Like Aunt Jemima, the Frito Bandito fed into racist stereotypes of people of color. He had little beady eyes and a big goofy grin. He wore a huge sombrero, spoke broken English and resembled a Mexican revolutionary. Commercials portrayed him as a sneaky, untrustworthy thief bent on stealing your chips.

El Tecolote urged offended readers to contact the producers of such defamatory images and demand their removal. An editorial in our Feb. 23, 1971 issue proclaimed that after a wave of such protests, the Frito Bandito was finally dead.

But is he? Or does he live on in the form of the Taco Bell dog and other pop culture icons? Some might argue these images are just ironic kitsch, but many people of color find them insulting.

Darren Villegas, a local writer and the Vice President of the Inter Club Council and a member of La Raza Unida at City College of San Francisco, explained how advertising and media could be offensive to him as a Latino. “People who grew up with Speedy Gonzales might have a racist complex that they liken our facial features to a mouse or a rat, basically a lower life form.”

He believes the Spanish speaking Taco Bell dog affected viewers similarly. “The chihuahua is almost like a rat. So it looks more like a pest or nuisance, which is probably how some upper middleclass white people may subconsciously relate to Latinos. They may not even realize that they think these things, but this characterization is adding a small grain of sand to a big mountain of hate that is building up in their hearts.”

After depicting the dog as Che Guevara and appropriating Cuban revolution imagery in a way that was strikingly similar to how Frito used the Mexican revolution, Taco Bell put the logo on hiatus.

Yet Villegas and other young Latinos are still angered by the company. Taco Bell’s ties to farm worker labor abuses have prompted college students to begin a “Boot the Bell” boycott against the fast food chain. One key issue is that Taco Bell’s suppliers still pay their tomato pickers 1978 wages.

At a United Students Against Sweatshops conference last week, a Latina student from Notre Dame University told El Tecolote that even though they discontinued the dog, Taco Bell’s connections to the abuse of Latino workers was still, “shaming the idea of what it means to be Latino.”

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