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Exporting tears and fantasies of (under) development: popular television genres, globalization and nationalism in Mexico after World War II

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Exporting tears and fantasies of (under) development: popular television genres, globalization and nationalism in Mexico after World War II

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Content EXPORTING TEARS AND FANTASIES OF (UNDER) DEVELOPMENT: POPULAR TELEVISION GENRES, GLOBALIZATION AND NATIONALISM IN MEXICO AFTER WORLD WAR II by Jaime Javier Nasser A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Jaime Javier Nasser ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my grandmother, Miriam Hasbún de Nasser. And my parents, Jaime Ernesto Nasser and Mireya Giacoman de Nasser; this dissertation would have never been possible without their unconditional love and support. iii Acknowledgements At many points during the writing of this dissertation, and especially the last few months I felt as if I had come to embody my argument: ideas seemed repetitive, arguments appeared to go around in circles, and I felt that the more I wrote, or the more I would try to clarify and refine and argument, the less I would accomplish. In other words, I felt as if I was stuck in a stagnant state best described as “process without progression” that seemed to echo the frustrations that accompany underdevelopment that are discussed in this project. I literally would have been unable to close this chapter of my life without the faith, support, and encouragement that I received from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. I would like to begin by thanking my dissertation committee for their support, help and guidance. First and foremost I have to express my deepest gratitude to my chair Tara McPherson as she was the first person to consistently push me and encourage me to stick to this topic when I first came up with it years ago. I was extremely hesitant and anxious about writing a dissertation on Mexican telenovelas and comedies that I watched when I was a child. I spent a few meetings with her discussing the possibility of switching topics because this seemed like a difficult task personally and academically as there was little research on them and I had fears that they would not be taken seriously by anyone. In a conversation that I had with her, Tara discussed how her first book, based on her dissertation emerged out of her own desire that she saw as being similar to mine to figure things out about her iv own life and where she was from. After that conversation in 2002 I never once doubted that this is something that I should write about and I fully committed to it. I am very grateful for her support, as I realized that writing about telenovelas or Mexican television comedies is not difficult in it of itself, but my desire to discuss issues of national identity, global politics, gender, race and class, all issues that are deeply personal to me were making this a difficult task. She always stood by me all the way from the very beginning when I wrote my first outline of my argument regarding Cinderella telenovelas approximately six years ago. From that first draft, she kept reading everything that I wrote for this project up until the final moments. I feel extremely lucky for having Curtis Marez play an integral role in this dissertation. Curtis began working at USC around the time when I started to conceptualize my ideas and he was an instrumental force in shaping and strengthening this project. Working on the interrelationship of race, class, gender, sexuality, global politics and national histories is an extremely arduous, complex and difficult task. His expertise, advice and guidance helped me argue how these texts mediate the very complicated material context out of which they emerge. His interdisciplinary approach to media studies, and his focus on articulating the relationship between media texts and the material conditions out of which they emerge, is something that I wish to follow for the rest of my academic career, both in the classroom and my research. v Last but not least, my outside member, Sarah who I first met back in 2004 when I took her Cultural Studies class at Annenberg right before my qualifying exams was crucial in demonstrating to me the ability to place all these axes of identity in conversation with one another through the lens of popular culture. Sarah also was present a conference presentation at SCMS in Vancouver about el Chapulín, when I got into an argument with an audience member who got upset by my comparison of el Chapulín to Che Guevara. Her support was incredibly important as that time was filled with much insecurity. Her presence and the advice that followed were instrumental in giving me the strength I needed to continue this project. In addition to my guidance committee I also feel the need to thank Dana Polan who just like Tara was equally supportive of my project when I expressed my insecurities when I first started the program. His cultural studies approach to the study and analysis of film and media that I had the opportunity to learn in the many classes that I took with him continue to shape my work and research questions. Dana also provided invaluable professional support and advice. Such advice was continued by Priya Jaikumar after Dana left for New York University. She was incredibly helpful in answering questions about professionalization and her warm and sympathetic style made difficult times much less stressful. Priya’s guidance and advice during my qualifying exams shaped my approach to gender and imperialism that was incredibly influential in the development of Chapter 3 where I explore two different forms of masculinity in relation to US hegemony. I must also thank Cristina Venegas for introducing me to Latin American cinema back in the year 2000. Her enthusiasm and vi commitment to the subject was extremely contagious to the point that her perspective has remained highly influential to me all these years. The main force that enabled me to first conceive of this dissertation was a graduate seminar on television studies taught by Lynn Spigel in the spring semester of the year 2001. When I first entered graduate school, I saw myself as a film scholar, but I decided to switch in less than a year as I found that Lynn’s interdisciplinary approach to media would allow me to study important cultural texts in Latin American television that have been largely ignored in our field. I wouldn’t have ever considered attending graduate school if it wasn’t for the support of my undergraduate critical studies professors at Emerson College who encouraged me to pursue this career. This is why I will be forever grateful to professors Jane Shattuc, Shujen Wang and Tom Cooper who introduced media studies in such a passionate way that was contagious enough to make me want to pursue a doctoral degree in the field in order to teach, research and join them as an educator in the hopes of influencing students in the same way that they influenced me. Of equal importance is the help of my colleagues and friends, Dong Hoon Kim, Hye Ryoung Ok and Nam Lee with whom I formed a dissertation writing group and met with regularly. Their feedback, advice, and persistent encouragement were essential to the completion of this project. The final year of writing was filled with deadlines and pressures that would have been much more difficult to handle had I not been blessed with the support of my partner Gil Tabachnik who had the most arduous task of providing 24 hour emotional vii support and helped me with the proof reading of this project. There are simply no words to express the gratitude that I feel towards Gil for providing so much patience, love and understanding until the very last second before its final submission. Lastly, this dissertation would not have been completed this year had it not been for the financial support of the Oakley Fellowship for the year 2006-2007, I feel honored and grateful to have received such recognition for my research. Additional financial support was provided steadily throughout my academic career at USC through research and teaching assistantships that also served as important valuable learning experiences. I thank all the professors and graduate colleagues who I worked with and Linda Overholt for her warmth and patience when assigning T.A. positions and helping me with important paperwork, including those forms needed to submit this dissertation to the Graduate School. Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures x Abstract xvii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Happily Ever After 16 Once Upon a Times and Happily Ever Afters Myths of Universality: The Telenovela Format 27 “Unpredictable Duration” 33 Television History and the Emergence of Telenovelas 37 The Telenovela: A Soap Opera with Closure 52 Fantasies of (under)Development 56 Concluding with a Kiss 64 Chapter 2: Diamonds in the Rough 69 Introduction Class Conflict: Battling Femininities 71 Family Ties and the Undermining of Nationalist Discourse 82 Polishing Diamonds: Education as Domestication 95 Domesticity, Race & “Soaps” 104 Conclusion: The Death of Soap Opera Study? 118 Chapter 3: Gender, Degeneration and the Creation of Pan-Latin American Identities in the Age of Development 122 Introduction: “Fué Sin Querer Queriendo” “Si voy… … …” 129 “Mis antenitas de vinil están detectando la presencia del enemigo” 134 “Síganme los Buenos!” Questioning New Latin American Cinema Histories, Manifestoes and the Politics of Gender and Taste 144 “Lo sospeche desde un principio.” 157 Conclusion: “Bueno… La Idea es Esa.” 169 ix Chapter 4: The Telenovela Experiments 175 Introduction: Telenovela Nightmares “Make Way for the Super Soaps”: MNTV’s Canned Telenovelas 179 Educating the American Audience about a Foreign Format 184 The “Telenovela Fever” and Pan Latin American Identity 191 Ugly Betty: A Story of (non)Transformation 195 Pleasure in Expectation: Transcending vs. Embracing “Ugly” 200 Conclusion: “The Television Novel” Meets the Telenovela 205 Conclusion 217 Exporting Tears Melodramas of Development 226 Bibliography 238 x List of Figures Figure 0.1: Memories of Underdevelopment (Alea, 1968) 1 Figure 0.2: Fantasy of Underdevelopment, El Chavo del Ocho (1974) 1 Figure 1.1: Disney Theme Park Ornament, Once Upon a Time 16 Figure 1.2: Disney Theme Park Ornament, Happily Ever After 16 Figure 1.3: Maria happily asleep 22 Figure 1.4: Meeting her prince in a dream 22 Figure 1.5: Maria embraced by her prince 22 Figure 1.6: Maria trying to make sense of her oppression 23 Figure 1.7: Maria imagining herself as an oppressed Cinderella 23 Figure 1.8: “Final Stage” 35 Figure 1.9: “Nothing is Written” 35 Figure 1.10: Jerónimo addressing the viewer 35 Figure 1.11: Family embrace 35 Figure 1.12: Tatiana addressing the viewer 35 Figure 1.13: Attempting to revive Enrique 35 Figure 1.14: Victoria addresses the viewer 35 Figure 1.15: Victoria embraced by ex-husband 35 Figure 1.16: Victoria telenovela logo and schedule 35 Figure 1.17: Luis Alberto brings a TV for Mariana as a gift 64 xi Figure 1.18: Luis Alberto grabs Mariana’s arm 64 Figure 1.19: Luis Alberto steals a kiss 64 Figure 1.20: Mariana succumbs to Luis Alberto’s kiss 64 Figure 2.1: Leonela’s Trap (a) 73 Figure 2.2: Leonela’s Trap (b) 73 Figure 2.3: Leonela’s Trap (c) 74 Figure 2.4: Leonela’s Trap (d) 74 Figure 2.5: Leonela’s Trap (e) 74 Figure 2.6: Leonela’s Trap (f) 74 Figure 2.7: Leonela’s Trap (g) 74 Figure 2.8: Leonela’s Trap (h) 74 Figure 2.9: Marimar’s Humiliation (a) 76 Figure 2.10: Marimar’s Humiliation (b) 76 Figure 2.11 Marimar’s Humiliation (c) 76 Figure 2.12: Marimar’s Humiliation (d) 76 Figure 2.13: Marimar’s Revenge (a) 77 Figure 2.14: Marimar’s Revenge (b) 77 Figure 2.15: Leonela’s Death (a) 80 Figure 2.16: Leonela’s Death (b) 80 Figure 2.17: Leonela’s Death (c) 80 Figure 2.18: Leonela’s Death (d) 80 Figure 2.19: Angelica’s Death (a) 81 xii Figure 2.20: Angelica’s Death (b) 81 Figure 2.19: Angelica’s Death (c) 81 Figure 2.20: Angelica’s Death (d) 81 Figure 2.23: Maria Candelaria (1944) 84 Figure 2.24: Medium Shot of Dolores del Rio as Maria Candelaria 84 Figure 2.25: Silvia Derbez as Maria Isabel (1966) 85 Figure 2.26: Adela Noriega as Maria Isabel (1997) 85 Figure 2.27: “Dirty” Mariana 97 Figure 2.28: “Clean” Mariana learning how to walk “like a lady” 97 Figure 2.29: “Clean” Mariana with no table manners 97 Figure 2.30: Mariana as a mature woman fifteen years later 97 Figure 2.31: “Dirty” Marimar 98 Figure 2.32: Marimar studying hard 98 Figure 2.33: Marimar learning how to walk 98 Figure 2.34: Marimar transformed and ready for the opera 98 Figure 2.34: “Little Black Sambo” 107 Figure 2.35: Washing “Sambo” 107 Figure 2.36: Bath water turns black 107 Figure 2.37: Black and White Bleaching Cream 108 Figure 2.38: Nadinola Deluxe Bleach Crème 108 Figure 2.39 Reinforced Rápido Commercial (a) 110 Figure 2.40: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (b) 110 xiii Figure 2.41: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (c) 110 Figure 2.42: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (d) 110 Figure 2.43: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (e) 111 Figure 2.44: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (f) 111 Figure 2.45: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (g) 111 Figure 2.46: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (h) 111 Figure 2.47: Driving to the remote village 113 Figure 2.48: A warm welcome 113 Figure 2.49: Commercial’s focus on women of color 113 Figure 2.50: “Rápido will eliminate the grey menace” 113 Figure 2.51: Showcasing the product 113 Figure 2.52: A skeptical woman 113 Figure 2.53: Injecting whiteness 114 Figure 2.54 “Rápido: Injects More Whiteness” 114 Figure 2.55: Admiring clean dishes 116 Figure 2.56: Woman’s reflection on a plate 116 Figure 2.57: Woman’s reflection on a wine glass 117 Figure 2.58: Woman’s reflection on a spoon 117 Figure 2.59: A proud housewife 117 Figure 2.60: Joy 117 Figure 2.61: Joy slogan: “See Yourself Shine” 117 xiv Figure 3.1: “Popular Idols of Mexican Television:” Mexican 127 postage stamps honoring El Chapulin Colorado and El Chavo del Ocho Figure 3.2: La Chilindrina holds the talcum powder 143 after throwing it on el Chavo’s face Figure 3.3: Profesor Jirafales’ classroom 144 Figure 3.4: “Ojo con el ALCA” 163 Figure 3.5: “NO TLC” 163 Figure 3.6: El Chapulín emerging from a well 168 Figure 3.7: Super Sam 168 Figure 3.8: Super Sam, el Chapulín 168 Figure 3.9: Dimitri Pansov 168 Figure 4.1: Betty crying over the photo of her boss 175 Figure 4.2: Charlie threatens to shoot Betty and Henry 175 Figure 4.3: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (a) 182 Figure 4.4: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (b) 182 Figure 4.5: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (c) 182 Figure 4.6: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (d) 182 Figure 4.7: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (e) 183 Figure 4.8: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (f) 183 Figure 4.9: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (g) 183 Figure 4.10: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (h) 183 Figure 4.11 “six nights” ad shot (a) 184 Figure 4.12 “six nights” ad shot (b) 184 xv Figure 4.13 “six nights” ad shot (c) 184 Figure 4.14 “six nights” ad shot (d) 184 Figure 4.15 “six nights” ad shot (e) 184 Figure 4.16 “six nights” ad shot (f) 184 Figure 4.17 “six nights” ad shot (g) 185 Figure 4.18 “six nights” ad shot (h) 185 Figure 4.19 “six nights” ad shot (i) 185 Figure 4.20 “six nights” ad shot (j) 185 Figure 4.21 “six nights” ad shot (k) 185 Figure 4.22 “six nights” ad shot (l) 185 Figure 4.23 “six nights” ad shot (m) 185 Figure 4.24 My50TV ad shot (a) 187 Figure 4.25 My50TV ad shot (b) 187 Figure 4.26 My50TV ad shot (c) 187 Figure 4.27 “Battle of the Blondes” (a) 189 Figure 4.28 “Battle of the Blondes” (b) 189 Figure 4.29 “Battle of the Blondes” (c) 189 Figure 4.30 “Battle of the Blondes” (d) 189 Figure 4.31 IFL ad shot (a) 190 Figure 4.32 IFL ad shot (b) 190 Figure 4.33 IFL ad shot (c) 190 xvi Figure 4.34: Wilhelmina 194 Figure 4.35: Catalina Creel 194 Figure 4.36: Cruella de Vil 194 Figure 4.37: Cinderella’s stepmother 194 Figure 4.38: Oct. 27 Glamour Cover 202 Figure 4.39: America Ferrera at the Emmys 202 Figure 4.40: Betty Suarez 204 Figure 4.41: Beatriz Aurora Pinzón Solano 204 Figure 4.42: Lety Padilla Solís 204 Figure 4.43: América Ferrera 204 Figure 4.44: Ana María Orozco 204 Figure 4.45: Angélica Vale 204 Figure 4.46: American Betty and Mexico’s Lety posing for the camera 205 xvii Abstract The focus of this dissertation primarily consists of studying popular Mexican television programming that developed shortly after the introduction of