and with enormous white eyes.
He is dressed in square-printed pants, suspenders, a stripey t-shirt and grotesque enormous shoes, potentially resembling the shoes of a clown. The players take a break and Boquellanta, admiring the player’s great skills with the football, decides to take a chance with the football and starts moving it with his feet.
The players, impressed when seeing Boquellanta playing the football, comment out loud that the little Brazilian, as they call him, has an impressive dominion of the football. Boquellanta replies to the players that he is not a little Brazilian and that he is a “true Black” who lives in the Malambito*, a racialised neighbourhood in the Colombian Atlantic region, traditionally associated with Afrocolombian populations.
* “Yo soy negro de pura cepa y vivo en Malambito”.
Boquellanta –a racist term to refer to a person with thick lips– is the name of a comic strip and its main character, an Afroperuvian child, created by Peruvian comics artist Hernan Bartra, published in the newspaper Útima Hora from 1953. Boquellanta exemplifies how racism can be expressed in ambivalent ways. Boquellanta is represented as smarter, wittier, more agile, and more romantically desirable to women than his white and light-skinned-mestizo counterparts, yet openly racist visual and textual depictions, including Boquellanta’s family, are deployed in different episodes of the comic strip. These politics of representation relate to Peter Wade’s findings regarding ambivalence in anti-Black representations in Argentina’s 1920’s La página del dólar. In this kind of ambivalent racism, negatively racialised characters are represented in openly racist yet ambiguous ways, conveying “a dual dynamic of simultaneous subordination and limited inclusion of Blackness in Latin America” (Wade 2023: 1). Boquellanta indisputably constitutes a racist representation, and the racism is deployed in combination with features that present Black characters in this comic strip as fit and capable yet still are subjected to dehumanised representations.
Abeyamí Ortega
The creators of this comic, Osvaldo, Pamela, Lourdes and Luis, are part of the Kalay'i collective. In Nopeyakas N'äyhäy the Wichí characters have agency over the content they want to share with us, reclaiming their right to exist and expressing themselves on their own terms. Life is not easy for the Wichí due to the inequalities resulting from colonization. Their exclusion form society can be evidenced in the difficulties the Wichí have in accessing state institutions due to policies that do not recognize the cultural diversity of the region.The comic also allows us to fly over moments and spaces of the Wichí community, their communal practices linked to the river, and their territory, abundant in natural resources for survival as well as human and non-human allies.
Catalina Delgado Rojas
