Spanish American Barbie Doll Identity

Virgin, Sandi looks in the mirror in the bathroom and is “surprised to find a pretty girl looking back at her. It struck her impersonally, as if it were a judgment someone else was delivering, someone American and important, like Dr. Fanning…” (Alvarez 181). When Sandi looks in the mirror, she does not feel as if she is herself, but rather the powerful host of cultural ideology that is at play in the working of the definition of beautiful, as if she were a doll looking at a doll. She sees what Valerie Babb would refer to as having “…no particular power, until ‘adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world’ give them such by aggregately terming them [Spanish] and privileging that now racialized classification.” Sandi realizes the power of having

Immediately she begins to perform the role in which she is able to find power in when, realizing that the Barbie doll “had to be true to her Spanish costume,” she thanks Mrs. Fanning in Spanish (Alvarez 192). In El Flamenco, Sandi learns the power that can be gained in fulfilling a cultural stereotype and privileged ideas of beauty, and becomes a Spanish American Barbie doll.

The decision that Sandi makes to diminish her identity to a Spanish American Barbie doll in order to gain power leads to the conflict that she experiences as an adult. Although Sandi’s appearance is privileged in American culture, “…fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!” she wishes she could be darker skinned like her sisters, more like a Spanish Barbie doll (Alvarez 52). Her mother calls her a “spirit of contradiction,” and these tensions surrounding her character seem to defy interpretation (Alvarez 52). In Ann Ducille’s essay “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” she argues that Barbie dolls are inherently