To understand why anyone would want a Vote for Pedro shirt in the hellscape year of , I looked to Amazon, which still boasts plenty of sellers hawking the tee. Most reviews pointed out the most obvious reason to buy one of the shirts: As one reviewer wrote, "Cheap quality, not worth what I spent but it served it's purpose as Halloween costume [sic].
This person wrote, "My husband ordered this for me because of the election. He thought it would be funny for me to wear. Looking back, it's possible to see the world of Napoleon Dynamite as a cross-section of what we would, come , think of as Trump America—the white, low-to-middle income Middle American who saw Trump as a symbol of hope as they struggled with joblessness, feared socialism, and felt let down by entrenched politicians.
The wealth, poverty, and race dynamics of the film, as Simmons put it, show "an element of hopelessness and lack of opportunity in the background" that was clear to her even as a teen. By way of an example, she brings up Jon Gries' character Uncle Rico, a former football star who is living out of his van and constantly hustling to make some cash. The makeup of his base has obviously shifted quite a bit in the years of Trump's presidency to include more unhinged racists, white supremacists, capitalistic millionaire bloodsuckers, and domestic terrorists.
At its heart, Napoleon Dynamite is a sweet underdog story set in a depressed small town where there's a clear lack of resources for the film's protagonists and their families. Life is desolate and painfully boring. Napoleon lives under the care of his mostly absent grandmother and chatroom-obsessed brother Kip, who is clearly seeking an escape from the dreariness of their lives.
Pedro, the rare immigrant in the area, faces flippantly racist insults from his opponent Summer during campaign speeches. See, with me it will be summer all year long. Vote for Summer. Fuck you, Summer Wheatley. Also, they're called chimichangas. But also, still holding out hope this happens someday. For Duffy-Smith, who bought the shirt back in , the Vote for Pedro shirt has become a way to brace herself through the brutal real-life elections we've gone through in recent years. It just represents a lot to me a lot about inclusion, and quirkiness, and acceptance, and humor.
The Vote for Pedro shirt is an emblem of those values, values Duffy-Smith believes will "never go out of style. Duffy-Smith is, unfortunately, unable to wear her Vote for Pedro t-shirt during this election cycle; she's currently spending time in the desert, and it's at her home in the San Luis Obispo area. Still, she assures me she'd be rocking the tee if she had it with her to "highlight the absurdity of the intense divide that we have at the moment," and has no intention of ever getting rid of the shirt.
And even though the film has largely vanished from the pop culture discourse, it's easy to see why some people are still holding on to these shirts.
The nostalgia they evoke and celebration of uniqueness they represent is something we all desperately need as we wade through a stomach-churning election that's got the entire country on a razor's edge, crossfaded on rage and crippling anxiety.
November 3 could spell disaster for people like Pedro and Napoleon while the Summer Wheatleys of the world maintain their racist, rights-stripping chokehold on the U.
But 62 million people and counting! That's something to hold onto, even if you threw out that Vote for Pedro shirt years ago. Sign In Create Account. Just in time for the election, we tracked down owners of the 'Napoleon Dynamite' relic and asked them: Why?
And then it got deep. October 30, , am. Alex Zaragoza. Tagged: napoleon dynamite vote for pedro election. With Pedro seemingly on the verge of losing, his loyal friend Napoleon wearing a Vote for Pedro shirt jumps onto the stage and does an elaborate dance routine, which earns a standing ovation and results in Pedro winning the vote.
The phrase Vote for Pedro , and the dance that accompanied it, became a cultural touchstone that has earned many tributes and spoofs.
Not too surprisingly, Google Trends shows that the use of the phrase Vote for Pedro tends to become more popular around US Presidential election cycles, perhaps due to increasing dissatisfaction with the two major political parties. Memes began depicting Pedro and his campaign slogan, Vote for Pedro , in opposition to Trump. For the most part, Vote for Pedro is used as a humorous or nostalgic allusion to Napoleon Dynamite.
The phrase Vote for Pedro is sometimes used in political protest as a way to express dissatisfaction with the candidates or the two-party system. Vote for Pedro! This is not meant to be a formal definition of Vote for Pedro like most terms we define on Dictionary.
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