‘Primos’: Imagining the Brown Cartoon
Pop, Buela, Baby Bud, Tater, Bud, and Bibi. Courtesy of Disney.
When the first trailer for Primos, the coming-of-age animated comedy on Disney, dropped in 2023, it introduced us to Tater Ramirez Humphrey, a Mexican-American girl whose 12 cousins threaten to thwart her plans for a summer of self-discovery. It offered a glimpse into what the show could be: the story of a racially and linguistically diverse, multigenerational U.S. Latinx family living under one roof. While Disney had promised an “authentic and inclusive” series based on show creator Natasha Kline’s childhood summers as a Mexican-American girl, Primos ultimately received backlash: Latin American audiences decried the show as “racist” and riddled with stereotypes on social media.
Natasha Kline, creator/executive producer of Primos. Photo courtesy of Disney/Michael Kirchoff.
The outcry was loud enough that Disney pushed back the show’s release from fall 2023 to summer 2024. By the time the show debuted in July 2024, the most “offensive” aspects of the cartoon had been toned down or done away with entirely. Watching it for the first time, you would hardly know there had been controversy.
But there are traces for those in the know. In the first episode, for instance, Tater introduces her younger sister, Nellie, to all their cousins by name. It’s to help Nellie, who struggles to remember all their names, but it’s really for our benefit, too. We greet Lucita, one of the youngest cousins, a 3-year-old who wears butterfly wings, loves drawing with crayons, and wears cochlear implants. “Lucita—was that always her name?” Nellie muses as she dutifully scribbles in her notebook. Tater doesn’t answer. But Latin Americans who objected to the show know the answer is “no.” Lucita was not always Lucita.
In fact, Lucita—which one could read, incorrectly, as the diminutive form of “Luz,” meaning “light”— was originally Cookita. “Cuquita” is slang, also in the diminutive, for female genitals in some Spanish-speaking countries. Cookita did not live, as Lucita does in the show now, in Hacienda Hills. She lived in Terremoto Heights, which viewers of the trailer took as an offense, given the history of tectonic disasters in places like Chile, Haiti, and Mexico. It comes then as no surprise that the neighborhood name, too, had to go. The problematic, yet comedic “Terremoto Heights” became the seemingly innocuous but far from banal “Hacienda Hills.” Haciendas, after all, are the Latin American equivalent of U.S. plantations. The name change is hardly an elegant solution, but it didn’t invite more criticism; to my knowledge, few complaints have been lodged about the name since.
“In responding so vehemently to the animated characters, Latin Americans affirmed what they sought to deny: The show was about them, whether they liked it or not. ”
Arguably, some things in the series haven’t changed. Several non-animated backgrounds still bear the yellowish cast that many equate with the sepia filter, which has come to represent Latin America in digital media, a standby that suggests backwardness and destitution. The show creators’ efforts to emphasize that the series takes place in Los Angeles, not Latin America, came too little and too late. Here we find the cruel paradox of the backlash. In responding so vehemently to the animated characters, Latin Americans affirmed what they sought to deny: The show was about them, whether they liked it or not.
In her animated comic, Yellow Faces, comics and animation scholar JS Wu walks us through the challenges of portraying race in illustration, particularly when we concede that representation, caricature, and stereotype share similarities, like closely related cousins, that viewers often struggle to tell apart. Though Wu focuses on depicting Asianness in cartoons, many of the insights of Wu’s work apply in cases like that of Primos, where the faces are not “yellow” but “brown.”
According to Wu, in the U.S. and even globally, “unmarked cartoon characters are white, and the burden is on nonwhite characters to declare their difference.” In Primos, this is abundantly true: The characters are various shades of brown, signaling both nonwhiteness and Latinidad. When the shades aren’t brown, they are variations of peach and orange. Tater’s dad, Bud, as well as Cousin Bud and Tater’s little brother, Baby Bud, share pale complexions with Gordita, Cousin Bud’s younger mad scientist sister.
At the opposite spectrum of hues, there are characters like Lita, the eldest of the cousins, and Toñita, the youngest of the acrobatic “T sisters.” Lita and Toñita have the two darkest shades of the cousins, each distinct from the other. They are not sisters nor do their respective siblings share either of the girls’ coloration. Within sibling dyads and triads, there are ranges of shades to depict complexion, suggesting the sheer phenotypical diversity within Latinx families.
Tater, Lita, Nachito, Cousin Bud, Scooter, Big Nacho, Tabi, Lotlot, Gordita, Tere, Chacha, Toñita, Lucita. Courtesy of Disney.
Siblings also don’t necessarily have the same accents. The elision in Lita’s Spanish signals that one of her parents might be Caribeñx, but it’s harder to tell in the case of her siblings, Scooter and Lucita. And when other characters make assumptions about race, the Ramirez Humphrey clan corrects the record. Tater’s mom, Bibi, in confronting a posh blonde from Fresadena who confuses Bibi for Baby Bud’s nanny, says: “Yes, my baby has his father’s complexion and propensity for sunburn, but he’s got my zero-tolerance policy for bull pucky. And we’re smelling a big pile of it right here.”
