A Toy Story, Too

For sale: Ghetto Kids.

One is a brunet darling with chocolate eyes who has nothing in this world except her garbage can. Petra Guadalupe Antonia Perez, a.k.a. East L.A. Lupe, was abandoned by her adolescent mother after her father, a gangster, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

In the streets of Hollywood, Stephanie Flintclaire, a.k.a. Starlet Stephanie, is fending for herself because her mother is busy with her acting career and her father, a well-known movie producer, has lost everything to drugs. Tammy Jo Norman, nicknamed Confederate Tammy, is a homeless girl from Nashville who was sold to a lawyer by her mother, a waitress who became pregnant after a drunken one-night stand with a truck driver.

The green-eyed redhead and brown-eyed blond also come with their own garbage cans--a symbol of the gritty upbringing of all the Ghetto Kids, a new line of dolls suffering from tragic, urban problems.

Dolls these days do almost anything: jump on trampolines, eat and then soil diapers, even tell secrets. But Ghetto Kids (available only on the Internet since October at www.ghettokidshood.com) are, according to their creator, designed to provoke conversation between parents and their children in the hopes of preventing inner-city tragedies.

But the dolls so far seem to have provoked mainly controversy. The Ghetto Kids moniker and the dolls’ troubled biographies have been the subject of criticism on ABC’s morning program “The View” and its late-night “Politically Incorrect.”

Chicago entrepreneur Tommy Perez says he selected the hot-button name because “it’s an attention-getter.” Indeed, the parental bios received so much negative feedback from Chicago-area shoppers that Perez has stopped including them.

“The word ‘ghetto’ basically means a place away from the center of town, a place where you kept Jews in the Middle Ages,” says Perez, 55, who is of Mexican and Native American descent. “When I first put together the doll, I wasn’t referring to the poor people in the U.S. I was referring to all types of ghettos, ghettos in Europe and ghettos in your mind,” he says. “The doll is there to open the doors on all these subjects before society closes the doors on children who live like this.” If that sounds like a tough bill for a doll to fill, consider the rest of the line: Carmen Lydia Julia Gonzalez, known as San Juan Carmen, was abandoned in a crack house by her drug-dealing father and heroin-addicted prostitute mother; Mary Margaret O’Shannon, called Windy City Mary, whose mother is an Irish immigrant who had an affair with a married politician, was left with a friend of her mother’s; biracial Cynthia Kennedy, called Beantown Cynthia, was also abandoned by her rich white Bostonian mother; and the only boy, Sammy Travanti, a.k.a. New York Sammy, whose parents are Italian, is coping with smoking, teen pregnancy and the use of Ecstasy on the streets.

With about 700 dolls sold at $39.99 each, Windy City Mary, the Chicago native, and New York Sammy stand as the most popular. Latinos, says Perez, have been buying San Juan Carmen and East L.A. Lupe. Beantown Cynthia is selling the least. But none of the dolls is a hot seller. Perez recently placed some for sale on the online auction site Ebay. After a 10-day auction, 18 dolls sold for about $500, according to Ghetto Kids spokesman Fred Nawrot Jr.

Even as sales have stalled since the holidays, Perez is designing new dolls. His ghetto, so far, has excluded African Americans but not for long, he says. Hoping to invigorate his first toy line, Perez will take his Ghetto Kids to the American International Toy Fair in New York City next month to seek feedback from industry veterans. There, he intends to introduce the line’s first black doll, which he declines to discuss until then.

“The truth is that there are people who are living those lives,” said Terri Bartlett, vice president of communications for the Toy Industry Assn. “I’m not defending [Perez’s dolls] one way or the other. But if a doll can bring comfort because a child can identify with that story, who is to say that it’s bad? If someone doesn’t like the doll, they shouldn’t buy it, but that doesn’t mean the product shouldn’t be on the shelf. There are cartoons about ghetto pets that live on the street. There’s been diversity in toys forever. It could give people some understanding of certain hardships some people are living. That’s a great way of using toys.”

Indeed, Ghetto Kids are not the first set of diverse toys on the market nor are they the first dolls to come with personal histories. In the ‘90s, Cabbage Patch Dolls came with their adoption papers, but no doll has included such explicit urban tales of woe.

“Most of the people who were purchasing the dolls were letting us know that children were opening these letters, and the parents are not ready to talk to children at these levels about these problems,” Nawrot says. “The letters were written for parents to be a conversation piece with their kids, but for a 6-year-old to read that her doll’s father was killed in a drive-by is harsh, so we got rid of that.”

