"Why call her a Latina and not say anything about it?" said Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a Pasadena-based media advocacy group.
(Who, by the way, also happens to look like many Latinas.) Sofia herself has medium-brown hair and blue eyes - again, there are Latinas who look like this.īut she'd not representative of the darker-skinned, darker-eyed majority, say some critics, who also don't understand why Disney isn't more overt about her ethnicity, like in the case of Princess Tiana of "The Princess and the Frog," a black princess from New Orleans. Viewers will know that Sofia's mother's name is Miranda, and that Miranda has a darker complexion than her daughter, nothing out of the ordinary in multi-hued Latino families. “When we go into schools, what I find fascinating is that every girl thinks that they’re Sofia.”Īn executive producer added, “It’s sort of a matter-of-fact situation rather than an overt thing.” “We never actually call it out,” said Joe D’Ambrosia, vice president of Disney Junior original programming. Here's what one of them told Entertainment Weekly:
First, while the character is supposed to be Latina, Disney execs say they don't plan to make a point of her ethnicity. Sofia is adorable, but there's a two-folded flap evolving over her introduction. 18 on the Disney Channel in an animated television film titled "Sofia the First: Once Upon A Princess," in which she navigates the commoner-turned-princess life. The new character is Sofia, a young girl whose mother marries the king of a place called Enchancia, making her a princess. And, not surprisingly, people are already at odds over whether she's, well, Latina enough. In the spirit of Tiana and Mulan, there's a new princess joining Disney's ethnic princess roster: a Latina.