POST 11: SPACES & EXCHANGES: ¿Qué? A cartoon by Nate Beeler (2007)

POST 11: SPACES & EXCHANGES: ¿Qué? A cartoon by Nate Beeler (2007)

 Nate Beeler is an american cartoonist, one of the most talented of his generation, he is the true descendant to a long line of american political cartoonist. His cartoons has been published in very prestigious newspapers like Time magazine, The New York Times or Newsweek but they also appeared many times in television  on CNN or Fox News. We are going to describe and interpret one of Beeler's cartoon that talks about the illegal immigration in the United States of America related to the notion of Spaces and Exchanges.

To begin with, we can see three characters on this cartoon that we can separate in two groups, on the left there are the reporters and on the right an immigrant apparently mexican, it appears directly that they belong to two different world. First on the left, we have the cameraman, his face is covered by his camera that he carries, on the camera there is the inscription TV News it indicates that they work for them. At the very right of the cameraman there is the reporter who wears a suit and a micro, that remind that he is the reporter, he seems very confident with his white teeth and he's hand in his pocket. He asks a question to the character on his right : "We're here live with the 300millionth american! How do you feel about this milestone, Sir?" to what the immigrant responds  "Qué"  which means what in spanish. In contrary with the cameraman and the reporter, the character on the right of the cartoon seems flithy and desoriented, he looks like  he has just arrived from a long trip, he has a bag full things on one hand and a mattress on the other hand, he also has barbed wire stuck to his leg. I think this black and white cartoon is represented the immigrant situation in United States and how the media talk about it, with his drawing skills Nate Beeler tries to inform the people.

First of all and as we saw before, this cartoon talks about the immigrant situation on the border between Mexico and the United States, here we can see the opposition between two worlds. On one hand, One very clean and arrogant of the media who are supposed to cover the subject of immigration but in spite of doing that they are compleasant and takes this  hard situation more too softly. But on the other hand, we have a dirty and confused mexican immigrant who doesn't really know what is going on, he has been throw a lot of things to get in america but he is welcome by media. The Mexico- United States border is the most frequently crossed international boundary in the world. What's funny and paradoxical in this cartoon is that the reporter says that he is live with a "300millionth american" who are in fact a mexican immigrant freshly arrived, Beeler is saying that an american can be this mexican who don't even speak english. In the United States, the hispanic community is so important that they created a new language named "Spanglish" which shows the importance of immigrants in America.

We can relate this cartoon to the notion of "Spaces and exchanges" on the fact that he talks about the illegal migrants situation, and the problems that this creates so we can relate that to the "exchanges" part and for the other one we can say that this cartoon is a very good representation of the breakdown between North and South, rich and poor world.