nstruction of Chel, and her alliance with Tulio and Miguel against her own people, the story might raise questions about what passes for a “human side,” past or present.
Perez has also observed that the filmmakers did a “wonderful job in being sensitive to the portrayal of Chel and other characters as Latinos.” This is perhaps the greatest instance in the film of “turning myth into truth,” and one that supposes that Latin American culture arose spontaneously from Native American culture, without the unwelcome intervention of colonial Spaniards. Though Perez and Olmos both bring tremendous life and subtlety to their vocal performances, the decision to characterize members of a pre-Hispanic Central American culture as Latinos is a strange one, considering that the Native American culture portrayed in the film did not become “Latin” until it was wholly conquered by the Spanish.
One wonders why the makers of The Road to El Dorado chose to resurrect the 500-year-old myth of a city of gold for audiences in a “New World” long since conquered and colonized. Perhaps The Road to El Dorado attempts to redeem the ruthless conquest of the Americas by Europeans by creating characters who befriend the native people, instead of enslaving and exploiting them. But the two Spaniards (played by Anglos Branagh and Kline) still occupy a position of superiority in that only they can liberate El Dorado from its oppressively “primitive” religion, and only they can (at least temporarily) stave off the city’s destruction. Behind the facade of goofy humor and simple sentimentality is an attempt to turn the myth of Miguel and Tulio’s “adventure” into an alternate, bloodless history in which insecure whites renounce their lust for gold and charitably show the natives a more humane, “Enlightened” perspective, pausing to pick up one of the native women along the way.