The show also resists attempts to racialize its seemingly “unmarked” characters as white. For example, in episode 8, “Summer of No Sabo,” the primos realize Tater feels left out when they speak Spanish, and they take it upon themselves to teach her. They set up a Saw-like Spanish language escape room, complete with a Jigsaw-esque sock puppet on a screen. Gordita, the mad scientist cousin who is one of the characters it would be easiest to interpret as “unmarked” and therefore “white,” controls the sock puppet, which barks orders in Spanish to Tater. The show makes Gordita, whose name surprisingly bears no obvious relationship to her physique, distinctly Hispanic, if not racialized by her coloration, via her Spanish in a way that Tater, who is ostensibly “browner” and therefore presumptively more likely to speak Spanish, is not.
Primos, against assumptions that conflate color and language, makes clear that one cannot index Latinidad to certain shades, language abilities, or even specific national backgrounds. It makes the backlash among Latin Americans that much more bemusing. For example, numerous posts on social media objected to what they saw as nation-specific stereotyping. According to Milenio, a since-deleted X post by @BonnibelVTuber said, “Disney: La sirenita sí es una persona de color y debemos respetarla. Es la mejor película de todos los tiempos. Also Disney: Vamos a hacer una serie con estereotipos racistas contra los mexicanos, guatemaltecos y latinos en general.” Another post, this by an X user with the handle @berrytas, claimed they knew the show had “latino-american” written “all over it,” and yet also asserted that the show was “trying to show some of that LATAM culture.” They maintained that viewers like them—Latin American, living in Mexico—“have the right to speak out… especially if we consider that this show might be the kind of representation that will get around the world for many to see.”
Here we have the heart of the dilemma. On the one hand, viewers from Latin America took pains to claim that the show relied on racist stereotypes and, therefore, could not possibly be about them. In other words, the stereotype is a stereotype precisely because it reduces authenticity and difference into a hackneyed representation that cannot reasonably represent anyone, let alone “real” Latin Americans in an animated show set in Los Angeles (not Latin America) with Latinx (not Latin American) characters.
On the other hand, viewers from Latin America also justified their claim that the show had racist stereotypes by conflating regionality and nationality (“mexicanos, guatemaltecos”) with something akin to “race” as used in U.S. discourse. To @BonnibelVTuber, “mexicanos, guatemaltecos, y latinos en general” are to Disney—and, it is suggested, to Latin Americans themselves— “personas de color,” much like Ariel is when played by Halle Bailey in the live-action Little Mermaid. Contrary to assertions like those of Wendy Trevino that nationality is not equivalent to race, Latin American users on social media implied nationality and race were practically one and the same.
To follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion, “mexicanos” and “guatemaltecos” are as susceptible to “estereotipos racistas” as are “latinos en general” even if, as Gordita’s command of Spanish and Tater’s lack of the same suggest, Latinx characterization can undo our assumptions about both race and stereotype. Thus, while Latin Americans committed the cardinal sin they ostensibly opposed—making “mexicanos, guatemaltecos, y latinos en general” racialized caricatures by likening these to racial classifications by way of analogy with “personas de color”—the ambiguously racialized characters in Primos pushed against racial caricature altogether by subverting viewer expectations of what Gordita and Tater could and could not do, respectively, with language.
The post by @berrytas betrays this paradox even further. No, they say, Disney did not get Latin Americans right. And yes, @berrytas concedes, the show is not even about Latin Americans, but about “Latino-Americans,” Latin Americans’ diasporic cousins who are “born and raised in the United States, don’t speak Spanish, and never visit Latin America.” And yet, the representation of these Latinx characters matters to @berrytas. Why? Because this show might turn out to be the kind of representation “of that LATAM culture… that will get around the world for many to see.”
I describe the complexities both of how Primos represents race in its animated cousins and how the Latin Americans see themselves vis à vis their Latinx relatives not to be an arbiter of race or Latinidad for what are, ultimately, illustrations. Rather, I describe them to guide us toward what the initial Latin American reaction to Primos can teach us about the medium of animation and Latinx representation more broadly. It is as Wu writes in her comic, where she is both cartoonist and cartoon character reflecting on a lifetime of consuming and making cartoons: “When I inevitably returned to the real world, the gap between myself and these representations seemed wider than ever. I realized that, ironically, facing reality meant facing the cultural imaginary of the yellow woman head-on, as painful as that might be.”
Something similar is afoot for those of us watching Primos. The cultural imaginary of the brown cartoon, as the social media backlash revealed, is steadily gaining ground in depicting Latinidad domestically and abroad, including for people like @berrytas, who know the cartoon isn’t “about them” and yet project themselves onto the cartoon anyway.