television in that country, primarily telenovelas and sitcoms and the ways in which they mediate global politics. Of particular interest is how an engagement with these forms allows for a greater understanding of a host of cultural anxieties in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, an era intricately bound up with broad networks of globalization and a rhetoric of “development”. Issues of class, gender and race are important axes and nodal points along these vectors of change, and attention is placed here in order to discern the complex and uneven way in which processes of globalization register in the national consciousness of those nations that have been imagined to be in a perpetual state of development. There are important gender and generational dimensions to developmental logic that render Latin America as inferior to the US. This is why this project emphasizes a particular genre of telenovelas referred to as “Cinderella” stories that have been successful throughout Latin America and around the globe. The innocent, noble and “savage” girl that is at the center of these narratives articulates what is implicit in official narratives of economic growth and progress by foregrounding the feminization and infatilization of Latin America. Contemporary programming strategies that attempt to adapt the telenovela in the US are discussed as a way xviii to demonstrate how such narratives of development continue to shape our understanding of global television format exchanges today. Given the importance of the New Latin American cinema for “world” film studies in the US, this dissertation argues that these very same feelings facilitated the formulation and the embrace of a militant cinema as a way to fight imperialism. A transmedia and transgeneric approach is deployed as a way to explore the ways in which Latin American people are infantilized in Mexican television comedies of the same period and the militant masculinity of the New Latin American cinema that are imagined to respond to this oppressive, feminized, and infantilized state of underdevelopment. 1 Introduction From Memories of Underdevelopment to Fantasies of (under)Development Figure 0.1: Memories of Underdevelopment Figure 0.2: Fantasy of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968) El Chavo del Ocho (circa 1974) This dissertation began eight years ago as a critical inquiry into the history and popularity of Mexican telenovelas, particularly those produced by Mexico’s largest broadcast company Televisa. The task of writing about these cultural texts produced a great deal of anxiety and insecurity. These feelings were both academic and personal, and it felt crucial and necessary to get over such feelings as they seemed at the time to be an impediment to writing the dissertation. Soon I realized that far from presenting an “obstacle,” those academic and personal feelings of anxiety and insecurity allowed me to make important connections that would come to structure this dissertation. Academically speaking, few would argue that television is not an important field of study in media studies. Despite this, there are scant monographs that deal with Latin American 2 television from a cultural studies perspective. Having few models to turn to, I engaged with American television studies, specifically, with the debates that occurred in its beginnings when its status as a field was being fought for. Feminist critics argued that television, similar to mass culture, have always been devalued compared to film and that there is a great deal to be learned about culture and society by looking at women’s pleasure on television. The soap opera played a central role in such debates and for me they seemed incredibly relevant to the telenovela as it is evident in Chapter 1. I see this dissertation as placing in conversation different disciplines within media studies, such as wider debates regarding television’s position in academia as they relate to film studies, and more specifically, the status of Latin American television scholarship within the now well-established field of Latin American film studies. My passion for the television texts that I chose to engage with, such as early feminist television scholarship, are, at least in part, motivated by my personal experiences of growing up in civil war-torn El Salvador in the 1980’s, where television was my primary form of entertainment. This interest in feminist works on American television coincided with Charlotte Brunsdon’s Screen Tastes and The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera. As one of the pioneers of feminist television scholarship, Brunsdon’s revisiting of the debates that ensued decades earlier as a “defence” spoke to my need to revive such debates in relation to Latin American television’s absence from American television studies. 3 For me, both growing up and watching television have always presented an unbreakable connection between the violence of global politics and sexism, as I did not only grow up watching the Mexican comedies that are the subject of Chapter 3 but I was introduced to telenovelas by my grandmother, a woman who suffered a great deal as a result of the violence of the Salvadoran civil war. Rosa Salvaje was the first Mexican telenovela that I watched with her, and after that I began to share my grandmother’s addiction to these melodramas. Unfortunately, she also had an addiction to prescription medications- one that was worsened by my grandfather’s politically motivated assassination in 1982. To this date it is still unknown who planned my grandfather’s assassination, but there are two possibilities that circulate: the leftist guerillas (supported by the USSR and Cuba) or the death squads who were organized by ARENA (Republican Nationalist Alliance), a political party heavily sponsored by the U.S. As a result of this event, my grandmother suffered from a severe clinical depression for which she never received adequate treatment. Largely due to a combination of ignorance and a lack of family support, her sadness would often be dismissed as trivial. I was very close to my grandmother, and even though I was too young at the time of my grandfather’s assassination to remember his death, he remained a haunting specter in my life and my family. Not only were all of his pictures removed from grandmother’s house in order not to remind her of his death, but her sadness was always apparent despite the fact that she was extremely loving, affectionate, and playful. Ten years after his murder, my grandmother passed away, and her death in 1992 was a tragic event that coincided with the end of the Salvadoran civil war. 4 Although for my grandmother, telenovelas served a very positive role, telenovelas have traditionally been critically dismissed in very much the same manner as soap operas in the United States. It would have been easy for me to equate the addiction to a telenovela with an addiction to drugs as a way to escape reality given the tragic example of my grandmother. Such an equation is not only incomplete and misleading but as ignorant as thinking that removing my grandfather’s pictures would somehow ease my grandmother’s depressive illness. In the last sentence, I equated my anger and frustration towards dismissive attitudes regarding telenovelas with the inability of my family to help my grandmother with her depression. My desire to take telenovelas seriously is directly linked to the love that I have towards my grandmother’s memory, whose pleasures, as well as her suffering, were repeatedly dismissed. Feminist television scholarship has been incredibly influential for me in the sense that it legitimized women’s pleasures as worthy of critical scrutiny and provided invaluable insights into the significance of the soap opera, especially in relation to the gendered nature of the history of media studies that tended to devalue women’s pleasures. At the very same time that this perspective was, and continues to be incredibly useful and essential to my approach, I also found it to be limited as it applies to telenovelas, since I experienced firsthand other axes of oppression while growing up in El Salvador that I feel need to be accounted for. 5 This dissertation not only draws from the work of feminist media studies but also bring that scholarship into productive tension with both critical race theory and theories of globalization. My goal in joining these critical traditions is