The Wonderful World of Suarez

Maybe I just needed an animation injection, but lately I've been watching Disney movies: Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hercules. I wanted to surrender to the stories...to become a child again. But as I watched, I began thinking back to other Disney films...other characters and themes. And one thing struck me: they're all a bunch of orphans!

So, I spent the next hour or so researching various characters and guess what? There's an extensive list of "heroes" who grew up completely orphaned, adopted or with a single parent.

I mean, how many motherless princesses do you need? Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas. At first I thought Disney had a Freudian obsession with father-daughter relationships. But then, it seems to work on the other end too: Dumbo was a fatherless boy, close to his mom (in fact, he was conceived immaculately, being delivered by a stork).

Then there's the list of orphans where there were no parents to begin with, or the mother died: Aladdin, Quasimodo, Bambi. And the adopted characters or step-children? Try Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Hercules and Tarzan. Even the 101 Dalmations, though they had their birth parents with them, spent the whole movie trying to find someone good to adopt and care for them.

This had to be more than mere coincidence. A little googling led me to something interesting. A rumor that Walt Disney himself was adopted! His real mother was a washerwoman from Spain named Consuela Suarez. As an unwed, Catholic mother, she gave up her son to the Disneys who took Walt to America.

Snopes.com claims the rumor is false, but then goes on to say that no birth certificate for Walt has ever been found. Which means they really have no proof either way. Who knows? Maybe Walt Disney really was adopted, but never knew his real mother. So he spent his life devoted to beautiful stories of his fellow orphans. He created a world where mother figures were substituted with fairy godmothers, tea pots, willow trees, nurses, nannies and other careworn matrons...kind of like a washerwoman.

Maybe, just maybe, Walt was Hispanic and we would all be going to Suarezland today. But then, I guess you'd still be able to order churros in Spanish at the snack carts.