Family Guy

http://www.familyguyx.net/watch/104/Padre_de_Familia/

The main focus of the Family Guy episode entitled Padre de Familia is about immigrants and their struggle in America. The show starts out with a Veteran’s Day celebration. Peter then decides that he wants to be a stand-up American citizen, which resulted in him accusing every person of a different race/ethnicity of being an illegal immigrant. Eventually, he find out that he is also an illegal Mexican immigrant since his mother had him in Mexico and never filled out his birth certificate in the United States. From there, he tired getting a job, but with little success. He went to work for Mr. Pewterschmidt, Lois’ father, where other illegal Mexican immigrants worked. Finally, Peter forms a riot in order to get equality for the immigrants, but in return the immigrants tells him to go home. I choose this Family Guy episode, because it focused entirely around people of different races and their treatment they faced by being illegal.

One of the first parts of the show, an elderly man was singing “God Bless America” with a choir of boys. However something that seemed odd to me was that all of the boys were white. This reminded me of chapter two Drawing the Color Line by Zinn. There also white people created themselves as being better and superior to people of color. To me, a choir of all white boys is giving the message that one should be white to be a citizen of America and have power.

Even though the immigrants in Family Guy were Mexicans, I could see a strong relationship to the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. Mr. Pewterschmidt was shown to be the “master” to the immigrants or “slaves”. The Mexicans lived out back in little shacks similar to the cabins that the slaves in Kindred lived in. Both the slaves in Kindred and the illegal immigrants had a close family-like bond to one another.

With Mr. Pewterschmidt being the master of the house, he ordered Peter to drink his own blood and Peter had to do it even though he didn’t want to, which again was similar to the slaves doing everything that the white plantation owner wanted. Knowing what they were and were not allowed to do also reminded me of The Ethics of Living Jim Crow by Richard Wright. He had to listen to his bosses not matter what in order to keep his job just like the immigrants in the show. Finally when the illegal immigrants tried to revolt, Mr. Pewterschmidt threatened to deport them, and teased them with the idea of becoming legal citizen. The slaves were also afraid of being “deported” or sold in their case. In the book, Rufus also held the idea over Alice that he would free their children if she listened to him.

I usually enjoy Family Guy and find it full of jokes. Now when they play episodes like this, I still find it funny, but I see it a different way now. It actually did irritate me to see the choir of all white boys. It made me wonder why they couldn't make it a mixture of races and still get a similar comedic effect. I feel that this show was similar to the Avenue Q song that I had analyzed before by the way that both made a large emphasis on whites have the power and privilege.