to provide a more robust scholarly framework for the examination of popular Mexican television, ranging from the telenovelas I’ve mentioned here to popular television comedies. I am particularly interested in how an engagement with these forms will help us to discern a host of cultural anxieties in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, an era intricately bound up with broad networks of globalization and a rhetoric of “development”. Issues of class, gender and race will be important axes and nodal points along these vectors of change, and I locate my attention here in order to discern the complex and uneven way in which processes of globalization register in the national consciousness of those nations that have been imagined to be in a perpetual state of development. In an effort to address the interrelationship of race, gender, and class within global relations, this dissertation engages primarily with the study of some of the most prominent ideological frameworks that framed our concepts of global relations in the decades following World War II, such as American modernization theories and influential critiques of such theories that emerged shortly thereafter, such as “dependency theory.” My focus primarily consists of studying popular Mexican television programming that developed shortly after the introduction of television in that country, primarily telenovelas and sitcoms and the ways in which they mediate global politics. 6 Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the genre of telenovelas that I was first introduced to by my grandmother. Usually these are pejoratively labeled as “Cinderella” stories. Critics have argued that this type of telenovela represented “the epitome of everything that was criticized regarding Mexican television drama: it was cheap, vulgar and repetitive.” (Paxman 128) I decided to stick to the pejorative label because these tales embodied three important aspects concerning the genre that jumpstarted my interest: first, the assumption by elitist critics that audiences are infantile due to their lack of education (predominantly women of color); secondly, the assumption that these stories are about fantasy and escapism; and thirdly, the “transformation” of a suffering lower class girl into an elegant, sophisticated woman. Chapter 1 will focus on studying the main conventions of the telenovela as a televisual format and on an analysis of the narrative pleasure allowed by this type of programming structure. I will use the Cinderella genre as a specific example to illustrate how the conventions of the serial work in relation to the central myth of this genre. I historically situate the emerging popularity of the Cinderella genre at a time when the television industry in Mexico was developing with strong support from the US in order to promote its commercial broadcast model throughout Latin America. In addition, the development of television as a private enterprise in Mexico generated tensions with the government at a time when modernizing theories were being widely debated. My argument about the success and popularity of this format and genre is based on the ways in which both the telenovela format and the central myth of transformation particular to the Cinderella genre mediate the politics of the context out of which they emerge. Chapter 2 will proceed with a closer textual analysis of the Cinderella genre’s myths and conventions in order to, first, explore the centrality of 7 race, class, and gender in relation to global and Mexican nationalist political and economic discourses and, second, to explain the hatred felt for the genre based on its telenovela format structure and most importantly the way in which it strongly undermines post revolutionary nationalist discourses. The image of a young, immature girl who needs the help of a wealthy, loving adult in order to grow into a mature citizen recalls the way in which development discourse represents the relationship between Latin American nations and the United States. This is one example showing there are important gender and generational dimensions to developmental logic that render Latin America as inferior to the US. The innocent, noble and “savage” girl that is at the center of most Cinderella narratives articulates what is implicit in official narratives of economic growth and progress effectively foregrounding the feminization of a continent that, arguably, helped to inspire the creation of militant hyper masculinities in revolutionary artistic movements such as the New Latin American cinema. In Chapter 3, I will discuss the ways in which Latin American people are infantilized in Mexican television comedies of the same period in addition to the ways in which different forms of masculinity are imagined to respond to this oppressive, feminized, and infantilized state of underdevelopment. These three chapters intend to bring to the forefront and subject to analysis the very feelings of inferiority, humiliation and degradation that have been associated with the conception of underdevelopment as articulated in the Cinderella narratives and in Mexican sitcoms. A difficult, but necessary task in Chapter 3, given the centrality of the New Latin American cinema for “world” or “international” film studies in the US, is to argue that how these very 8 same feelings facilitate the formulation and embrace of a militant masculinity and cinema in an effort to not only fight Imperialism but transcend it. My study thus deploys a comparative model that is both transmedia and transgeneric. Transgeneric because this allows me to refract two very popular but very different generic televisual traditions in order to discern the ways in which both femininity and masculinity are articulated in popular media as a way to respond to ideas of progress and modernization. Telenovelas feature long narratives that focus on the suffering of a protagonist who eventually transforms into a sophisticated model citizen, bringing the narrative to a “happy ending” and presenting what I describe as “fantasies of development”. The sitcoms on the other hand, have messy and inconclusive endings resisting the need for closure foregrounded by the telenovela format. Furthermore, the sitcoms’ characters do not seek to transcend their states of inferiority but instead, seem to reluctantly embrace it, effectively providing fantasies of underdevelopment. A transmedia approach affords me the ability to place these critically degraded texts face-to-face with the highly valued and critically esteemed New Latin American cinema movement as a way to learn about how different articulations of masculinity are imaged to respond to US intervention. Latin American television scholarship typically limits itself to industry analysis and broadcast history, and works in media studies that deal explicitly with popular Latin American programming are growing but are still scarce. It is a good thing that there is at least thriving scholarship on Latin American cinema, but this to me sticks out like a sore thumb in the face 9 of the scant work on Latin American television. But this is understandable, as feminist television critics have pointed out repeatedly; television has historically been devalued in comparison to film. Another and more “practical” excuse might be that there is significantly less work on Latin American TV as a lot of the programming in Latin America has been imported from the US. Finally, the aforementioned reasons could be argued to be a result of the fact that the introduction and development of television in Latin America has been tied up in messy politics that has made it rely on American private and government investments and approval from the state. This is in direct opposition of the Latin American cinematic practices that have been valued in academia, the prime example being the politically charged New Latin American Cinema mentioned earlier. Let us imagine a Latin American neo-Marxist scholar committed to neo-Marxist criticism from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s who was heavily invested in issues of cultural dependency, and later cultural imperialism, and present him or her with these options: on the one hand, a cinema that aggressively denounces the US neocolonialist exploitation, while at the same time attempting to experiment with new ways to tell narratives as a way to critique Hollywood realism. On the other hand, telenovelas about