Kring: “We care about diversity. Here, have more white, male people!”

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Concerning Maya’s storyline

It looks like it’s this International Blog Against Racism Week again, which means I’m increasingly often coming across posts that address Maya’s storyline. It’s sad that the people who claim to be concerned with a fair portrayal of coloured characters are describing the storyline in just as limited perspective as the people who would like all non-white, non-Petrelli characters to get off the show.

Example: The idea of “the problematic Maya and Alejandro storyline, how she’s crossing the border with her creepy mind-melting black goo disease, killing the (white) locals”.

This is a fairly common interpretation of this storyline. Maya’s power is primarly considered a threat to the white US-Americans. But why? Because that’s what the cliché says, the stereotype of the illegal immigrant who brings dangerous diseases into the USA. But is it also what the storyline says? Is Maya’s power really shown to be a danger first and foremost to white people, to white US-Americans?

Let’s look at the facts for that. Let’s compare numbers and so on. Maya accidently kills a couple of dozen people in her native Dominican Republic. She kills a couple of smugglers and refugees in Honduras, and there are many instances where she almost kills people, but Alejandro stops the effect: In the church in Venezuela, Nidia in Guatemala, the policemen and Derek and later Sylar in Mexico.

Derek is the first white man to enter into Maya’s storyline. He is a US-American, and he is affected by Maya’s ability, but doen’t die of it thanks to Al. Not only isn’t he killed by Maya, he is even freed from prison by her. Maya and Alejandro don’t kill him, they help him.

Who kills Derek? Sylar does. Fellow white, US-American Sylar.

Like Derek, Sylar receives help from Maya and Alejandro (and Derek), in an episode appropriately titled The Kindness of Strangers. In the same episode, Derek discovers that Maya and Alejandro are sought for murder, and he does what any white US-American stranded in Mexico would probably do: he shares his findings in confidence with the only other white US-American around. He buys into the idea of the foreign Middle Americans being dangerous, the fellow US citizen being an ally.

And this proves to be a fatal mistake.

When Maya, Alejandro and Sylar cross the border, Sylar convinces Maya to kill the border patrol. This is the first and only time she kills white people, and it is largely because of Sylar’s presence and influence. Alejandro wanted to find someone to smuggle them over the border (sans Sylar), which would probably allowed them to pass over into the USA without anybody dying. But Sylar convinced them to… just drive over the border in broad daylight, which was bound to cause trouble.

The border patrol consists of five men. I cannot really get a good look at all of them in order to guess their ethnicity, but let’s just assume they are all five white.

This means that Maya has killed five white US-Americans (only due to the influence of another white guy), and several dozens (if not hundreds) of Latinos from various countries.

This is what’s wrong wih the above description of Maya’s storyline: By describing Maya’s power as primarly a threat to white people, to citizens of the USA, you imply that the lives of five white Americans count more than those of dozens or hundreds of Latinos.

It doesn’t matter whether this implication is accidental. If it’s there, it’s there. In any case, Maya’s storyline ought to finally be considered as a whole, not just the bits and parts of it that would be outrageously racist if they were all there was to the storyline.

But yes, even though the storyline is definitely more than this cliché people love to cite, it certainly contains this cliché. The show’s original plan for the second part of the second season, the scrapped virus storyline, contained a subversion of the cliché, so it’s fair to assume the writers were aware of it.

Maya was meant to be the one who saves humanity from the Shanti Virus. This is foreshadowed in the online graphic novel Maya y Alejandro, which was released just before the start of the second season. Even if it looked like Maya was a danger to everybody who crossed her path (not just white people, just like the virus was a threat to the entire world and not just white people), it would have been revealed that she was actually the opposite, she was their salvation.

I also take issue with the complaint that the route that Maya and Alejandro travel towards the USA shows that “the creators think that all Middle American countries are the same”. This complaint would be valid if the show hadn’t supplied an explanation for why Maya and Al find themselves in Honduras, of all places, when their original starting point was the Dom. Rep. But it did:

After she accidently killed her brother’s wedding guests, Maya left the country for Venezuela. She started out in Santo Domingo, which is located on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic, so if you cross the ocean, you’d end up in Venezuela.

Now, I have no idea whether this would be the common escape route for Dominicans on the run from the police. From an outsider’s perspective, just going by what the map shows, it looks like an obvious option. Correct me if it isn’t. I’d like to learn something, too.

It is from Venezuela that Maya and Alejandro travel US-wards. Well, probably. It’s not really said where they learn of Chandra Suresh, where they find the (Spanish language) copy of Activating Evolution. There is no reason to assume that they don’t find it in Venezuela somewhere, though. They would be looking for an explanation for what’s happening to Maya before taking any action, before taking any risks. I don’t know if Venezuelans would try to enter the USA via boat, or whether they would take the route over land.

From a storytelling point of view, the reason why Maya and Al cannot just take a ship to the USA (be it from the Dominican Republic or from Venezuela) is obvious: The way they proceed through country after country, you can measure their progress, and antitipate when they are going to reach Mohinder and cause further complications for his already complicated situation. It’s also more dynamic to show them move around, rather than show them sit in a hiding place on board a ship.

This makes sense. It does not make sense at first glance, just from looking at the first episode alone, but why can’t people be a little more patient with this storyline?

I get it that this is a sensitive topic for many Latin Americans and those sympathizing with them, but that is just one more reason that I would prefer a more open, a more balanced discussion of this storyline. Of the whole storyline, in its entirety, taking all its aspects, the contexts etc. into account. By reducing it to the racial cliché that it does contain (with the original intention to subvert it!), you are not working against racism, you are promoting it.