For scholar, visual artist, and philosopher Byron Davies, a collection of finely crafted anti-communist propaganda cartoons produced in Mexico by some of the country’s top animators with support from the United States government offers a window into the relationship between the United States and Latin America, insight into the economy and function of propaganda, and a captivating political mirror between the Cold War and the present.

“One interest I’ve long had is the operation of propaganda and thinking about how propaganda operates in a war context – in a Cold War context,” he said. “In this case, kind of looking at old Cold War propaganda from a new Cold War perspective.”

Davies spoke November 2^nd at a Block Cinema event Mexican Animation, American Propaganda, and the Cold War (1952-56). The program included a selection of the cartoons, produced by the company Dibujos Animados SA (DASA), and a conversation with scholars Derek G. Larson, Carlos Oliva Mendoza, and Dan Bashara. Davies and Larson also spoke with The Block in interviews conducted following the screening. The cartoons were previously screened throughout Mexico in similar showcases at art and academic institutions in Tijuana, Mexico City, and Oaxaca beginning in April. Their presentation at The Block marked their first known public screening in the United States.

Of thirteen known cartoons produced by DASA, the screening included seven. A preceding introduction and post-screening discussion contextualized the cartoons within the framework of US-Mexico relations, the Cold War, and maquila – the phenomenon of manufacturing a product in another country for cheaper production costs – and engaged listeners in thinking about their political and economic implications.

To appear Mexican despite their US-backed political aims, the films were produced with the clandestine support of the United States Information Agency in Mexico under the pursuit of Richard K. Tompkins, a USIA agent in the 50s who was also second head of Estudios Churubusco, an offshoot of the US movie studio RKO and the most important Mexican movie studio at the time.

“RKO historically had a connection to US propaganda at the end of World War II,” Davies said.

In support of his vision of cartoons that could also function as political propaganda, Tompkins hired a number of the most important Mexican animators of the period, along with workers from United Productions of America (UPA) and musical talent like Juan Garcia Esquivel. In 1952, he founded DASA. And so, the yield, Davies noted, was a batch of films significant not only for their political aims, but also for their aesthetic qualities.

“So, we’re moving between these two questions of giving proper credit to the animators – particularly for their work later on US cartoons, something they did not receive sufficient credit for – and also recognizing the mechanisms of propaganda and how it works,” he said.

Following the screening, Bashara spoke about the films’ visual style and their origins in UPA’s history. In 1946, the studio had published a manifesto criticizing its peers Warner Brothers and Disney for producing animation that was too childish or too close to live-action cinema, respectively. He said that UPA, which had produced educational films for industrial and military use, operated on the belief that animation could function as a printing press.

“They thought that animation was a very special object because it could combine two different forms of information,” Bashara said. “It could be a diagram that can show an invisible concept visually and, at the same time, it moves, unlike a diagram. It could show processes unfolding in real-time.”

He elaborated that this idea manifests in the work in a visual simplicity that communicates the world’s complexities in a way that any viewer can understand.

“Here, we have cartoons arguing that the world actually is simple, and that’s the goal of a propaganda cartoon, and that’s kind of the way we’re starting to see this style get mobilized in these later cartoons,” Bashara said.

The group’s work began a few years back when Davies, interested in looking at the history of Mexican animation through a political lens, discovered a 2020 blog post about the DASA cartoons written by preservationist Ivy Donnell on the National Archives and Records Administration’s blog. Twelve films had come to the agency’s Motion Picture Preservation Lab with the vague label “Mexican Cartoons.” Each begam in roughly the same manner – by introducing four animals who appear with the programs’ theme music: Burrito the donkey, Manolin the rooster, Armando Líos the raven (whose name in Spanish means “making trouble”), and Chente the wolf. The former pair always play unwitting victims, while the latter pair play the enactors of various insidious communist schemes.

There’s a significance to the allocation of villainy and virtue, as well as an inherent racism, Oliva notes:

“The domestic animals, the donkey and the rooster, are the proper capitalist animals: they are doing work with the land and working in a very intelligent way,” he said. “The wolf and crow are not domestic animals, so they need the state. They need the power.”

The cartoons were discovered in the ’90s by Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea while interviewing Mexican animators, who later made the first copies of them on a visit to the National Archives, exhibited them as part of a 56-film retrospective of Mexican animation at Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional in 2002, and wrote the most complete account of them to date in his 2004 book El Episodio Perdido. Aurrecoechea also provided Davies, Oliva, Larson, and Bashara transcripts of his interviews with the animators and presented the cartoons with them at Mexico City’s Centro de Cultura Digital in April.

