He is portrayed as "The Fastest Mouse in all Mexico" with his major traits being the ability to run extremely fast, being quick-witted and heroic, and speaking with an exaggerated Mexican accent.

The cartoon features Sylvester the Cat guarding a cheese factory at the international border between the United States and Mexico from starving Mexican mice.

Sylvester (often called "El Gringo Pussygato" by Speedy) is constantly outsmarted and outrun by the mouse, causing the cat to suffer all manner of pain and humiliation from mousetraps to accidentally consuming large amounts of Tabasco hot sauce.

Slowpoke regularly gets into all sorts of trouble that often require Speedy to save him—but one cat in Mexicali Shmoes says that as if to compensate for his slowness, "he pack a gun!

In an interview with Fox News on March 28, 2002, Cartoon Network spokeswoman Laurie Goldberg commented, "It hasn't been on the air for years because of its ethnic stereotypes.

"[6] However, the Hispanic-American rights organization League of United Latin American Citizens called Speedy a cultural icon, and thousands of users registered their support of the character on the hispaniconline.com message boards.

Fan campaigns to put Speedy back on the air resulted in the return of the animated shorts to Cartoon Network in 2002.

Many Hispanic people remembered him fondly as a quick-witted, heroic Mexican character who always got the best of his opponents, at a time when such positive depictions of Latin Americans were rare in popular entertainment.

[9] In a March 2021 essay, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote, “I love Speedy so much, I keep a large painting of him in my home office.

[11] He had one appearance in the Tiny Toon Adventures episode segment "The Acme Acres Summer Olympics", as the coach, and serving as the mentor of Lightning Rodriguez.

[11] He made a cameo appearance alongside Porky Pig in the 2003 film Looney Tunes: Back in Action,[11] making fun of his politically incorrect status.

The episode "Sunday Night Slice" showed that Bugs bought his favorite restaurant, Girardi's, to prevent it from being closed and hired Speedy to help him.

[12] Speedy Gonzales appeared occasionally in New Looney Tunes, often as the leader of a gang of mice that also includes Hubie and Bertie, Sniffles, and "Minnesota Rats" (originally Minniesoda Fats; an aborted 1970s character revived and fleshed out in this series).

In 1965, the movie Wild on the Beach included the song "Little Speedy Gonzales" which was written by Stan Ross and Bobby Beverly and performed by The Astronauts.

[14] In 1995, he appeared in a video game, Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos, for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

[17] In April 2024, during an interview, Eugenio Derbez said that he doubts that the movie will happen saying “I feel that the studios are afraid that, nowadays, it's so politically incorrect.