Portrayals of Children in Popular Culture by Cvetkovic Vibiana Bowman;Olson Debbie C.;

Author:Cvetkovic, Vibiana Bowman;Olson, Debbie C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1680214
Publisher: Lexington Books

Dora, Her World, and Borders

Dora revolves around a young Latina girl and her friends traveling through various landscapes in search of missing articles or characters, or collaborating on a group objective. Each show follows a similar format, based around the narrative style and strategies of a computer game. Dora and Boots, her monkey best friend, introduce themselves, and a complication emerges. To achieve their objective, they call upon Map, a talking, rolled-up map who identifies a series of locations to which they must travel. Often during their journey, they encounter Swiper the Fox, who attempts to steal an item that Dora needs. Sometimes Swiper succeeds, and sometimes Dora and Boots foil him by chanting “Swiper, no swiping!” three times. Also on the journey, Dora utilizes her backpack (herself a character) to retrieve some necessary item from the myriad of objects she contains. Eventually, Dora and her friends achieve their objective, and sing a victory song: “We Did It.” They then ask the viewer to recall his/her “favorite part” of the journey, before sharing their own. Every show follows this formula; elements such as locations, objects needed, and characters encountered may change, but the journey structure never alters.

Dora takes place in a borderland; its main character speaks two languages and Dora seems caught between Mexican and U.S. culture. Author/theorist Gloria Anzaldúa defines borders as more than physical boundaries: “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined space created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (3). I find this definition a useful space to begin talking about the discourse around Dora’s explorations. Although Dora lives in a borderland, the only “borders” she encounters are spaces between locations, which are easily traversed. In her travels, she might be seen as a border crosser—someone who belongs to multiple cultures simultaneously and is able to move freely between and among them. Anzaldúa suggests that those who exist in this state are often feared, mocked, or seen as illegitimate, but Dora encounters no such prejudice. Although she holds several real-world markers of the historically subaltern or marginalized—female, nonwhite, child, Spanish speaker—she is centered in her own constructed society, and so represents the dominant identity (yet the audience has intertextual knowledge of her as a marginalized identity—at least in the U.S.).

By dominant identity, I mean that Dora represents a normative middle class U.S. childhood. She lives in a home, attends school, plays safely with her friends, and does not worry about money for meals (in fact, she sometimes gives Boots money when he doesn’t have it available, as in “Ice Cream”). Her mother is an archaeologist, as we learn in “Job Day,” but her father’s employment (if any) is not addressed. He is mostly seen cooking and caring for Dora’s younger siblings. As she is represented as a normative U.S. child, Dora also demonstrates the

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