Jorgito el colonizado
I used to love Curious George when I was a child. I had almost all the books and would spend hours reading them. And the I became an adult and realized that it was really an unintended allegory for colonialism. The Man in the Yellow Hat arrives in Africa and steals George from his natural home so he can end up in an American zoo. Lovely.
Anyway, I wanted to come up with the Central American version, and so, our George would be a Capuchin monkey named Jorgito and our Man in the Yellow Hat would be the United Fruit Co. In case you didn’t know, banana production has a violent history in Latin America throughout the 20th century. Throughout Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia, the United Fruit Co.(an American corporation) owned enormous tracts of land, exploiting hundreds of thousands of workers. And whenever workers began to organize, or Latin American governments attempted to pass land reforms, the U.S. would send in the CIA or the military to ensure that profits would continue.
If you’d like to learn more about the United Fruit Co. (now known as Chiquita Banana), please check out this article: