The The Mother Figure in the Mexican Cartoon Madre Santa of Ricardo Peláez and Eric Proaño Muciño

Abstract

Objective: to determine the way in which the mother figure is represented in the independent Mexican cartoon Madre Santa, created by the cartoonist Eric Proaño Muciño "Frik" and drawn by the illustrator Ricardo Peláez Goycochea.

Methodology: a qualitative approach takes up the paradigm of indicial inferences proposed by Carlo Ginzburg to identify details in the image and narrative of the story, taking into account narration and iconography. With the purpose of unfolding the story, we used the proposal of Jenaro Talens, who resumes from Charles Morris the three levels of meaning of the sign: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The aforementioned allowed the access of a first level of interpretation of the primary source and facilitated the identification of clues in both its image and narrative.

Results: it was found that the cartoon Madre Santa, created within the countercultural movement of Mexican comics, satires the vision of the selfless Mexican mother. In its representation, the authors dramatize the generosity and altruism of the mother when relating her to the Virgin of Guadalupe, but, in a parallel way, they play with irony when representing her as a proprietor of transgressive and violent actions, which leads her to reproduce her captivity.

Conclusions: Madre Santa was created at a time when the opening of frontiers of the neoliberal model introduced new ways of creating, narrating, and producing comic books; this expanded the vision of local creators. This cartoon makes a satire of the image of selfless motherhood in Mexico, which, however, reproduces the notion of
the divided image with which the woman in Mexico has been typified.