Triskeliae wrote:
But in the US, for years, the portrayal of Puerto Ricans in films, Etc. has been as bad guys.
I take your point. Sorry that I wasn't quite getting the main point of your previous post. You're right that Hollywood studios and others often stereotype Puerto Ricans in that way and it must be annoying, even if you don't especially blame Hergé in this instance.
Triskeliae wrote:
And there's the thing: Puerto Ricans come in all colors and shapes. There are black Puerto Ricans, white, in-between...
Yeah, you're right to point out that Puerto Rican is a nationality, not an ethnic definition. We don't actually know that the original black crew-man wasn't Puerto Rican anyway, nor that his more latin-looking replacement actually
is Puerto Rican.
I guess Hergé was just trying to give Alan a crew of mixed nationality and ethnicity, in both versions of the book, and presumeably the possibly-Puerto Rican replacement was as dark-skinned as the US publishers would allow him to go in achieving this.
You could argue that Alan's mixed crew follows another lazy stereotype, whereby a mixed crew would be shorthand for illegitimate and criminal activity. But you could argue that the mixed crew was simply realistic (given this is an international gang), or even more inclusive (which is what the US publishers objected to). Alan may be a deeply evil man, but at least he practices an equal opportunities policy when it comes to employing henchmen!
The Tintin books do have a quite a lot of foriegn and non-white baddies, but to be fair to Hergé, they have a lot of foreign and non-white goodies as well, and loads of white baddies.
Like you, I don't think Hergé was a racist, but I guess like many Europeans of his era, he was somewhat out of his depth on understanding real racial equality.
Even when he draws black Africans as goodies, in both
Congo and
Red Sea Sharks, he patronises them.
Personally, I find the portrayal of black Africans in
Red Sea Sharks more patronising than in
Congo, given it was written in the late 50s when Hergé might have known better.