C'mon, feel the NAFTA

My crush on mariachi music can probably be traced back to a single source: Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944). My brother won a copy of it in a coloring contest at the supermarket, when he was 6, and I was 4.

It wasn't till college that I learned that this flick, which I had memorized down to every last one of Donald Duck's Brazilian booty-shakes, was propaganda billed by F.D.R. to promote his Good Neighbor Policy. It took me awhile to get over this. Apparently he hoped that the U.S., Mexico, and The Rest Of Latin America (represented by a cigar-smoking Brazilian parrot) could be BFFs* like these cartoon birds. 

*so that the United Fruit Company and the U. S. Military could keep on exploiting and occupying Latin countries. SLEEPOVER!!