MEXICO CITY — A newly issued series of postage stamps showing a once-popular black comic book character with exaggerated thick lips has reignited controversy over racial attitudes in Mexico, six weeks after President Vicente Fox was forced to apologize for remarks perceived as insensitive toward black Americans.
The five new stamps show a cartoon figure named Memin Pinguin, a picaresque urban child who gets by on wits and moxie, that has been one of Mexico's best-selling comic book characters.
Created by Yolanda Vargas Dulche in 1947, the character remains well known, though its popularity peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.
A day after the stamps were issued, an outcry ensued, with civil rights groups and prominent Afro-Mexicans, including pop singer Johnny Laboriel, calling the images outrageous.
"Of course people are going to be offended by the caricature," Laboriel said Wednesday. "The idea to put out this postage stamp is the biggest stupidity.
"They do this without thinking of the consequences."
Gustavo Islas, director of Mexico's postal service, emphasized that the stamps were intended to have nostalgia value. There was no plan to recall them, he said.
"Whoever sees the character as something offensive is looking at things completely wrongly," Islas said, adding that the comic book figure was "a beautiful personage with no importance given to color."
Mexico's Foreign Relations Ministry issued a statement saying that no offense should be taken, "just as Speedy Gonzalez has never been interpreted in a racial manner by the people in Mexico because he is a cartoon character," the statement read.
The dust-up comes in the wake of the indignation caused by Fox's remark in mid-May that Mexican migrants do jobs that "not even blacks want to do in the United States." Fox spent several days explaining and finally apologizing for "any hurt feelings."
He did so personally to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who visited Fox at his official residence, Los Pinos, on May 18.
Reached by telephone Wednesday night in Little Rock, Ark., Jackson said that he found the "Sambo-type" stamp demeaning and "in many ways worse than what President Fox said last month."
"I called the Mexican ambassador in Washington and asked him to call President Fox and ask him to apologize and to take the stamp off the market," Jackson said.
Now the stamp is forcing Mexico to reexamine an issue that usually remains below the surface.