For the group of scholars, which had come together via their overlapping academic interests in animation, the cartoons ignited curiosity. Davies, Oliva , and Larson met when Larson interviewed Davies and Oliva for his Trés Mall series. Larson and Davies set out to pursue the project, and Oliva became involved later via his existing connection to the two. Bashara came into the fold because of his work studying UPA, which Davies had encountered in Hannah Frank’s book Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons.

Older scans of some of the films had circulated on YouTube years prior (an English-dubbed, Spanish-subbed version of Viaje Interplanetario was posted 9 years ago), and because of them, questions arose – chiefly, if the cartoons had been produced in Mexico, why were there versions available in English?

“We thought: ‘These are very interesting, these are very well made – but it doesn’t hang together, doesn’t make a lot of sense,’” Davies said.

Further mysteries arose as their research deepened. As far as is known, the films never received the mass distribution Tompkins imagined for them. The first of them, Manolin Torero, was screened in July, 1954, and Larson found documentation of a reprinting of the films on 35mm film in the early 1960s sent to Venezuela, but the scholars have yet to confirm whether the films were ever screened there.

The films’ exhibition in Mexico and now the United States unveils a long-hidden part of history, but it’s also fuel for the scholars’ ongoing investigation of the films’ mysteries.

“The more we travel and screen these, I think we’re doing a service – first of all, releasing a bit of history that’s been tucked away, and the cartoons on their own are pretty amazing,” Larson said.

In exhibiting the films, there’s hope that people connected with their making, past screening, or potentially with further knowledge of them might reach out, Davies said. Through a connection with Donnell, the son of one of the American animators wrote with new insight about his father’s work. However, the researchers know that the age of the animations and the secretive circumstances of their production limit that likelihood.

“At this point all we can do is kind of show them and hope that there is a fruitful exchange of ideas,” Davies said. “In the end, I’ve learned so much about how to read the cartoons from my colleagues in the project. That’s worth it for me.”

Listen to the Discussion

About the Speakers

Derek G. Larson, graduate of the Yale University School of Art, is an artist and animator at Purdue University with previous experience at PBS television. He produces the animated documentary series Très Mall with researchers on philosophy, the environment and the Anthropocene. Recent guests include Noam Chomsky, Michael Hardt, Graham Harman, and Priyamvada Gopal. The series has been screened at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Tranen, Times Square in New York, MoCA Atlanta, and the Yale School of Architecture. 

Byron Davies is a philosopher, visual artist, and translator. In 2024 he will be a María Zambrano fellow and, from 2024 to 2026, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, with the Aresmur research group in aesthetics and art theory at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he will be developing philosophy of film projects. He was previously a postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), following his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University. He has spoken at and collaborated with various film festivals and exhibition projects in Mexico, including FICUNAM, Ambulante, ULTRAcinema, Fisura, SACIMU in Oaxaca, CEART in Tijuana, and “Cine Más Allá” at the Centro de Cultura Digital. His writings have appeared in Screen, Millenium Film Journal, The Baffler, Desistfilm, and Los Experimentos.

Carlos Oliva Mendoza is a writer and doctor of philosophy. He works as a full-time professor at UNAM’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI). Among other recognitions, he has obtained the International Narrative Award, Siglo XXI; the National Award for Young Essay and the National Award for Literary Essay. He is responsible for the research projects “Critical Theory in Latin America” and “Baroque Modernity and Mexican Thought”. His latest published books are Mexican Cinema and Philosophy; Space and capital; Semiotics and capitalism.

Dan Bashara received his Master’s and Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s Screen Cultures program. He teaches courses on animation, media and cultural theory, science fiction, the city in film, and the weird and fantastic. His work explores animation with other fields of visual culture, including architecture, graphic design, and cartography. His main academic interest is modernism in all its forms, particularly as it relates to issues of vision, perception and abstraction, and he is currently developing a project exploring modernism and horror in literature and visual culture. He is the author of the book Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics (University of California, 2019).

Films courtesy of The National Archives in Washington DC, Juan Manuel Aurreocochea, Centro de Cultura Digital Mexico City, General Archive of the State of Oaxaca. Program co-presented with support from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of History, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University.