Cinderellas and sitcoms with adults acting like children and clumsy superheroes produced by a company with sketchy ties to the government and the US. Well, I think the answer is obvious, television’s configuration and programming would be more than enough to send chills down the spine of any neo- Marxist and proof of this is media studies history. In the eyes of many film and media scholars of the past decades, Latin American independent cinematic traditions would not 10 only seem less tainted by the production context but film in general enjoyed a more privileged position in the field, serving to validate their scholarship and careers, just as I am doing now with my choice of texts. I’d be somewhat hypocritical if I started bashing them, since I firmly believe their work is important and has strengthened and shaped my commitment to the study of global political history that takes into account views and perspectives that are largely absent from American television studies. For example, in Chapter 3, I deal with these issues in a direct manner by contrasting two different forms of masculinity and maturity that have come to embody a type of pan Latin-American identity in the face of US politics. Specifically, I discuss two Mexican television comedies from the 1970s that continue to be successful throughout Latin America, one that features a clumsy superhero, and the other, adults acting like children. I compare these forms of masculinity and consciousness with an icon who embodied the ideal figure that was to fight US imperialism as articulated by Latin American filmmakers in their manifestos. This icon is none other than Che Guevara, and I compare and explore the implications of these two types of masculinities that emerged at a time when dependency theories constituted the main type of critique against US foreign policy. This further demonstrates the centrality of gender implicit in responses to developmental discourse that I argued for earlier. On the one hand we have a militant and aggressive man and on the other, an infantile, emasculated and regressive form of masculinity and adulthood that seems to embody the abstractions of economic theories that conceive of an entire continent and its peoples as “underdeveloped.” 11 Important racial, gendered and generational identities that are implicit in capitalist and Marxist notions of progress become explicit (if under examined) in popular narratives such as Cinderella telenovelas and Mexican sitcoms. The generational aspect is one that is often the least discussed, and is one that I wish to bring to the forefront as explicitly articulated in these narratives. This particular representation of age and human growth (or stunted growth as in the case of the comedies) literally projects the ideology of economic development onto the human body. This notion of progress is a linear one, as articulated in modernization theories such as W. W. Rostow’s influential Stages of Economic Growth: A Non- Communist Manifesto discussed in Chapter 3, that gave birth to contemporary capitalist developmental ideology. As Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo has pointed out, there are two modalities to development; the first is that it is “assumed that societies move through stages of development” such as the ones suggested by Rostow, (6) which to me, “moving through five stages” implies a linear notion of progress. The second modality of economic development assumes that the movement of these societies is only achieved if there is a change in the consciousness in the subjects of underdevelopment; that is, “the development of the members of these societies into free, mature, fully conscious, and self-determining individual subjects.” (6) Saldaña adds to this that developmental discourse was framed and continues to be framed as a type of revolutionary discourse (Portillo 18); what is not part of her analysis is that always implicit in this “change” is a linear notion of growth, evolution or revolution that will lead to this “inevitable” and “desirable” state of maturity, and/or peace, order and stability. But as she does observe, along with other critics such as Emmanuel 12 Wallerstein, both capitalist and Marxist discourses share the same notion of progress, and this is because both leftist and neoliberal revolutionary rhetoric emerged at the same time 1 . Skepticism, resistance and harsh criticisms of capitalist development emerged soon after its debut, beginning with the United Nations’ first official assessment in 1961 of the failure of foreign policies to achieve modernization in the developed world. In fact, this assessment explicitly noted that “the gap in incomes per capita between the economically developed and the less developed countries [had] increased, and that the rate of economic and social progress in the developed world [was] still far from desirable”. (17) This lead to the first “Development Decade” that sought to, among other recommendations, eliminate illiteracy, hunger and disease, promote the teaching and learning of skills, and increase private- investment in the developing world, etc. The term “Third World” is an example from the earliest of criticisms of development politics. The term was coined in the 1950’s at the Afro- Asian Conference in Bandung and at the non-aligned Summit in Belgrade in 1961. The term was an attempt, in the spirit of solidarity from those nations which comprised most of Africa, Latin America, South and Central Asia, to take a third path as opposed to the “developed and underdeveloped” binary imposed by the world powers. This led to the rise of “dependency theories” where neo-Marxist critics claimed that the enrichment of the developed nations was based on the exploitation of Third World nations, and this became 1 Emmanuel Wallerstein in After Liberalism discusses how in 1917, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin called for the independence of all nations from imperial domination (108-122). 13 the main logic to motivate socialist revolutions across the globe. For the next three decades, there would be a UN “Development Decade” in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, stating the same or worse lack of progress, and proposing similar incentives to promote growth. I am interested in “dependency theory” as the first counter response to capitalist developmental ideology that was highly influential in artistic, intellectual and political discourses. This logic of development continues to circulate widely and unless we engage with it critically, it risks becoming increasingly more and more naturalized. As I will argue in subsequent chapters, and the conclusion, the easy acceptance for this theory is based on the way in which it projects a generational hierarchy onto global relations. In the conclusion I suggest how human development discourse of the time circulated theories that sounded all-too-familiar to the stages of economic growth fore grounded by modernization theorists. Octavio Paz describes the difficulty of achieving productive dialogues in politics and the arts, between North American and Latin Americans, “the truth is that there are no dialogues at all, they are monologues: neither of us ever hears what the other is saying—or, if we do hear, we always think the other was saying something else.” (253) Chapter 4 will discuss two “experiments” in the US to adapt the telenovela format in 2006 with opposite results. Fox’s My Network TV attempts at producing prime-time telenovelas will be compared to the phenomenon and success of Ugly Betty. This comparison reveals how race, ethnicity and discourses of immigration and globalization manifest themselves, and shape industry and popular press debates surrounding the adaptation of televisual formats. In terms of 14 television’s history of style, one could argue that Ugly Betty can be considered to be the epitome of three aesthetic traditions that used to belong to separate media industries and practices. First, the high cost/value of a Hollywood cinema blockbuster that is now being applied to the second tradition: the network prime-time drama; and third, the blurring of the boundary between prime-time and daytime melodrama through the explicit deployment of daytime soap opera conventions in Ugly Betty. Beginning with the telenovela format that was itself inspired by the American daytime soap opera in Latin America in the fifties, such conventions have traveled through