Utica Sleepers - Ai ai ai! Muchol racismo!

The Forties were a different time. Super-square honkies got to walk around like they owned the place, ignoring the existence of people who looked or thought or philosophised differently than they did. It's the world that some people miss dearly. It was a time when you could use racial stereotypes as advertising and no one would notice. Simple times. Behold! Utica "Bodygard" sleepers with jolly jumping bean designs in "gay mexicolors", from 1949. Please try to remember in the future that, pink, blue, yellow, peach, and green
apparently qualify as "mexicolors".

 I guess the whole "jumping bean" thing is because kids in footy pajamas are adorable or whatever and their parents call them jumping beans. Or something?

 The jolly jumping bean family comes from "down Mexico way". How did this phrase get started? You never hear people say "I'm just in for the holidays. I came from up Boston way." They only say this about Mexico. The only place I know the line from is the Sinatra song "South of the Border". Turns out this song is from a 1941 film called, oddly enough, "Down Mexico Way".

I became aware of the song in the Simpsons episode Kamp Krusty, in which Krusty the Klown takes the campers to "the happiest place on Earth - Tijuana!" after things go to the dogs at his officially licensed summer camp. Then a Sinatra sound-alike begins crooning  Down Mexico Way over the closing credits. I like the song. Very catchy, but listeners should be warned it has a few kinda stereotypey things at the end ("ai ai ai", etc.)

So, are we to believe that, down Mexico way, the kids there wear PJs with fun little pictures of white people on them, walking around with briefcases, seething with marital strife over meatloaf dinners and getting divorced and dying of congestive heart failure at the age of 45? Would that be any less insulting than a family of Mexicans portrayed as living beans?

I think the only real outrage about these pajamas is that they taught children of the Fifties that elephants are indigenous to Mexico (see image below). What kind of madhouse nightmare world are they trying to create? Just to avoid embarrassing myself, I checked to see if there is some weirdo species of Mexican elephant that I hadn't heard about, and nope, there isn't. But, I did find a great line of informative text on the Wikipedia page, though. get ready for education, people!

"The word "elephant" has its origins in the Greek ἐλέφας, meaning "ivory" or "elephant"

There is another other outrage, I now realize I can type "wikipedia" twice as fast as I can type "Mexico"

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