New Ford Pickup Line: So Available With a Manuel

Manuel is coming, Manuel is here, Manuel saves the day. But Convertible Dude -- a gringo, right? -- still has the girl. Will he keep her? Who wins this showdown?

Is Manuel the new multicultural America -- or the old physical, frontier America? Can a Latino now be an Old West American Hero? Did Bilingual Babe leave her cultural roots for access to mainstream America, in the guise of Convertible Dude, who, like the rich land that employs illegal immigrants, no longer works with his hands? Does Bilingual Babe secretly yearn for a man who is good with his hands? Manual . . . like Manuel?

Almost as soon as the ad debuted this spring, it generated buzz.

Part of the company's "Bold Moves" campaign, a series of ads showing Ford car and truck owners taking action at edgy moments, it was made entirely in Spanish, for Spanish-language networks, by Miami-based Zubi Advertising. Ford liked it so much that an English version was cut for a wider audience. The marketers didn't think the sole Spanish phrase, "Gracias, Manuel," would be off-putting to English-only customers.

But using two languages instead of one did shift the meaning of the ad. With everyone speaking Spanish, the implied male competition is across class lines; in the English-Spanish version, it's across ethnic lines.

For answers and interpretations, we checked in with a couple of novelists, a cultural essayist, an anthropologist, a theater director and a Minuteman.

Truck Commercial as Romance

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"I understand it as a Latino Walter Raleigh," says Sandra Cisneros, author of "The House on Mango Street," referring to the chivalrous courtier who supposedly laid down his cloak so Queen Elizabeth I could walk over some mud.

"It has to do with love, passion, triangles, telenovelas, in my opinion, and with the belief that love is unto death, a Latino concept," Cisneros continues in an e-mail. "That a real man drives a truck and can be ready at a moment's notice to do a man's job, unlike her wimpy new boyfriend . . . And that look, the subtext is that he still loves her, she still loves him. Of course she'll get back with him and that red truck."

"It's a romantic and very modern view of Latinos," says Hugo Medrano, co-founder and artistic director of GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington. "Stereotypes of Latinos are broken. He seems capable of having a nice truck, which means he has a good job, and he's sharp enough to do such an audacious thing. . . . She is pretty and open-minded and also engaged to an Anglo. She seems not a stereotypical domestic Mexican kind of woman. Much more worldly."

Truck Commercial as Threat (1)

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Jim Gilchrist, founder of the California-based Minuteman Project and co-author of "Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America's Borders," thought it was just a another truck ad -- until Bilingual Babe speaks Spanish to Manuel. That made him mad.

"It's part of the Trojan horse domination of our culture. Now they're coming after our language," he says by telephone from New York, where he is on book tour. "It's another steppingstone in a literal takeover of our country, eventually. . . . I'm supportive of a boycott of Ford, because now they'll be complicit."

Truck Commercial as Threat (2)

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"I don't think the typical American viewer is going to turn into a Minuteman and say, 'We've got to deport Manuel, [but] let's get Salma her [legal] papers,' " says Ruben Martinez, author of "The New Americans" and English professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He's named Bilingual Babe "Salma" because she has that hot Salma Hayek look.