decades and cut across national boundaries to come full circle back to the US. These aesthetic mergers are a result of the current global scope of the political economic structure of Hollywood industries, their emphasis on mergers and acquisitions and transnational program and format exchanges. ABC’s adaptation was covered by the press as its own kind of televisual “Cinderella”, that is, a low budget telenovela was transformed into a polished American serial with great success. The show successfully adapted to the prime-time serial by marketing itself as a comedy, while still acknowledging its melodramatic roots, foregrounding the mutability of formats, and their ability to adapt to a variety of contexts. Furthermore, the appeal of Ugly Betty seems to be that it is an “ugly duckling” story where the duck never turns into a swan. Whether or not the series features a transformation in the future, the fact that there is desire for a transformation not to take place speaks of the way in which the show articulates a critique of ideals of beauty via a representation of class, ethnic and gender differences in the US. 15 Works Cited Fernández, Claudia and Paxman, Andrew. El Tigre: Emilio Azcárraga y su Imperio Televisa. Grijalbo, Mexico, 2000 Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. London, University of California Press, 2003 Modleski, Tania. “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas,” Feminist Television Criticism. Ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, et. al. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 Portillo, Maria Josefina Saldana. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Duke University Press, 2003 United Nations. “United Nations Development Decade: A Programme International for International Cooperation.” UN.org, 1084th Plenary Meeting, 19 Dec 1961, Location <<http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/167/63/IMG/NR0 16763.pdf>> 16 Chapter I Happily Ever After: The Marriage of the American Soap Opera, Classical Cinemas and the Birth of the Telenovela Format I. Once Upon a Times and Happily Ever Afters In a visit to the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California I encountered a musical ornament that not only embodies the ways in which fairy tales are stereotyped in terms of their narrative structure, but also presents a shift to the overall meaning of the Cinderella narrative, allowing us to begin to understand the complex functions of the telenovela programming format. This type of programming will be studied in this chapter in relation to the way in which its structure relays a very particular version of the Cinderella genre of telenovelas. Figure 1.1: Disney Ornament; Once Upon a Time Figure 1.2: Disney Ornament; Happily Ever After 17 One side of the music box reads: “Once Upon a Time” below the image of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters and stepmother (figure 1.1). Cinderella is in the snow globe holding a bucket as if her image was captured in the midst of doing house chores. The other side of the music box features Cinderella’s fairy Godmother holding up her wand (figure 1.2). Cinderella is in the snow globe holding out her elegant dress and to her right (outside of the globe) we see the prince’s castle and the carriage that will take her to the ball from which her stepsisters and stepmother have prohibited her from going. The shape of the ornament resembles a book and the labels in each side that read “Once Upon a Time” and “She lived happily ever after” tell us how these two conventions, the beginning and the ending of the story, have become symbolic of the overall structure and story of the fairytale. 1 This particular way to condense a narrative by placing an emphasis on the exposition of a problem and its resolution is not limited to Disney kitsch but is known to have been a staple of Marxist cinema studies. As scholar Christine Gledhill has pointed out, Hollywood films spring out of a melodramatic tradition that did not receive enough attention because of two main influences in film studies: The first is the “great tradition of humanist-realism” which the debates of the sixties inherited from literary criticism. The second is structuralist neo- Marxist theory, which critiqued the notion of popular art and its identification of “realism as 1 Disneyland Theme Parks released similar versions for some of its most popular fairytales involving princesses, such as Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid. The Cinderella music box was chosen for obvious reasons regarding the focus on the Cinderella genre. 18 the anti-value” exposing at once, “the literary critical tradition, bourgeois ideology and the manipulations of the cultural industries”. Gledhill argues that from this pejorative alignment arose the notion of the “classic realist text” (8). Following a similar path, some feminist psychoanalytic criticism of the 1970s explored the ways in which Hollywood classical narratives did not only support the maintenance of the status quo, but also reasserted gender difference and the subjugation of women to men 2 . According to this framework, film criticism through the 1960s and most of the 1970s taught us that most of the ideological work in narratives relies on the representation of chaos, and on order being restored in the end according to dominant ideology 3 (Modleski 35). The musical ornament’s emphasis on the exposition of chaos and its resolution is one of the reasons I found it fascinating. If we were to take a second look at it, one can see that as tacky and predictable as it seems to be, this ornament erases some conventions that are arguably essential components of what is commonly associated with Cinderella’s story. One of the sides reads “and she lived happily ever after,” and not the usual “and they lived happily ever after.” On that same side, the ornament features a Cinderella that has been recently transformed and ready to attend the prince’s ball at the castle in her carriage (both can be seen to the right of the globe in figure 2 The most well-known example is Laura Mulvey’s 1973/5 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 3 I am paraphrasing Tania Modleski’s quoting of Roland Barthe’s in her essay “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas” as a way to sum up the value given to the ending of classical realist narratives in film criticism (36). 19 1.2), with her fairy god mother on the right, still holding her magic wand up in the air as if the transformation just took place… and the prince? He’s nowhere to be found. The significance of this is that the box links the happiness associated with the story’s ending with Cinderella’s transformation, and not the usual heterosexual union that takes place at the end of the narrative. In other words, closure in this ornament is associated with her transcendence of unjust abuse, exploitation and poverty in the hands of her evil stepmother and stepsisters. This re-interpretation of Walt Disney’s Cinderella renders the prince as an accessory, or a signifier of social status. Cinderella’s story is not one of love, but of a magical transformation as a way to transcend a state of poverty, and marriage to the prince becomes a guarantee that she will never be poor again and “live happily ever after.” Most importantly, the ornament assumes that the consumer is aware of the narrative’s official ending, that Cinderella will marry the prince and therefore escape the oppressive household, since the ornament proclaims that at that moment Cinderella “lived happily ever after” allowing the consumer to enjoy the transformation without having to worry about the imminent deadline, otherwise it would’ve read “and she lived happily until midnight…” This shift, which I deem as a radical departure from the usual interpretation of Cinderella as one of romance, signals the value and importance of the “middle” in classical narratives, out of which Disney’s Cinderella is just one example. This emphasis on the middle and erasure of the prince reminds us of the important work that feminist film critics did in the late 1970s and 1980s regarding the re-evaluation and critical reclaiming of melodrama as a way to examine women’s pleasure. At the very same time, the ornament also emphasizes the cultural significance and pleasure associated with a story’s ending. As Gledhill has pointed 20 out, starting in the mid-70s, it became a central