“With CG,” Walsh Valdes said, referring to computer-generated animation, “one of the great things is you feel like you’re along for the ride, and it could really forge that connection even more.”
Dora goes three-dimensional in other ways, too. In the new series, her previously unacknowledged Hispanic ancestry has been made concrete: Mexican, Cuban, and Peruvian. Diana Zermeño, the 10-year-old Californian who calls Dora, is herself the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Kathleen Herles, who played Dora in the original series, is of Peruvian descent and has now returned to Nickelodeon to voice the little girl’s mother.
“We have these connections with our characters,” Herles said during a video chat. “And I think it just adds more depth. Not only for us and our characters, but also for the show.”
Dora’s nationality must also resonate with the audience. According to the US Census Bureau, more than 19 percent of Americans are Hispanic, as are more than 25 percent of the nation’s children. “Dora” now joins a TV landscape that includes characters like Alma from PBS’s “Alma’s Way,” who is Puerto Rican, and Rosie from “Rosie’s Rules,” who is Mexican American.
“We don’t live in a world where we can say Latino culture is one thing,” Ramsey Naito, president of Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Animation, said in a video interview. Eighty percent of the “Dora” writers, he added, are Latino themselves and can “contribute authentically to the stories.”
One episode, for example, focuses on the Latin American shirt known as the guayabera, which is believed to have originated in Cuba, while another features alebrijes, the colorful carved wooden animals of Mexican folk art. In this tale, “The Alebrije Adventure,” the alebrije are living creatures, and one, the jaguar Ale, voiced by Mexican-born actress Kate del Castillo, enlists Dora’s (and the audience’s) help in restoring his water rainbow that feeds the magical tree of creatures. While these figures are pure fiction, the term “alebrije” is real. But how do you help young children remember this?
