Education: Puppet Pedagogy

The Audience: Mexicans of all ages, gathered around a miniature theater set up in a public square, a factory, or a harvest field.

The-Scene: a human mouth.

The Play: three fantastically ugly puppets, representing bacteria, loosen a lower tooth, look for a ladder to knock out an upper. Enter the Dentist. Enter also a lady puppet in a tubelike dress, a gentleman with hog-bristled pate. Senorita La Pasta (toothpaste) and Senor El Cepillo (toothbrush) kill the dental gremlins. In a quick change of scene the magnified mouth vanishes, its possessor reappears. An apple-cheeked urchin named Comino, he promises to brush his teeth forever after. As the curtain drops, his audience presumably vows to do just as Comino does.

Comino, Mexico’s most popular puppet, is also one of the Mexican Ministry of Education’s most effective mass-educators. He has a free-&-easy way with his audiences, dangling his legs over the platform, challenging kids (“Hey, you with the glasses!”) to come up and recite. When the Government first tried to give toothbrushes away free, nobody would take them. But when Comino put on his show and squeaked that “No boy or girl who won’t brush his teeth is a friend of mine,” both children and adults lined up. The original Comino was created in 1933. Today several hundred Cominos are off to battle against Mexican illiteracy.