concern to try to examine the radical potential of melodrama (9) and to argue that, because a film has an ideologically conservative ending, does not mean that important work did not remain to be done with the “middle.” The two conventions emphasized in the musical ornament become emblematic of two of the main conventions of the genre that has come to define the Mexican Cinderella telenovela. For one, Cinderella genre telenovelas tend to focus on the suffering of the protagonist; these are usually extreme conditions of poverty and exploitation that set up the desire and/or expectation for a transformation to take place that will allow her to transcend this state. As opposed to Disney’s Cinderella, which is the type of story that these narratives are pejoratively compared to, the conditions of Cinderella’s transformation in this genre of telenovelas is not temporary, and her financial security is usually not guaranteed by a prince. Instead, the transformation becomes the feature in this group of narratives that will distinguish one Cinderella telenovela from another. That is, the transformation may take place near the end of a narrative where it serves as a form of compensation for the character’s unjust suffering (e.g. Rosa Salvaje, 1987). Sometimes the change will occur near the center of the story facilitating other storylines such as the protagonist’s search for a lost child (e.g.: Los Ricos También Lloran from 1979 or its remake Maria la del Barrio, 1995), revenge (e.g. La Venganza; “the vengeance” from 1977, re-made in 1994 as Marimar) or to 21 develop an “incest scare 4 ” (such as Bianca Vidal from 1983 and its remake, Maria José in 1995). The central narrative of the genre deals with a young girl who was abandoned at a very early age for reasons that were beyond the parent’s control. For the most part, all Cinderella stories present the hardships of the girl living the life of the poor who are marginalized while simultaneously depicting the anguish of the living parent and the relentless attempt to find the lost child. The parent who is alive is almost always rich (whether a mother or a father), and class differences are the main reason why there was a forced separation to begin with (usually Cinderella’s grandparent’s objected to the romance between her birth parents due to class differences). The forced separation leaves the child vulnerable and unable to access education, healthcare and other basic needs. In most cases, the child’s remaining parent dies of natural causes, or is unable to provide the security and stability usually associated with parenthood (if the remaining parent doesn’t die, he might be an alcoholic, for example), this leaves her in a heightened state of vulnerability. As the search for his or her daughter continues, a romantic relationship between the underage girl and “the prince charming” takes place and most of the exploitation and class conflict emerge from a series of confrontations with her prince’s family and wealthy love interests (the most common 4 “Incest scares”, as in the case of Bianca Vidal often involves the poor girl falling in love with a rich man only to find out that her prince is actually her brother, as she is the male protagonist’s father’s lost daughter. Of course, the audience is usually queued in to know that her prince is not her brother as he was actually adopted. 22 villainesses are women who want to marry the male protagonist working in liaison with his mother, sister, or any other powerful female figure in the household). And I say prince charming, because he is always a rich young adult (usually early twenties) and because he is usually referenced as such within the telenovela text itself. The following images from María la del Barrio depict the protagonist’s active imagination that makes explicit references to the classic Cinderella story. Figures 1.3 through 1.5 present her dreaming of her “quinceañera” celebration, where girls are believed to transition into womanhood and dress up with extravagant dresses that closely resemble those of fairy tale princesses. Figure 1.3: Maria happily asleep Figure 1.4: Meeting her prince in a dream Figure 1.5: Embraced by her prince On the second set of images (figures 1.6 and 1.7), she is sitting on her bed soon after meeting her new guardian’s family imagining that she is going to live the life, in the character’s own words, “of that girl in the fairytale that my godmother used to tell me.” That fairytale is of course, Cinderella, and we see our protagonist in figure 1.7 occupying her role with a bucket of soap and water with characters from the telenovela who have been hostile 23 to her. In figure 1.7 we see Don Fernando’s wife Victoria (far left), her niece Soraya (far right), and Filipa, of the maids who is not very fond of the new member of the family (middle). Figure 1.6: Maria trying to make sense of her oppression Figure 1.7: Maria imagining herself as an oppressed Cinderella The transformation involves this unruly but noble girl turning into a sophisticated and elegant woman. This change occurs through an accelerated process of education and fashion make-over. This transformation is only possible when this underdeveloped and exploited teenage girl receives the aid of a wealthy adult (usually her parent or a charitable person that becomes a parental figure and guardian of the child), and it is only after this transformation that the female protagonist gets married to her “prince”. In rare cases, the girl will obtain a large sum of money through an inheritance, as in the case with Maria Mercedes. In this telenovela, the protagonist obtains money from the brother-in-law of Malvina, the male protagonist’s mother, who decides to leave all his wealth to Maria as a way to avenge the fact that Malvina was always after the deceased’s family’s money. In this case, Maria does not 24 transform until she meets her mother towards the end of the telenovela, signaling that love and caretaking are essential for her growth and behavioral transformation. As I mentioned earlier, the implications of these issues will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 2, when I analyze these myths in relation to post-revolutionary Mexican nationalist discourse. For this chapter, I will concentrate on the convention of Cinderella’s transformation to exemplify the way by which the programming format of the telenovela mediates global developmental politics. Part of the reason for the global success of the Cinderella genre of telenovelas stems from the narrative structure of the telenovela format. The telenovela format emerged in Latin America as a distinct type of programming that shared (and continues to share) formal characteristics with the American soap opera and classical cinemas (such as Hollywood Classical Realism and the Mexican Golden Age of cinema). Specifically, I conceive of the telenovela as a serial consisting of episodes aired daily, presenting a narrative of unpredictable duration. Episodes are linked through cliffhangers, offering several smaller climaxes, interruptions, reversals of fortune, constant chaos and conflict, etc. throughout the duration of the story that typically lasts three to six months (characteristics inherited from the soap opera). At the same time, and despite all the complications that are characteristic of these narratives, the format possesses a linear narrative with a distinct beginning, middle and end (that is associated with classical cinemas). 