Little Woman

Not far from the seat of presidential power in Buenos Aires sits an incredulous six-year-old girl who questions everything. “What democratic sector do cats fall into?” she asks her mother. “Papa, what does ‘Fortune favors the brave’ mean??” she wants to know. “Can you explain why humanity is a disaster?”

Skeptical, inquisitive, and inherently decent, young Mafalda is a tourist magnet, posing on her shaded bench with visitors from around the world who pour into her neighbourhood of San Telmo, many of them from the cruise ships that dock nearby. With her dark hair and trademark bow, she is an opinionated beacon, a mouthpiece for difficult but necessary questions: “Who got us into this mess, huh? If I get my hands on him I’ll give him what for!!” As Umberto Eco once put it, she is “a hero of our time.”

Mafalda, of course, is a comic-strip character, a Latin American answer to Charlie Brown or Blondie. Originally conceived as part of a home-appliances advertising campaign that never ran, she made her editorial debut in Primera plana magazine in September 1964. The following year she moved to El Mundo, and when that daily newspaper shut down, she began appearing in the weekly Siete días ilustrados. Her creator, popularly known as Quino, ended the strip in June 1973, on the eve of the Dirty War. “If I had continued drawing her, they would have shot me,” he later said of the military junta.

Long after her nine-year run, the perceptive girl who hates fascism, imperialism, and any kind of soup has continued entertaining readers in Argentina and beyond. Collected volumes of Mafalda’s adventures with her friends Felipe, Manolito, and Susanita have been translated into more than a dozen languages, from Armenian and Chinese to Hebrew and Romanian. She is featured in countless art installations, both sanctioned and guerrilla. Her face adorns mugs, key chains, water bottles, backpacks, and T‑shirts.

Yet, until recently, Mafalda’s astute interrogations of a grown‑up world headed in the wrong direction have been largely unavailable to English audiences. Thankfully, that changed this summer with a new book — the first of five — translated by Frank Wynne. “I think maybe I’m starting to understand why humanity has such a hard time moving forward!” she declares in a republished frame. I can only imagine what she would make of 2025.

How do you explain — to someone who is six or sixty — what’s happening in the United States? The president has sacked the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and has undermined the independence of the Federal Reserve. He has deployed armed National Guard troops to the streets of Washington, with Chicago and San Francisco possibly next. He has fired the Librarian of Congress and literally rewritten history at the Smithsonian. He has attacked the “stupidity” of renewable energy. He has glad-handed with an accused war criminal on American soil, has held university research dollars hostage, has detained and deported citizens, has given the green light for logging and mining in millions of hectares of national forest, has threatened water quality safeguards for the Great Lakes, and has gutted AIDS prevention efforts in defiance of Congress. Then there are those mercurial tariffs he’s imposed on the rest of us.

“I don’t have to do what anyone says, Mama!” Mafalda declares at one point, imagining what it’s like to be accountable to no one. “I’m the president!” Later, she openly characterizes Congress as “a really hilarious farce” and throws a tantrum when she’s backed into a corner while playing chess with Felipe. It’s the same attitude that’s now projected from the Oval Office: infantile, imperious, reckless.

Written in Spanish, Quino’s Mafalda was censored in dictatorial Bolivia and Chile as well as in Francisco Franco’s Spain (the comic was published there with a banner that indicated “for adults only”). Her critiques of doctrinaire decrees and authoritarian tendencies transcend geopolitical boundaries; they hit home even as the particular circumstances change. They are as perceptive and poignant now as they were generations ago. They clarify, as much as any cable-news panel or think piece I’ve seen, what we’re all watching unfold, seemingly at the mercy of a fitful egotist.

Mafalda may now be widely available in English, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we learn of local officials and paranoid parents calling for her to be banned from school libraries. “Unstable . . .,” the precocious hero hears on the radio. “Rapidly becoming turbulent . . .” Mafalda is listening to the weather forecast, but she knows such descriptions are equally applicable to strongmen and their legions.

From her bench in San Telmo, Mafalda has watched governments come and go. Her staying power, despite the odds, is a thing of hope.