It’s all about the truck

In today’s Washington Post, David Montgomery dissect a new, bilingual ad for the Ford F-150, which  pits a Spanish speaking truck driver against an English speaking convertible driver in an implicit battle for the affections of a woman whom the article dubs “Bilingual Babe.”

What does all this have to do with immigration?  Montgomery writes:

Maybe at another time a Ford truck commercial could be just a Ford truck commercial. Manuel could be just a guy witha truck. But not now. The immigration debate is burning, and the Latinoinfluence on American society is under examination.

The commercial becomes a Rorschach test, a 30-second telenovela suggesting multiple back-stories and future plot twists…..

For “answers and interpretations” of the bilingual the ad, the Post “checked in with acouple of novelists, a cultural essayist, an anthropologist, a theaterdirector and a Minuteman.”  To find out how novelists Sandra Cisneros and Nina Marie Martinez, Minuteman Jim Gilchrist and a few academics interpreted the ad, check out the full story. 

-jmc