Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context

June Carolyn Erlick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134811953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This concise book provides an accessible overview of the history of the telenovela in Latin America within a pan-Latino context, including the way the genre crosses borders between Latin America and the United States. Telenovelas, a distinct variety of soap operas originating in Latin America, take up key issues of race, class, sexual identity and violence, interweaving stories with melodramatic romance and quests for identity. June Carolyn Erlick examines the social implications of telenovela themes in the context of the evolution of television as an integral part of the modernization of Latin American countries.

1
Discovering Telenovelas

The world’s eyes were on Nicaragua, the small Central American country that had toppled a dictator and set up a revolutionary government. U.S. president Ronald Reagan had deemed the small nation a threat to national security. As journalists in Nicaragua, we found that there were certain hours we just couldn’t get interviews—even if we were on deadline.

In 1986, while U.S. congressional representatives were debating whether to provide support to the anti-revolutionary forces known as Contras, Nicaraguans were debating whether María Elena would marry Jorge Luís and if Don Rafael Del Junco would regain his voice.

Telenovela hour, when El derecho de nacer (The Right to Life) came on, was sacred and shut the country down. It’s not that the bloody Contra war, which had been devastating Nicaragua for five years, wasn’t a reality for most Nicaraguans. Most of the telenovela buffs had lost some relative, had a son in the army or had simply watched their living standards decline as the war ate up almost half the government budget.

But in Nicaragua’s highly polarized society, it was only the telenovelas that seemed to cut through both class and political barriers.

El derecho de nacer, a 1981 Mexican remake of a 1952 Cuban telenovela, tells the story of an illegitimate boy rescued by the family’s black maid. The wealthy grandfather had sent an employee to kill the infant to save the family honor, but the man relents and Mama Dolores comes to the rescue. The boy, Albertico, grows up to be a successful doctor and, without knowing it, rescues his half-brother from alcoholism and falls in love with his cousin (who fortunately turns out to be adopted).

In Nicaragua at the time, more than half the population was born out of wedlock, so many could identify with the theme. But the suffering, the division in the Del Junco family, love, religion, ethics, class and even alcoholism were also issues with a direct appeal in revolutionary Nicaragua.

“It’s a mirror image of society,” Martín Vega of the North American Desk of the Foreign Ministry told me then. “Different people identify with different characters.”

I remember when former U.S. president Jimmy Carter received an honorary degree from the Jesuit University, the ceremony was delayed while Carter met with government officials. Commandante Dora Tellez, Nicaragua’s health minister, looked at her watch impatiently. “If this guy doesn’t get here soon,” she fretted, “I’m going to miss the telenovela.”

In Lenin Fonseca Hospital, surgery was not performed during the telenovela hour.

“We’re all young doctors, and we all identify with Albertico’s professionalism,” a 22-year-old internist told me.

For a sociology professor, the show’s real hero was the black maid who raises Albertico as her own child: “All the poor people, all the people for whom this revolution was made, identify with Mama Dolores. They’re out there saying, that’s me, that’s me.”

Horacio Ruíz Sr. of the opposition newspaper La Prensa saw the telenovela a different way. “The message is basically anti-Sandinista, anti-class struggle,” he explained to me. “The values that are extolled are bourgeoisie values, and Albertico gets ahead in a bourgeoisie world of pretty clothes and pretty landscapes.”

Not only did the program cut across class and political barriers, but it also evoked a curiously pan-Nicaraguan nostalgia for the pre-Sandinista past. The radionovela version was first heard in Nicaragua in the early 1950s. “Everyone was tuned to the radio, when there was no earthquake, when there was a downtown,” Ruíz from La Prensa reminisced. The city center was destroyed in a devastating 1972 earthquake, and even the most anti-Somoza Nicaraguans tended to long for that time before war and rubble.

The mother of Jaime Wheelock, one of the nine members of the powerful Sandinista directorate at the time, played María Elena in the Nicaraguan radio version. A Nicaraguan baseball pitcher was remembered by his nickname of María Dolores because his wife played that role in the radio version.

For war-torn Nicaragua, telenovelas were not only a national institution, but also a connection with other countries that export their telenovelas there—particularly Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.

The guest of honor at the 1986 anniversary celebration of the Sandinista revolution was the Brazilian actress who played the role of the “Slave Isaura” in a popular telenovela. “Here I am not a slave,” she told the cheering crowds.

I wrote about the Nicaraguan telenovela phenomenon for the Wall Street Journal. It was clear to me from my interviews that viewers found more than a mere distraction; in a revolutionary wartime society, the series was providing identity and unity—even if the interpretations of the telenovela were different. It was something the entire nation did for an hour each evening and then talked about incessantly the following day.¹

Ever since then, I’ve heard anecdote after anecdote of how telenovelas are the routine of public life, uniting citizens for fleeting moments in a collective activity of watching. Abby Cordova, a political science professor from El Salvador at the University of Kentucky, recalls how during the guerrillas’ final offensive in San Salvador in 1989 she huddled with her grandmother watching telenovelas in their hilltop home while helicopters buzzed overhead and bullets grazed the walls of their home. “My grandmother was not going to miss the telenovela,” she recalled, “and I was always there to watch it with her.”

