Mafalda, the eternal 6-year-old girl, whose double-edged naivety dismantled all injustice and established social norms, has fulfilled on her 60th birthday the dream that she once expressed in one of her cartoons: “to learn languages to be a UN interpreter.” and “contribute to people understanding each other.”
Hand in hand with the Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, her hometown, a statuette of Mafalda, sculpted by the artist Pablo Irrang, arrived this Monday at the UN headquarters and was introduced into the very room of the interpreters of the very room where the Economic and Social Council meets.
“It is no coincidence that I wanted to be an interpreter at the UN, because the values that Mafalda promulgated were always the values of peace over war, justice, education and above all freedom.“, the Minister of Culture of Buenos Aires, Gabriela Ricardes, told UN News.
Question injustice and inequality
As soon as she arrived at the entrance to the headquarters, Mafalda made her first perch on the iconic sculpture of “Nonviolence”, the gun with the knotted barrel by the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, where she was immediately recognized by a group of young people. Japanese women visiting the Organization.
“Mafalda is a girl with a unique, insightful, critical and interested in world problems.. A girl from San Telmo, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, but concerned about world peace and what was happening to the planet,” adds Ricardes.
Mafalda, created by the Argentine comedian Quino, represents an ingenious and insightful social and political critique through the eyes of a curious and idealistic girl. With her keen intelligence, Mafalda questions injustice, inequality, and hypocrisy in the world, while expressing concerns about peace, human rights, and the future of humanity.
It is, without a doubt, a symbol of social conscience and the desire to transform the world, mixing humor with deep reflections.
Popular throughout Latin America and Spain, Mafalda crossed the borders of the Spanish language and became popular in places as far away as China and Japan.
One of its characteristics is the use of naivety as a powerful dialectical weapon. Her character as a child allowed her to ask seemingly simple questions but loaded with depth and criticism, disarming the adults around her and exposing their contradictions or lack of answers to complex problems.
Guillermo Lavado, Quino’s nephew, points out that “It was a dream of hers to contribute to world peace.perhaps a little innocently thinking that being a translator for the UN I could sort out the ideas of the different leaders a little and harmonize them so that there would be fewer conflicts and fewer wars.”
Both Ricardes, Lavado and the sculptor Pablo Irrang, who also accompanied Mafalda throughout her journey through the halls of the UN, highlighted that Mafalda is still current and has not lost validity despite the fact that the first comic strip has been 60 years old. in which it appeared.
“Mafalda embodies a lot of values that at this moment in this world are super necessary: the values of peace, feminism, equity, equality, ecology, caring for the world. They are values so transcendent and important that, at this moment, they are more important than ever.”Irrang said for example.
“Unfortunately, it is still valid because the conflicts have changed a little geographically, although let’s say that the Middle East has remained the same for so many years and since (Mafalda) was born, but we always have the same interests that produce the same wars,” Lavado commented. .
The Argentine character Mafalda visits the United Nations.
Put yourself in someone else’s place
For this reason, for Lavado, the message that Mafalda would have today would remain the same: “hopefully we can agree as humanity to collaborate and not compete and be more with the other against the other.”
“For Mafalda, education, justice and freedom were unwavering values, as was the exercise of common sense in a foolish world,” says Ricardes when highlighting that this would be her message today.
After walking through the UN lobby, the Mafalda statuette later arrived at the room where the Economic and Social Council meets, where it was received by the group of interpreters in Spanish, among them, an Argentine colleague, who expressed how her dream, hers and Mafalda’s, was fulfilled and “left a light of hope.”
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