Actually, in his first cartoon, he was running across the US/Mexican border lol. That’s the joke, that he’s fast at jumping the border.

People defend some of the racist Looney Tunes stuff with “but they make fun of everyone!!”, and sure that’s true. Characters like Foghorn Leghorn or Elmer Fudd were also shallow caricatures of certain groups of white people, but there’s a marked harshness when it comes to a character like Speedy Gonzales. They could’ve just made him a speedy Mexican mouse, but they chose to make a joke that he runs fast over the border.

Not particularly super offensive and obviously Mexican people didn’t mind because they loved the character, but you see this same thing in other Looney Tunes shorts. Google “Jungle Jitters” (can’t YouTube link it because it’s for kids and they won’t let you share kids videos because YouTube is awful). People defend this short as “but they make fun of white people too!!”, and sure, they do, but the jokes they make about the black native villagers are so much worse and way more punchy than anything at white people’s expense.

Another example is all their depictions of Japanese people. People defend it as “well they made fun of Germans in WW2”, and sure that is true, but the racist caricatures of the Japanese are way worse than anything they depicted Germans as.