It was quite surprising that Disney-Pixar premiered Coco (2017), a film that celebrates Mexican culture, at the height of Trump’s first presidency when he was demonizing Mexican immigrants. Given this puzzling timing, I analyze how Coco managed to be read as a politicized and pro-Mexican film while simultaneously positioning itself as just another fantastical Pixar movie that white conservative viewers could enjoy. By exploring interviews with the film’s directors and cultural consultants, examining the reception of the film in trade journals and newspapers, and making a textual analysis of the film, I argue that Disney was able to garner applause from its politically diverse audience through a praxis of placing “Mexican Easter eggs” in the film. These covert nods to Mexican culture could be grasped only by audiences well-versed in Mexicanidad. Using this subversive tactic, Disney managed to appease Mexican and Mexican American viewers as well as white conservative audiences and thus increase its profit. I interrogate how media conglomerates perform diversity and inclusion, practices that masquerade as forms of allyship yet ultimately serve these corporations’ bottom line. The essay contributes to scholarship on Disney, children’s media, the film industry, and critical whiteness.
In this article, I offer a novel approach to the study of contemporary corridos by starting from within their sounds. Sonic details in recent corrido subgenres tune us in to the political and economic context of US-Mexico borderlands and the possibilities for Mexican male subjecthood at the turn of the twenty-first century. I pay attention to schizophonic sounds or sounds that feel out of place when distanced from their source of origin. Within narcocorridos and related subgenres, schizophonic sounds creatively extract and musicalize echoes of neoliberal displacement, Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs, and US militarization. A feminist listening recognizes how the celebration of gore and desmadre posturing runs parallel with an explicit increase in misogynist songs ubiquitous to the point of becoming mundane in community soundscapes. Reviewing new developments in the corrido genre, I explore schizophonic listening as a form of political engagement that resists predatory capitalism and increasing authoritarianism in the United States.
