Mexica in Popular Culture

The Road to El Dorado is an animated movie that represents the position of the mainstream media and popular culture about indigenous culture and colonization twenty years ago. It portrays the jungles of Meso-America in luscious colors as we can see in the foliage that surrounds the main characters in the movie poster. The traditional geometrical patterns that we associate with early American civilizations are also used in bright colors throughout the movie; we can see that in the opening scene video. The gold of the pyramids and city is also emphasized by bright tones and reflected light rays. The gold is an important part of the movie as it is what motivates the main character and ties them with the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés. The movie poster shows the main characters mounted on a hearing stallion, and one of them even raises his sword in the air assuming the exact same position as Cortés in The Siege of Tenochtitlán. They, however, don’t share the colonialist agenda with the conqueror and are portrayed as the good guys that save everyone in the end, assuming a different problematic archetype: the white savior. Behind them, the pyramid is visible like it was in the Spanish painting but they are not facing it in a stance that would suggest violent intent. This duality says a lot about the movie as a whole because although they acknowledge that Cortés was a problem they fail to discriminate against other parts of colonialist thinking, such as thinking that indigenous people are passive and their religion is a joke.