Parents who wish to tackle these tough issues may still do so on the comic strip that accompanies the dolls on the Web site. Next on the chopping block might be the garbage cans, another point of heavy contention, Perez says. He’s considering replacing them with suitcases or shopping carts.

“The garbage cans are supposed to say, ‘Look, where I’m living. Look at me. Understand me. Learn from me and learn from my situations,’” Perez says. “If you don’t talk about these things, you take the ostrich position. And when you take your head out of the ground, you see little Johnny wrapped around a tree because he was doing 80 mph, after drinking, and the two girls who were passengers are wrapped around the tree with him. Well, it’s too late then.”

For Deborah Constance, executive director of a South-Central community center that mentors children through the arts, the garbage cans represent the stereotypes she fights through her work every day. Constance is a doll-maker who handcrafts figures of all ethnicities to give to the center’s donors.

“These children who live below the poverty level right here do not live like that,” said Constance, who founded A Place Called Home in 1993. “When you see them in dance or music class here, they’re little stars. They’re angels. You wouldn’t know where they’re from. Their parents are doing their best. Of course, there are some crack addicts out here, but they’re in Beverly Hills too. You don’t ever associate children with garbage cans. What are you telling them then?”

The message, say those who defend the Ghetto Kids, is one of unadulterated reality.

“Protecting our children from the negative aspects of society is tantamount to creating a ‘ghetto,’ a wall of ignorance from which children may emerge without the skills to negotiate the troubled waters of the real world,” said Chicago clinical psychologist and former kindergarten teacher Marlene Eisen, who has been an informal consultant on the line. The dolls, manufactured in Mexico, were created with the help of Chicago public schoolteachers and police officers.

But how real can the Ghetto Kids be when they don’t even look ghetto? asks 9-year-old Julius Davis, a fourth-grader at Wadsworth Elementary School. The dolls, in fact, have identical facial features and vary only slightly in eye color, complexion and hair styles. Julius and his buddies, all African Americans, are quick to notice they are not represented in the toy line.

“They should have their pants hanging down, and they should have their hair in little pony tails like ghetto people. And they should be screaming at each other!” Julius says as he’s reading the East L.A. Lupe comic strip online. “The ghetto is the projects. That don’t look like projects to me.”

But this is a good thing, says Helen Hernandez, president and founder of the Imagen Foundation, which honors groups that portray Latinos in a positive light in film, television and advertising.

“They don’t have teased hair and makeup,” Hernandez says. “They’re not wearing their jeans pulled down to their hips. They look like normal kids. While maybe some of the description is not the way I would do it, ultimately the message is for the kids to study hard and value themselves. But the message does get jumbled. It can affect the way children see themselves and perpetuate the stereotype that people have of our communities.”

Wadsworth Elementary fifth-grader Rebecca Rosa, 10, was drawn to East L.A. Lupe because the doll’s parents are from Mexico, where she was born. Rebecca approves of Lupe’s appearance, noting that “she does not look like she lives on the streets. But I don’t know why they’re called Ghetto. Maybe they’re nice people, not bad people. She doesn’t look mean or nothing. But they should change the name because parents are not going to think it’s a good thing for little girls to play with dolls called Ghetto.”

Hernandez also questions whether parents will use the dolls the way Perez intended.

“These are issues that all kids deal with,” she says. “That’s the reality. Whether the dolls help parents deal with these issues is the $64,000 question. ... Besides, who are they marketing to? This is a niche market. They’re targeting the poor and the working poor. Those are the people who do not have computers and who cannot afford to buy these dolls.”

Perez, a father of two who owns one of the largest vending machine businesses in Chicago, says he is a product of the Chicago ghetto and views Ghetto Kids as a way to help address common societal ills.

“To everybody who talks up against us, I would like to ask: What have you done for your fellow man lately?” Perez says. “My last name is Perez, not Rockefeller. I don’t have a ton of money. Yes, it’s a doll. Yes, it’s a toy, but it has a social connotation to it.”

With a few run-ins with the law behind him, Perez says he now wants to contribute to the education of children around the nation. He was sentenced in 1997 to three years’ probation, including 10 months in a work release program, for failing to report $330,000 of income on his 1991 and 1992 federal tax returns. As a boy, he lived with his father in a hotel surrounded by prostitution and alcohol.

“I know what living in the ghetto means,” he says. “I am not offended by the word. We have made some changes to the dolls already, and if I have to change the name, I will. ‘Ghetto’ got people to open up their eyes. Now, will they continue to shut them, or will they carry this forward? If people don’t buy the doll, the doll will disappear, but we’ve made a statement. As we make this statement in life, we know nobody else has tried.”