“Actually, I think she’s the classic Barbie but with Down syndrome. Her eyes are almond-shaped and tend to go up, slanted. What strikes me a lot is that she has a unique palmar crease, that they’ve gotten as far as that. These are very easy traits to identify with Down syndrome,” she says. Mariana de Ugarte. Barbie in this story does not look like Margot Robbie, but to the children of this mother from Ferrol. And she is so pretty, she is in one way or another.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie will go down in history as a phenomenon of radical resignification. The Mattel doll, a former symbol of female conformism, now appears as an image of irony and rebellion. And Gerwig’s film is only one part of that cultural reconstruction. A few months ago, Mattel released the first Barbie with Down syndrome, to challenge this idea of the doll as a normative fetish. To put a face to that launch, Mattel chose several ambassadors. And, along the way, Barbie crossed her path with that of Mariana de Ugarte.
De Ugarte always wanted to be a mother. Therefore, it was a dream come true to have Mariana, her six-year-old daughter. Jaime, her four-year-old son, was a dream come true. She, smart He charming. She feminine. He imaginative. She, autonomous. He moved. And both with Down syndrome. This last circumstance is what has moved Mattel to choose De Ugarte as an ambassador for Barbie.
The syndrome came by surprise with both children. “He has touched us twice randomlybut I always say that I have actually won the lottery twice,” says De Ugarte, thanking her for her luck. Because her children are healthy and that is what matters to her. “I am lucky in many ways, but above all for having two wonderful children.”
That of Mariana de Ugarte is therefore an authoritative voice to speak about a disorder that, according to Down Spain, affects 34,000 people and whose only risk factor is maternal age, from 35 years on. De Ugarte, however, was only 28 when she became pregnant with her eldest daughter and she was not part of this risk group. In fact, as she recalls, the first test, “the screening test,” only gave “one chance in 10,000 that the girl might have some chromosomal abnormality. I mean, almost minimal.”