By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Christopher Columbus is the most famous explorer in Western history.

If you ask an adult to play a word association game and give them the world explorer, they will often come back with Columbus. Ask that same question of a teenager, child or those children’s parents, and the answer won’t be Columbus, but Dora!

By the way, get used to the having an exclamation point paired with Dora’s! name. This is because I never hear the name Dora! in any other way. My daughter and every other child I’m around never ask for Dora; no, it is always DORA!!!!!!

Six in the morning, it is Dora!. Nine at night, it is Dora!. It is Dora!, Dora!, Dora! all day long. Now back to ol’ Chris Columbus. While Italian by birth, as you know, Chris worked for the Spanish crown during his search for a shortcut to India and ended up bumping into America while he was at it. Those who followed him in the great period of exploration were mostly Spanish.

Sure there was Cabot, some Portuguese trailblazers and a few Dutchmen poking around the Americas, but the real boots on the ground, musket fire at the natives, “where ‘da gold at” stuff was a Spanish deal from the word vamonos. Columbus opened the way and the others, the Spaniards, perfected the Conquistador thing. Which leads me back to Dora!.

Do we think it is by mere happenstance that a cartoon featuring a young girl obviously of Conquistador descent is called Dora! the Explorer? Does it surprise you that the feminine of “conquistador” is “conquistadora”? While my daughter watches the show for the animal characters and problem solving skills, I see the historical projection of the continued power of the Spanish Empire in the New World. When Dora! heads out on each of her “explorations,” she isn’t breaking new ground, but instead, trodding in the pointy shoed footsteps of de Soto, Ponce de Leon, Balboa, Pizarro, Cortes and Coronado.

The show creators are covert enough not to have Dora! actually searching for Mayan gold so they hide the treasure campaigns behind seemingly innocent quests like finding a baby animal’s mother or getting to a treehouse for a party. It is almost transparent that the search for the parents of baby animals is a metaphor for finding the ruler of a particular native civilization so he could be held for a ransom of gold and emeralds and that trip to the tree house is really a masquerade for the hunt for the city of gold, El Dorado.

If I’m not up to something here, then what is with Dora’s! fascination with her map? In the Dora! the Explorer cartoon, the map holds a role as a central character. I would risk saying the map is one of the top three most important figures on the show. Well the early history of exploration of the Americas was nothing more than one big treasure hunt with Conquistadors fighting over and then following maps that would lead them to untold riches.

In the following century and during the rise of privateering, maps continued to play a key role in the finding of treasure and that same map is also important in the treasure culture of Dora! Speaking of pirates, it is my belief that the antagonist Swiper the fox symbolizes the English in the new world. The character Swiper is always trying to take whatever Dora! has, just like English pirates boosted the treasures pouring out of Central and South America on their way back to Spain, so Dora! and Swiper’s antagonism isn’t new; it is just a pairing of an age-old feud that won’t go away.

I also see Boots the monkey as a symbol of the oppressed indigenous populations of colonial Spain. His sycophantic worship of Conquistador Dora! will break one day and he and the other rainforest critters will revolt. I hope I’m watching that episode.

So if Dora! is an explorer in the shadow of the Conquistadors of old, where is her treasure? I believe that plunder is in the coffers of the creators of the show; “Dora! the Explorer” did $1 billion in sales just last year.

If you think the loot salvagers find in the hulls of sunken Spanish galleons is breathtaking, just think about opening a one billion dollar treasure chest. I bet queen Isabella is looking down or up and wishing she had had an explorer of Dora’s! merit in her time. So move over Hernando and Ponce, there is a new feathered cap on the block, and she is going to out earn you in no time.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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