thisisnotlatino:

I read all the commentary on my question about the Book of Life movie (I apologize for the mistake, produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Jorge Gutierrez) and I’ve time to pinpoint why I felt conflicted about it:

1) Released on Halloween, just in time for “appropriate a culture and make it a fun and sexy costume (aka sexist, racist, and dehumanizing) day”. I’m already dreading the amount of sugar skulls or “Mexican” costumes that I’ll bee seeing around. I live in a border city and the gringos are fucking ridiculous with their racist stereotypical costumes and cultural appropriation.

2) The date is not even related to the day we celebrate Día de los muertos!!!!!!

3) We have some voice actors with major roles that are not even Mexicans or Latino: Channing Tatum, Ron Perlman, Christina Applegate…

4) They could have done so much with this movie to show the richness of Mexican culture and instead they decided to make it (from what I take form the trailer) a movie about the main male character “earning” the right to confess to the main lady, as if she was a trophy to be earned. They could have shown something magical like the spirits of our muertos returning for el Día de los muertos to spend time with their family and friends; if they wanted drama they could have made it be so that something went wrong with this day and Idk, a little brown girl saving this much treasured day from the claws of the Reaper (why use what appears to be Ah Puch, the Mayan god of the death as the villain?!) who is trying to reclaim the souls that La Catrina took and never allowing them to go back to earth. IDK I am just very pissed that they could have shown something amazing and instead they fell onto a machista trope of the man earning the woman’s love through proving himself to be strong and whatnot. (I’m very emputada about this).

5) Like some people have mentioned earlier, Jorge Gutierrez has a history of using stereotypical portrayals of our culture and our people. I’m terrified that he’ll be doing this same shit.

6) Idk why but I keep reading the main characters as Spaniards. The clothes they wear, maybe? Am I the only one who sees this? Am I wrong on there?

7) WHITE FACES EVERYWHERE. There’s like two brown faces I could see in the trailer and that’s it.

I’m sure I’ll find more when the movie is released, but I’m hoping that I’m exaggerating. I’m really hoping that they will not fuck up a very important day in our culture and make it just another profitable thing for gringos to appropriate and make money of.