"Voyager" and the Fake Native American

[jaime]

While I wouldn't argue that it's better to avoid the issue of B'Elanna's human ethnicity than to handle it badly and resort to clichés, if the series/franchise wants credit for showing characters of various ethnicities, shouldn't they try to do it well?

Yes, of course the terms "Latinx" and "Latin" are far too broad to really be useful descriptors, but it's not as if the series gave us any way to narrow down B'Elanna's human heritage. Even the name "Torres" is used both in Spanish and Portuguese. The only descriptor I can find for the actress's ethnicity is "Hispanic," which rules out Portuguese and suggests South or Central American heritage rather than direct descent from Europe.

I keep coming back to @Christopher's comment, above, about how Discovery gives the non-binary character Adira authenticity by drawing on the real-life experiences of Adira's portrayer, Blu del Barrio, also a non-binary person. Could Voyager have given Torres's human side a credit's worth of authenticity by drawing on the real-life experiences and cultural knowledge of her portrayer, Roxann Dawson?

Or, barring that, could they at least have tried not going out of their way to make everything about her human side as unrelentingly whitebread as they did? I mean, her dad's name was John, her uncle's name was Carl, and she had three cousins named Elizabeth, Michael, and Dean. Her favorite foods were things like banana pancakes and fried chicken. She read romance novels and was good at math and athletics. Whitebread.

Star Trek in those days really didn’t do much ‘here’s what earth culture is like now, after a few hundred years and two big wars that ended in a post atomic horror’. In some ways that really works for it. In other ways it really doesn’t. I think it didn’t know how to do anything other than LA culture, and in that way, humanity becomes exactly the same as the cultural monoliths that every other race in Trek was. In that regard, almost by accident, it does present a ‘post racial’ society. Which again is a bit of a double edged sword, especially when the humans seem to basically cosplay their national stereotypes (and we see an ‘alien’ do this too... the ‘Scottish’ fellow in sub Rosa.)

I don’t think this is by design, but it very interesting. All of my favourite foods, most of my favourite films and tv, and even some of my fashion choices are not from ‘my’ culture. The bits of my own culture I do consciously favour are often done tongue in cheek and with a wink and a nod. So... perhaps this a valid extrapolation for humanities future?

Mostly it’s because Trek is made in la la land. There isn’t an accurate cultural portrayal anywhere. Apart from la la landers.

 

[Brennyren]

I get what you're saying, and it is very interesting -- and perhaps not invalid.

And you're right, there isn't an accurate cultural portrayal to be seen. Thinking about it, I guess TOS probably comes as close as any of its successors (I'll exclude Disco, as I haven't watched enough of it to say) and it had a cliché Scotsman -- with what was apparently a dodgy accent -- and a parody of a Russian, and a southerner who had a drawl and liked mint juleps.

I still remember rolling my eyes when Archer turned out to be a passionate enthusiast about...water polo. Get out of la-la land and nine Yanks out of ten couldn't tell you how the game is played (and that's an optimistic estimate), let alone display any enthusiasm for it. The standard joke is, "But don't the ponies drown?" But if memory serves, Archer actually is from la-la land, the one area they know. So that one they got right.

 

[jaime]

I get what you're saying, and it is very interesting -- and perhaps not invalid.

And you're right, there isn't an accurate cultural portrayal to be seen. Thinking about it, I guess TOS probably comes as close as any of its successors (I'll exclude Disco, as I haven't watched enough of it to say) and it had a cliché Scotsman -- with what was apparently a dodgy accent -- and a parody of a Russian, and a southerner who had a drawl and liked mint juleps.

I still remember rolling my eyes when Archer turned out to be a passionate enthusiast about...water polo. Get out of la-la land and nine Yanks out of ten couldn't tell you how the game is played (and that's an optimistic estimate), let alone display any enthusiasm for it. The standard joke is, "But don't the ponies drown?" But if memory serves, Archer actually is from la-la land, the one area they know. So that one they got right.

Disco itself even plays the same game, but now it looks like a narrative plan. Phillipa Georghiou. Greek then? But a famous Chinese (kinda) actress. This is a time when all humans are just... human.
Of course, going back to Chakotay, he’s clearly shown as having cultural signifiers that are unusual in Trek. But then... he uses tech as part of his medicine bundle, so it’s clear things have changed.
On the one hand, it’s just Hollywood kooky, on the other, Trek can almost get away with it, precisely because ‘gritty realism’ isn’t really in its mandate. When Trek talks about ethnicity or anything in that area, it does it with ‘humans’ and ‘not humans’. Race as anything other than a costume doesn’t really feature in Trek. (With one very obvious exception involving the twentieth century and Benny) The question is whether that’s something that works I guess.
Trek has a united earth.

 

[yotsuya]

The problem, though, is that VGR initially based Chakotay's made-up culture more on elements of societies from what's now the United States. It wasn't until "Tattoo" that they started to go for a more Central/South American heritage to better reflect Beltran's ancestry. So that's a valiant attempt to rationalize it, but it doesn't quite work.

You make excellent points, but until they started exploring it they had left everything rather vague. And there are several cultures that originally spanned the US/Mexico area. And Chakotay could be of very mixed heritage, so one side could be his mother and the other his father.

I'm just saying that in this discussion we don't want to be falling into the same mistake of over-simplifying Native American cultures or where they may be in 400 years. They may have inadvertently mixed things up and given us a more complex character. I don't for a minute think that they did it deliberately.

 

[jaime]

You make excellent points, but until they started exploring it they had left everything rather vague. And there are several cultures that originally spanned the US/Mexico area. And Chakotay could be of very mixed heritage, so one side could be his mother and the other his father.

I'm just saying that in this discussion we don't want to be falling into the same mistake of over-simplifying Native American cultures or where they may be in 400 years. They may have inadvertently mixed things up and given us a more complex character. I don't for a minute think that they did it deliberately.

The last two sentences about sum it up lol.
I think they did try. That’s why he was no good at starting fires or whatever it was in Basics or something.