Doozers From Henson's Fraggle Rock Modeled After Mexican Construction Workers
By TIMOTHY BOTTOMSFIELD
Published: August 19, 2012
Jim Henson, the late creator of The Muppets – those colorful puppets that populated Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock – was known as an early supporter of diversity. Indeed, his characters on Sesame Street were notably multi-colored in a decidedly Anglo world. As far back as 1969, the narratives of Sesame Street were at the vanguard of youth diversity education.
This is why a series of Henson’s personal notes concerning an obscure set of Muppets – called the “Doozers” – has created such a stir. The Doozers were tiny, rotund, green little men with large heads that populated the world of Fraggle Rock. They lived in silence among the much more loquacious fraggles – Fraggle Rock’s main protagonists – wearing construction hard hats and gear and built construction that served no known purpose.
Many speculated dating back to the 1980s that the Doozers were modeled after Mexican migrant workers at construction sites in Southern California, where Henson spent much of his later years. Henson scholar Theodore Clinger famously wrote in his 1994 Henson biography, “it seems clear that the Doozers sprung from Henson’s studies of Mexican’s at work on Southern California construction sites.” Clinger postulated that Henson admired Mexican laborers and instilled their same work ethic in the Doozers. “Separated by no common language, they toil in the Fraggles’ midst yet at the same time occupy a different world,” he wrote.
It appears that Henson actually was inspired by Mexican workers. In Henson’s personal notes submitted by Henson’s son-in-law for auction by celebrity auctioneer Julien Harold, Henson wrote that the Doozers “encapsulate all mysteriousness of the laboring Mexican peasants that surround us.” He also allegedly wrote, “They speak not a word to us, and their big round heads float atop their strutting, cartoonish, bulbous little bodies.”
Henson family friend Marshall Hammersmith said that he believes that Henson admired the migrant workers he saw in California. “Jim was a sensitive soul,” said Hammersmith. “I have no doubt that he admired migrant construction workers and tried to capture their essence in his Doozers.”
Latino activist and La Raza executive vice president Angela Descarta-Ruiz concludes that Henson's notes were “racist stereotypes" of migrant workers. “Latinos are not fat little anonymous men in hard fats with big heads,” said Ruiz. “We are famillies, we are husbands and wives, we are school children and we are dreamers.”
“They speak not a word to us, and their big round heads float atop their strutting, cartoonish, bulbous little bodies.”
The Henson family did not have any response to Ruiz's statements other than to say that Henson loved all people and valued diversity. He is known to have hired an Ecuadorean nanny for the younger of his two children.
