Literary Analysis
Since the character's debut, The Jaguar has been interpreted and discussed in other forms. One notable example appears in Laura E. Pérez' Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, in which the comic book was compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus:
| “ | Laura Molina's Jaguar Woman is also partly modeled on the hypersexualized superhero(ine) comic book and animation traditions. In regular life, she is a "scholar of the law" who slips into her animal double persona in order to obtain papers important in her fight against the contemporary California backlash against civil rights and people of color. Racist police and neo-Nazi skinheads are the villains in this comic-book world. The Jaguar's Nahuatl name, "Cihualyaomiquiz." the reader is told, means, "woman ready to die in battle." Linda Rivera prepares to transform into her animal spirit guide, The Jaguar though ritual and prayer.
Molina's "Cihualyaomiquiz: the Jaguar" is perhaps closer in its aesthetics and politics to the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, given the seriousness of the social issues that the format of fantasy allow them both to broach. The repugnant reality of the contemporary California is another commonality between Molina's art and Spiegelman's "Maus" books chronicling his Jewish parents' experience of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and his upbringing in the United States in his parents home in the aftermath of those experiences. |
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