When I was five years old the US military invaded my country. They were there to “save” us from a cruel dictator, one that, to this day, everyone conveniently forgets to mention was a former CIA-asset the United States government had placed in Panama and supported, as long as it benefited them.
The second he stopped playing by the rules, Panama’s citizens turned from people who could make their own decisions to victims in need of saving. And my five-year-old self got to spend a horrible few days wondering if the soldiers I could see roaming the streets were there to kill my family or me.
If you think the anecdote is out of place, consider this: the only thing going through my mind as I watched the first episode of Disney+’s The Falcon and The Winter Soldier – a show that was presumably meant to give us more grounded storytelling in comparison to WandaVision and deepen the characters of both Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes – was that I hadn’t signed up for military propaganda.
Especially when the character they chose to spout the most troubling parts of this propaganda was, you guessed it, the only Latino character in the show, and one of the few in the entire MCU.
The MCU in general is guilty of glamorizing the military in many properties. And, if anything, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is just another cog in the propaganda machine.
Joaquin Torres, introduced in the first episode of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier as Sam’s liaison, has a comic book history that makes this even worse, if possible. In the comics when Sam takes on the Captain America mantle, guess who becomes the new Falcon?
That’s right, Joaquin, a Mexican immigrant who came to Arizona at the age of six with his family and the first MCU character to be cannonly a DREAMer. So, you know, a very bad choice for the “I don’t know how jurisdiction works, but you’re under arrest” joke.
Not that there was a good choice for it.
The MCU in general is guilty of glamorizing the military in many properties. And, if anything, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is just another cog in the propaganda machine and one that is also trying to provide some social criticism to balance out the equation. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call out how tone-deaf the framing of the show’s first episode and its “jokes” were.
It isn’t a joke when the US basically ignored the sovereignty of Latin America. It isn’t a joke when in too many countries to count elected presidents were replaced by military regimes with the blessing and often full-on support of the US military. It isn’t a joke when a five-year-old spent days thinking the US soldiers were there to kill her.
Especially when the character they chose to spout the most troubling parts of this propaganda was, you guessed it, the only Latino character in the show, and one of the few in the entire MCU.
And it especially isn’t a joke when, even though I survived, many of my compatriots didn’t.
Joaquin doesn’t care about jurisdiction, you say. That’s not surprising to anyone born in Latin America. After all, the US military doesn’t either.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier shouldn’t have to carry the full burden of the sins of the United States’ foreign policy, and under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be asking the show to. Except they didn’t just align themselves with it, they chose to make light of it and used their one Latinx character as their mouthpiece. That’s adding insult to injury, and it colors my entire view of the show going forward.
Maybe the rest of the show will work. Maybe the introduction of U.S Agent will help the show tell a more nuanced story about the risks of blindly following orders, and the importance of the personal accountability Steve Rogers always fought for. But as of right now, I can’t say I trust them with that story – or any story.
That five-year-old has a long memory.