“In the absence of faithful portrayal, they get representational betrayal, and its name is Latinx. ”
Such viewers want to have it both ways: They want “faithful” representations of Latin American culture—an impossibility, given the sheer multiplicity in that fiction called Latin America—but they are dissatisfied by the technologies of representation developed by Latinx creators to become legible to themselves and others. In the absence of faithful portrayal, they get representational betrayal, and its name is Latinx.
The thing about cultural imaginaries is that individuals don’t get to unilaterally decide whether said imaginaries are authentic, ethical, or humane. This is especially true for animation. Objecting to the use of stereotypes or caricatures in animation is like objecting to the fact that water is wet or that the air we breathe is largely composed of nitrogen. The transnational reception to Primos suggests we need to approach animated representations of Latinidad in a way that takes seriously the conventions of animated media on its terms. Primos, it turns out, is ready to take us there.
Episode 10, “Summer of Tater Luna,” begins with Tater trying to get her mother’s attention in almost precisely the same way Stewie from Family Guy does to his mother Lois in season 5, episode 1 of the Fox show. It is a brilliant foundation for the episode, which cannily engages, in a tight 11 minutes and 22 seconds, the sequential art of comics, Japanese manga and anime, and the creative process underlying characterization itself. The “Summer of Tater Luna” gives us the series’ self-reflexive understanding of its contribution to animation as a medium. It’s a smart, funny, and satisfying retort to naysayers who would write off the series as just another demoralizing instantiation of gringo pendejadas.
In the episode, Tater introduces her family to her manga alter ego, Tater Luna, who draws inspiration from the character Sailor Moon. The problem is everyone has a different opinion of how Tater Luna should be. Big Nacho misspeaks and says, “There’s no way those noodle arms can throw that hemorrhoid.” In response, Tater makes Luna muscular to prepare her for asteroid throwing. Nachito, Big Nacho’s little brother, doesn’t like the look of her sword, which is a pen—the pen, Tater asserts, is mightier than the sword—and thinks it should be a palo de poder like his hockey stick. Tater dutifully abides by his suggestion. When several cousins jostle for a look at Tater’s drawing, she says, “I certainly can’t blame you—Tater Luna’s appeal is universal.” But this proves false. “Mass appeal?” Toñita asks. She answers her own question: “More like, no más appeal.” She punctuates her roast with a ballroom dip.
Scooter, Chacha, Lita, Gordita, Nachito, Big Nacho, Tater, Lotlot, Cousin Bud, Tabi, Tere, Toñita, Lucita. Courtesy of Disney.
It turns out, Toñita is right. By the time Tater incorporates all her cousins’ notes on her character design—including Lotlot’s suggestion that “it needs more existential horror” and “spooky spirals” à la Uzumaki by Junji Ito—Tater Luna has been workshopped to the point of incoherence. “I thought you wanted our help,” the cousins tell Tater when she finally blows up at them. “I did,” Tater says, “but now Tater Luna’s a mess and no one likes her. I don’t like her. I hate her.”
It's hard not to read this as the show writers’ response to the hate they received from Latin American audiences and the pressures of creating animated characters that “declare their difference,” to quote Wu, yet are expected to maintain universal appeal. When Bibi finds Tater despairing in bed, defeated by her cousins’ impossible aesthetic demands, she says, “It’s good to listen to what other people think sometimes but not if it makes you doubt yourself.” To which Tater replies, “But what if they’re right?” And Bibi says, “Well, then I guess you should never have another idea ever again.”
Here we reach the crux of the matter. The problem in heeding every piece of criticism against Latinx representation, especially in animation, as potentially stereotypical and therefore racist leads to a world where any representations, even those attempting to subvert harmful stereotypes, become impossible to execute in the first place. And viewers are the ones who lose. “What kind of advice is that?” Tater rightfully protests when her mother suggests she should never dream again. “My ideas are so good. The world needs them.”
This, perhaps, is the most important lesson Tater teaches the kids—Latinx, Latin American, or otherwise—who watch Primos: Your ideas are good, and the world needs them. It’s a “gotcha” from Bibi, and it works. The show treats the viewers to a delightful sequence in which Tater brings her version of Tater Luna to life in a style reminiscent of shouju anime, another callback to Sailor Moon.
“There’s a lesson here for the Latin American and Latinx cousins attempting to understand each other across languages, nations, and borders on the American continent.”
When Tater presents her completed manga to her mother, Bibi can’t understand it. “It reads right to left,” Tater says helpfully. “Oh right!” Bibi exclaims. “It’s a mango!” Despite misunderstanding the medium, she reads from right to left and gleans the message.
There’s a lesson here for the Latin American and Latinx cousins attempting to understand each other across languages, nations, and borders on the American continent. If Tater and her primos can learn from and grow with each other, then maybe there’s hope for us, too.
