ling suggestion that the inhabitants of El Dorado must be rescued from Tzekel-Kan’s tyranny by the two Spanish “adventurers” recalls those colonial apologists who argued that Europeans rescued the “savages” from their primitive, bloody religions and brought them a more “civilized” western humanity. While human sacrifice is repulsive and incomprehensible to us (and quite disturbingly represented in a couple of scenes), the treatment of Aztec belief systems here is too simplistic: they are condemned as a mechanism of control that is used, like Christianity, to enslave and terrify people, rather than provide them with a shared cultural tradition.
Still, we must keep in mind that this is a fun family film that promises, in one of Elton John’s piano-pop songs, to “turn legend into fact… myth into history.” That said, it often succeeds in doing just the opposite, or to scramble the terms so much that such distinctions collapse. Much of the story does appear to draw from and contort Cortes’ own dealings with Moctezuma. Tulio and Miguel, like the historical Cortes, are greeted as gods when they arrive in El Dorado. Instead of using this reception to deceive and murder their hosts, they parade around like fools, planning to take the gold offered them as tribute and sail back to Spain, fearing all the time that they will be discovered as imposters and killed. Tzekel-Kan and the Chief (Edward James Olmos) are much too hip to the Spaniards to believe in their divinity. And of course, everyone speaks the same language in this film, trading in the difficulty of one culture confronting another without the benefit of a common language for a contest founded in moral absolutes.
Tulio, the more pragmatic of the two, is greedy (imagining he is dying, his final regret is that “I never had enough gold”) and so serves as a foil to Miguel’s dreamy idealism. Being that Miguel and Tulio are ineffectual if comic losers, they come off as pilgrims in a strange land who are transformed by their adventure while their homosocial friendship survives the ultimate test, a woman.
The heroine in the film, if she can be called such, is a spunky rebel named Chel, voiced by Rosie Perez, who is described by producer Bonne Radford as “remarkable, because in many ways, she’s a contemporary woman.” Chel is actually a thief, like Miguel and Tulio, and when she comes on the scene, she is running from the law after stealing a golden artifact from the temple. Chel, eager to leave El Dorado, agrees to help the two Spaniards by coaching them on the local etiquette, that is, how to be convincing gods. She ends up seducing Tulio and coming between him and his buddy so that she and Tulio can sail off with the mountain of gold on their boat. Why, I wonder, is a woman who uses her sexual power to solicit power and wealth from a man “contemporary”? What the filmmakers may have conceived as a progressive female character ends up falling into the same traditional mold of a scantily-clad object of desire who uses her body to obtain what are deemed (within the culture) male possessions.
Perez herself comments on the character, saying, “What they [the filmmakers] did was deal with her human side first, before dealing with her outward appearance.” It is, though, Chel’s outward appearance that is constituted as her appeal, for both the protagonists and the audience. Her every advent on screen was followed by whistles and catcalls from the pre-pubescent audience, which drowned out most of the character’s verbal expressions of her “human side.” Although Chel is a strong character, she is the embodiment of exotic sexuality, and her instant alliance with the white intruders makes her less than admirable. Coincidentally, the historical Cortes also purportedly had a female native companion as an aide and interpreter in his conquest of the Aztecs. Her name was Malinsi, the Spanish baptized her “Marina,” Cortes called her “Mi Lengua” (my tongue), but the Aztecs called her something else, “la Malinche” the traitoress. While it is doubtful that this historical person had any bearing on the co