By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 6, 2006
So this hunky, swarthy, full-lipped guy in a white cowboy hat is tooling down a country road in a red pickup truck. He comes upon a big tree fallen across both lanes. No problem. He off-roads around the obstacle and cruises on.
But in the rearview he spies a dude driving a silver convertible with a dark-haired beauty in the passenger seat. They can't get around the tree.
Cowboy knows what to do. He lassos a chain around the tree and drags that sucker out of the way. Convertible Dude says: "Appreciate it." Cowboy replies: "Anytime."
To this point, the encounter has the usual ingredients of American myth: Nature's vengeance on the frontier. Laconic men, their humming machines and silent women. Cowboy to the rescue.
Then the lady, who looks Latina, addresses Cowboy -- in Spanish.
" Gracias, Manuel."
Cowboy tips his hat.
Driving away, Convertible Dude is puzzled. He asks, "You know him?"
"Yes," she says, in English, with a flirty smile. "He's my ex-boyfriend."
Convertible Dude whips his head around to stare at Bilingual Babe -- and with that kicker, this Ford commercial for the F-150 truck ends.
Maybe at another time a Ford truck commercial could be just a Ford truck commercial. Manuel could be just a guy with a truck. But not now. The immigration debate is burning, and the Latino influence on American society is under examination.
The commercial becomes a Rorschach test, a 30-second telenovela suggesting multiple back-stories and future plot twists.
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"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)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)"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.
"We have to ultimately identify with the guy who has the power in the ad, and it's not the white guy driving the convertible, it's Manuel; he's the real man," Martinez says. "The white boy reacts with a smirk; he's insecure, he's jealous, which is a form of desire. Maybe that's really the heart of the nativist reaction to undocumented people working in this country. They're too manly, they work too hard, they work with their hands, they work overtime hours, they brave the desert and the Border Patrol on these overland journeys. Maybe while the American retiree with the big paunch stands on the border calling himself a Minuteman, it's the guy like Manuel who runs past him across the desert, facing death, all so he can work with his hands in America, who is the real man.
"The white boy, who a few generations ago was the cowboy, is staring into his own past and mourning this partial loss of that symbol of manhood, which Salma is probably going to go back to, because the white boy can't take care of a simple log in the road."
Truck Commercial As Cultural Chill PillRelax. Actually, the Ford ad contains meanings that could appeal both to Minutemen and immigrants, says Leo Chavez, an anthropologist at the University of California at Irvine, where he teaches the politics of visual representation.
"I think Ford is trying to align itself with the purchasing power of the Latino population, but at the same time it's reassuring the dominant population, those concerned with immigration, that assimilation is taking place," Chavez says.
"Manuel is not a day laborer, he's not someone who got here six months ago. He's probably a legal immigrant. . . . He has initiative. He solves problems. . . . He comes to the rescue of people in distress. That could be the nation he is rescuing, with its demand for workers.
"The other male" -- Convertible Dude -- "represents social mobility, assimilation and integration. He may be a U.S.-born Latino or Anglo, but his use of English identifies him as not an immigrant Spanish-first-language speaker. His car suggests he does not have to 'work' for a living using his physical strength, truck power, and in this sense he has lost some machismo male virility compared to the Mexican type. While the Latina appears to have 'traded up,' she has clearly given up the macho virility as the price of assimilation."
Truck Commercial as . . . Truck Commercial?It really is just about selling the F-150, says Ford. "I don't know where Manuel was born, that's not the point," says Ben Poore, truck group marketing manager. The point is that F-150 owners "do really step up. They are the go-to guys and gals and do the right thing. Whether you go to Texas and talk to a group of contractors. Whether they be Hispanic, they all have a similar set of beliefs, a similar set of ways they approach life and the way they use their trucks within that. [Manuel's] making it, you can tell from the confidence on his face."
Truck Commercial as Anti-Mustang Commercial"When I first saw it, I raised my fist in the air, like, 'Go, Manuel!' " says novelist Nina Marie Martinez, author of "Caramba!" "I went, 'Yeah, the cute cowboy won!' Then I paused and went, 'No, no, no. You're being played. . . . They're taking your culture and selling it back to you!' "
She recognizes the Latino types: Manuel, with his truck, is the agrarian ranch country hero of corridos , or romantic outlaw folk songs. Convertible Dude is the upwardly mobile city boy. Bilingual Babe, whose skin is a shade in between Manuel's and Convertible Dude's, is the ambitious girl on the move between those two worlds.
Martinez happens to be a truck owner herself -- Chevy -- and she knows cars, too. She notices something about the ad that others miss: Convertible Dude is driving . . . a Ford Mustang! Mustangs and F-150s both start at about the same price: just under $20,000.
These revelations reboot the meaning of the drama: Convertible Dude is not necessarily more successful than Manuel!
But: "If my father picked who I would drive off with into the sunset, he would pick the guy in the convertible," says Martinez. "I'd definitely go with Manuel."
The marketers didn't intend to imply a competition between the two men, and they certainly didn't mean to suggest Mustangs are wimpy. "It's not that one or the other won," Poore says. "It's all about Manuel."
Yes, it is all about Manuel. Who he is, how he got here, where he's going -- and whom he passes on the way.
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