Laura, a singer from Colombia living in Boston, recalls her childhood in Medellín, where she attended a very conservative Catholic private school. The school used to send home lists of specific telenovelas the girls should not watch because they treated subjects like sex out of wedlock or divorce. Laura was enterprising though, she recalls. She saved her allowance and when her parents were out, she bribed the maid to let her watch the telenovelas. She wanted to share the experience—to know what everyone else (including most of the girls at school, who managed to find their own ways to watch) was talking about.

In today’s Cuba, telenovelas are a different type of collective experience: knowing the endings before anyone else provides bragging rights about how up-to-date one is. Many Cubans watch national telenovelas and not so recent imported ones on state-owned national television. But those who have more money, whether it’s because they have relatives abroad or run small private businesses, subscribe to something called the paquete—the package. The package provides recorded television programs, mostly from Miami-based Spanish language television, and comes in the form of a memory stick with news, telenovelas and other shows. The more you pay, the quicker you get the package and can tell all your friends about the telenovela endings (Cubans apparently don’t mind spoilers).

“Knowing the end of a telenovela—whether it’s a Brazilian or Turkish one—is definitely a status symbol in Cuba nowadays.” Geydis Fundadora, a Cuban sociologist who works at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Havana, told me.

Telenovelas were even mentioned in Fidel Castro’s November 2016 obituary in the Miami Herald, the newspaper that serves the world’s epicenter of Cuban exiles. Journalist Glenn Garvin, in discussing Castro’s legendary long public speeches, recalled that the day in 2008 when Castro officially resigned the Cuban presidency, a biologist in Havana sighed with relief and told a Miami Herald reporter, “Now I can watch my Brazilian telenovelas without worrying that they’re going to be interrupted by a six-hour speech.”²

Not the Soaps

When I wrote my article for The Wall Street Journal about the furor caused by El derecho de nacer, the headline writer entitled the article, “TV: Soaps for Sandinistas.” It would be many, many years before I would discover that telenovelas really weren’t the same as soap operas.

It’s true that Colgate-Palmolive, the U.S. soap company, sponsored early telenovelas, just as they did in the United States. But the creative roots of Latin American telenovelas are much deeper than their corporate sponsorship. They have a different history and form than their American cousins.

For one thing, telenovelas have an ending—usually a happy one resulting in a wedding or a big celebration. They generally run from 120–180 episodes. Unlike soap operas, telenovelas air in prime time—usually after the evening news. And everyone watches telenovelas: men, women and children, often in family groups. Telenovela watching often cuts across age groups, with grandparents watching with their grandkids, and across classes, as children watch with their maids or babysitters. In some rural communities, even today, large groups of fans watch the telenovelas at community centers or in the plaza. The habit was formed when televisions were scarce because of their high cost, and continues until the present day, even with the abundance of low-cost television sets throughout Latin America. In contrast, soap operas broadcast on daytime television, have a largely female audience and are watched in isolation or perhaps with a preschool child.

“It’s important to emphasize that telenovelas are seen by all audience targets and have enormous differences from soap operas,” writes Colombia’s Caracol vice president Juana María Uribe Pachón, in a Spanish-language e-mail. “In the first place, telenovelas always have a storyline with a clear start and finish and with a definite goal, whether it be love or the overcoming of some obstacle … for example, in the Ronca de Oro [The Voice of Freedom: Helenita Vargas], it’s discrimination and machismo; in Diomedes, it’s poverty.”

Statistics provided by Caracol, Colombia’s leading television station, show how audience share spreads across race and class. For example, in the case of Ronca de Oro, almost half the viewers from January 27 to April 25, 2014, were women, while 30.7 percent were men. Children under 12 made up 8.2 percent of the audience; those in the 12–17 category made up 10.9 percent, and from 18–24 9.6 percent. The network also categorized viewing by three social classes, with each commanding about a third of the audience, with the lower class leading slightly.

Diomedes, which follows the travails of a popular Colombian musician, showed a similar participation, with 45.8 percent female viewers, 38.6 percent male, and the rest youth. However, the show—perhaps because it focuses on poverty—drew slightly over half its viewers from what Caracol characterizes as lower class. The statistics, provided by Caracol, cover the period from January 13 to March 19, 2015.³

According to a Nielsen Ratings spokesperson, who gave me the information informally, women account for more than 70 percent of U.S. soap opera viewers, based on ten telecasts of four separate soap operas in 2015.

Telenovelas did not originate in the laundry rooms of suburban U.S. homes, but in the gritty cigar factories of prerevolutionary Cuba. To keep workers concentrated on the mechanical task at hand, readers called lectores perched on a high platform and read to entire factories from newspapers and literary works ranging from translations of Balzac and Dickens to Cuban authors such as Félix B. Caignet.⁴

Caignet’s immensely popular El derecho de nacer may have first been heard in cigar factories, but it soon became popular over the entire island in the form of a radionovela. And like the telenovelas to come, it soon obtained international fame, with versions adapted and transmitted in Venezuela, Mexico and beyond.

The radionovela did not develop in a vacuum. In addition to its cigar factory roots, the stories told in serialized newspaper novels and graphic comic books influenced the new genre. In Argentina, the folletín or newspaper novels, taking their inspiration from European serialized newspaper novels, came in the form of so-called “gaucho-novels,” distributed through loose-leaf pamphlets or weekly newspapers. Later, these “gaucho-novels” made their way to radio, where they drew on longstanding dramatic traditions and added music and sound effects. Telenovela theorist Jesús Martín-Barbero notes that the “open structure” of the newspaper serial constituted one of the key elements in today’s telenovela, “both in its configuration as a genre and in its wid...