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From lines in Quechua to scenes involving Incan technology, the new movie worked to get right what previous Hollywood efforts have not.
By Janice Llamoca
Isabela Moner read and reread her script, listened to audio recordings on repeat and prepped as she normally would for a movie. Except, it wasn’t just any film. She was getting ready for her biggest role to date: bringing Dora the Explorer to life on the big screen, and the lines she was meticulously memorizing were in Quechua, the language of the Incan empire and currently spoken by about 8 million people in South America, mostly in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.
“There’s so much detail in Quechua,” Moner said. Even after “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” was done “and I had gotten the lines down, we would have to go back and fix a few words here and there.” That’s because “a fluent Quechua speaker would know that’s not right,” Moner added. “It’s crazy the amount of detail that’s put into movies like these.”
In the movie, about the now-teenage explorer and her high school friends on a jungle adventure in Peru, it was important to get those cultural details correct.
In a recent episode of NPR’s “Latino USA,” my colleague Antonia Cereijido and I explored (no pun intended) the legacy of Dora from her beginnings on Nick Jr., Nickelodeon’s preschool programming block, and onward, spanning almost 20 years. And while Dora’s visual representation of Latinidad has been criticized for reinforcing a stereotypical mestiza look (with brown straight hair and light brown skin), there was some care given to crafting what she represented.
Dora’s pan-Latina bilingual identity was originally created in the late ’90s with the help of consultants to empower kids of Latino heritage in the United States.
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