Absolut ad doesn't distort past

¡Siéntate y cállate!

That’s “Sit down and be quiet!” en Español. And it was the reaction I honestly had when I heard the social conservative nitwits get all worked up about the new advertisement put together by Absolut to sell their vodka in Mexico. Here's the controversial advertisement. All illustrations provided by http://www.absolutads.com/

Throughout the years, Absolut’s advertising has been known for taking outlandish images and trying to associate them with their vodka, so as to create the concept of a miraculous drinking experience.

FOR THE AD campaign designed for Mexican magazines and billboards, Absolut depicts what it perceives as a Mexican’s fantasy – a map of North America with all of the southwestern United States restored to Mexico and the United States reduced to the eastern half of the country.

How dare they offend the great nation of the United States by reminding us of what once was – back in the days when California and Texas were states in Mexico and the Arizona territory in between consisted of Mexican settlements (what Mexico called Arizona is what we now think of as the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and part of Oklahoma).

For what it is worth, Absolut officials have issued an apology to anyone who feels offended by their Mexican ad. “It harkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico and not the U.S., that ad might have been very different.”

Not many of those offended are willing to accept the apology. The Internet is now cluttered with sites filled with ridiculous nativist rhetoric.

THERE ARE PLACES that are taking the ad as the ultimate piece of evidence that Mexicans are plotting to take over the United States. They also want to seriously consider boycotting Absolut products for providing “aid and comfort” to Mexican symbolism that would promote the notion that there ever was a legitimate Mexican presence in the southwest.

“Siéntate” and “cállate” are about the most reasonable response to these people, who are getting all bent out of shape for nothing.

Despite the Chicano rhetoric of the 1970s about “Aztlan” and the “reconquista,” no one of Mexican descent seriously thinks that the southwestern United States is ever going to return to Mexico’s control. No one who actually lives there would particularly want it to. Contemporary Mexican youth would view anyone spouting such talk as living in the past. They might as well be wearing polyester leisure suits or their hair in an Afro.

But the ad, in its own trivial way, does point out a reality – the Rio Bravo del Norte/Rio Grande is NOT some impenetrable barrier that separates two distinct regions. The southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico are truly one region, and they are a place where the Anglo version of U.S. culture has merged into the Spanish/Indian mix that makes up Mexican culture.

THE END RESULT is a region that is truly neither U.S. nor Mexican. People from central Mexico, particularly those from the Federal District, tend to view places like Juarez City and Tijuana as being just as outlandish as people in the rest of the United States perceive El Paso, Texas, or Truth or Consequences, N.M., to be.

La Valle (the Rio Grande Valley) is the place where two nations come together as one. The sooner that political officials on both sides accept that concept, the better off we the people will be.

The other fact is that the map does reflect a reality of the past – there literally was once a vast Mexican empire that could have progressed into something significant, except for the acquisition desires of U.S. officials. Under the concept of Manifest Destiny, some people saw the land used by Mexican states as potential slave states for the United States.

THINK I’M EXAGGERATING? Consider the fact that the movement to annex Mexican territory didn’t seriously end until after the Civil War, when it became apparent that any new Mexican land incorporated into the United States would make fully free and equal U.S. citizens of all those Mexicans – a notion that scared all those aging Confederates.

I say the map reflects a version of reality because there is some quibbling over how extensive the boundaries should be. It probably does push too far into Oregon, and ought to go farther into Central America, as Mexican officials at one point dreamed of incorporating all of South America into one Mexican nation.

Some people argue the ad is as insensitive as a counterpart ad geared toward the Southern United States that would depict a Dixie fantasy as an independent Confederate States of America. Such an ad campaign would be more trivial than anything else, particularly since we can argue whether a country known as the Confederacy ever legitimately existed (it didn’t in the mind of Abraham Lincoln).

BESIDES, I HAVE seen countless Confederacy maps on the Internet. Many white supremacist sites that engage in Civil War revisionism depict the south as an independent nation, and usually include Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri – all of which were slave states that never tried secession from the United States.

I have even seen a few Confederacy maps that also add the northernmost Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Sonora and Baja California to Dixie, along with an explanation that a victorious South would later have seized control of the Mexican land so as to stretch itself into a nation with boundaries on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Why do I suspect that such a map is the version that would be the Absolut fantasy of the people who are most offended by the Mexican ad campaign? Which is why my response to their griping is nothing more than, “¡siéntate y cállate!”

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Absolut’s new advertisement for Mexico angers the type of people (http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Entertainment/2008/04/06/absolut_campaign_sparks_controversy/8090/) who can’t accept the fact that people in most of the Americas speak Spanish (http://www.absolutads.com/?p=800#comments) as their primary language.

How is this alcohol advertisement perceived in the college cornfields of central Illinois? (http://media.www.dailyvidette.com/media/storage/paper420/news/2008/04/07/Viewpoint/The-World.Is.Not.Absolut-3305800.shtml)

The British press is getting a chuckle from the distaste of some of the United States’ liquor consumers (http://blogs.independent.co.uk/the_campaign_trailers/2008/04/absolut-ly-sorr.html). Perhaps those who are upset should just have another drink.

How does this ad work (http://consumerist.com/376546/is-this-absolut-ad-cheeky-or-distasteful), as a piece of advertising?