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• 1 media/handy-manny.jpg 2017-12-03T22:15:25-08:00 Handy Manny 27 image_header 2018-01-04T18:07:37-08:00

  As a show featured on the Disney Junior channel that started airing on September 16, 2006 targeting children ages two to six, Handy Manny is centered around a Latino repairman and his lovable singing tools.

   

  Although Manny (voiced by Wilmer Valderrama) teaches children to always help their friends in need, Handy Manny perpetuates the stereotype that Latinx immigrants in the United States can only aspire to work in low income positions. From an early age children can feel that culturally this is all they can ever amount to. This way of thinking is one of the first steps to becoming a “self fulfilling prophecy.” Referred to by the Journal of Social Issues, a self fulfilling prophecy refers to the phenomenon when a subject confirms beliefs imposed on them by outside forces such as parents, teachers, the media, society, ect. The journal claims that the first step towards initiating the self fulfilling prophecy is that “ a perceiver must hold a false belief about a target, as when a teacher underestimates a student's true potential.” These stages in a child’s development are an important time for them to learn and understand their social world, because

  “as children grow into early childhood, their world will begin to open up. They will become more independent and begin to focus more on adults and children outside of the family. They will want to explore and ask about the things around them even more. Their interactions with family and those around them will help to shape their personality and their own ways of thinking and moving”(CFDC). In spite of all his good characteristics, as a role model, Handy Manny potentially diminish the aspirations of Latinx children, who are compelled to fulfill only the jobs that are traditionally associated with their cultural and ethnic background.

  Although the voice-over cast of Handy Manny is predominantly white, the cast of animated characters appear to be pretty diverse. However, when looking at the occupations of the minority characters, Sean Brayton points out in his article that with the exception of a few characters, most roles with manual labor jobs such as gardener, cook, repairman, and car-wash assistant are “earmarked mostly for Latina/os” in comparison to the array of middle-class jobs occupied by primarily white and Asian characters. Brayton goes on to say “as such, the series draws an obvious connection between ethnicity and manual work, particularly in construction, domestic, and service industries that have historically relied on both US-born and migrant Latina/os.” This idea of dependability can have both negative and positive connotations. On the positive side, it promotes the Latinx value of “comunidad” where everyone does his, her, or their part to benefit the larger community, hence the reason Manny and his tools can only fix things when they all are on one accord. In contrast, the negative effect of this portrayal is that it suggests that the roles of Latinx individuals in the community are only meant to hold the community together behind the scenes while only the more privileged groups can aspire to become pilots, teachers, store owners, ect...   

   
   
   

  A favorable characteristic of the show is that it does embrace the bilingual ability of some of its Latinx viewers with Manny and some of his tools occasional use of Spanish vocabulary. This element speaks towards the multiple experiences aspect of the Latinx identity by accommodating what one does or does not do to assimilate. As Wilmer Valderrama said in one of his interviews featured below, Spanish “is used in a way that is not preachy and we are not trying to say that you should speak Spanish. Its kinda a part of who he (Manny) is and is a part of his culture and he just kinda naturally embraces it.”The sporadic usage of Spanish helps Latinx children to connect and embrace their identity, but also does not make them feel left out if they do not speak Spanish. Hopefully in the near future we will start to see more Disney Junior shows portraying Latinx characters as princesses, doctors, agents, etc... like some of the other characters of different ethnicities featured on the channel.