25 Taking into consideration the interplay between the Cinderella genre narrative and the telenovela format, a question arises: What is the pleasure in inhabiting this process of social transformation? There is a clear pleasure in expectation that is particular to the soap opera and a pleasure in achieving closure that is provided by most classical cinemas. In an effort to answer this question the following three issues will be explored in this chapter: first, I will define the telenovela as a programming format (and not as a television genre) that is a hybrid of the soap opera and American and Mexican classical cinemas. This will be achieved through a discussion of the format’s industrial origins and aesthetic characteristics. Second, I will elaborate on the format’s emphasis on generating a sense of expectation that will eventually come to an end. This element will be discussed in the context of its emergence after World War II, taking into consideration a much larger socio-political context when global politics were being re-shaped and re-defined. And finally, expanding on the preceding considerations, I will explore the significance of the deployment of the Cinderella myth within the telenovela format in an effort to suggest reasons for the success of this telenovela genre not only in Latin America but other national contexts. It is my argument that if we take into consideration the political and industrial context out of which the format emerges in the late 1950s and its solidification in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of dependency theory, the pleasure in both expectation and closure that is characteristic of the telenovela format offers a mediation of capitalist and socialist narratives of progress. This chapter will also examine how the telenovela format is developed as a hybrid of the soap opera and classical cinemas in a politically conservative period in post 26 revolutionary Mexico where the government was striving to develop a strong national identity and dealing with US influence. US influence was primarily concerned with preventing state-owned media throughout Latin America immediately following World War II in order to encourage its own commercial model. This emerged out of fears that state- owned media would be used to ignite anti-American sentiment. This foreign intervention generated tensions between the government and privatized Mexican television that resulted in the State and the Church keeping a very close eye on programming. Further, it is this type of control over programming that resulted in a desire to produce noncontroversial programming that facilitated the flourishing and establishment of the Cinderella genre. The telenovela as a format that is a hybrid of particular formal traits of the American soap opera and classical cinemas emerged during the development of television in Mexico after World War II. The US at this historical moment presented an ideological framework that has since shaped our understanding of global relations, mainly through developmental politics. These politics will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. For now, I would like to summarize this ideological framework as the articulation of economic relations that placed all nations within a hierarchical order, primarily through the rhetoric of development and underdevelopment. This framework grouped nations into those that had and had not achieved modernization, effectively creating a hierarchy based on a linear conception of progress and transformation whereby developing nations were seen or expected to follow in the footsteps of developed nations through economic growth. Therefore, not only did developing nations clearly inhabit a process with no clear end in sight, but they would need 27 help from the developed nations in order to reach the elusive goal of modernization. I present a conceptual framework that accounts for the emergence of the telenovela format at a time when a capitalist rhetoric of economic progress (in the form of developmental ideology) dominated discourses on globalization. I argue this framework permits us to understand the pleasures associated with the telenovela format that remain relevant today, and also to understand why this format solidified its success in Mexico through Cinderella narratives. This in turn opens up a space that allows us to understand the success of this format in nation states and societies that share a similar positioning within the global and hierarchical order articulated in contemporary politics of development and to begin to account for the widespread ‘export’ successes of the genre across cultural and national borders. II. Myths of Universality: The Telenovela Format Telenovelas are often referred to as “Latin” soap operas. This is due, in part, to the fact that, at first glance, telenovelas share many characteristics with the American soap opera. Some of the similarities are at the level of formal and narrative conventions (the most prominent will be addressed in this chapter), but also aesthetically, primarily in their low budget (compared to American primetime series), and a stereotyped style of (over)acting. The persistence within the trade and popular presses of the free association of the telenovela with the soap opera goes beyond a naïve assumption that the two television forms are similar since certain media scholars have been equally eager to equate the two. This is not to say that such 28 differences should prevent an inclusion of the telenovela within American soap opera discourse and vice versa (which is precisely what this chapter intends to do), but the problem is that there are important differences that are historically and culturally specific to the telenovela which are ignored in this equation, as will be addressed shortly. As will become evident, these historical and cultural factors that shaped the telenovela format, as different from –and similar to- the American soap opera allow us to understand its popularity beyond Latin America, in countries such as Russia, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, etc. This pervasive impulse to ignore the cultural and historical differences between the soap opera and the telenovela could be easily interpreted as a hidden desire to Americanize a Latin American format. At the same time, a seemingly contradictory impulse takes place, as the telenovela is sometimes articulated and endowed with an ethnic identity and characterized as a “foreign” format. I am referring to an issue that I will discuss in chapter 4, where the telenovela is discussed in the trade press, popular press, and television shows as embodying certain stereotypes usually associated with Latino culture resulting in a version of pan-Latin American identity. The references and comparisons to the American soap opera are extremely common, mainly in terms of its highly melodramatic content. As chapter 4 will illustrate, when the format is defined as foreign, it’s most commonly in reference to the fact that it includes closure. For this chapter, I would like to explore the implications of this closure as a distinct feature from the American soap opera, for this forces us to consider that telenovelas generally also share some narrative conventions with classical realist cinemas. I use the plural because this 29 influence comes from both Hollywood’s classical realism and the Mexican Golden Age of cinema. Because my concern is not to argue for the cultural or national “authenticity” of the telenovela format or any of its aesthetic roots and influences, I will frame my analysis via an account of the telenovela’s industrial history and aesthetic influences by discussing the history of US intervention/collaboration in Mexico’s cinematic and broadcasting practices. Contemporary work in television studies is by no means exempt from the universalizing rhetoric that plagues popular media. Quite the contrary, a relatively recent trend that attempts to understand global television practices through an analysis of television formats all-too-often runs the risk of propagating myths of universality as a way to address/erase cultural difference. I believe that this not only hinders our ability to explore the complexity of the telenovela but serves as a way to simultaneously depoliticize and re-aestheticize television studies. Silvio Waisbord, for example, in his essay “McTV” (part of an anthology of television studies’ articles that is widely read in television studies courses), under the section heading “Formats and Narratives,” argues that telenovelas which “tell universal love stories (e.g., Rags-to-riches, Cinderella-themed plots), without specific local references and featuring known stars have fewer problems crossing boundaries.” (385) He names Televisa as the best known example of this formula, citing the success of these stories in nations as diverse as Russia and the Philippines. While indeed Televisa’s Cinderella stories have been successful, perhaps more so than other telenovela narratives, in differing national contexts, there is little to learn by labeling them “universal.” Claims of “universality” assume that there is an 30 intrinsic characteristic to these stories that are transcendental and naturally appealing to everyone. Such claims arise out of an evasion of the historical roots of those stories that emerged with the development of the serialized novels and melodrama in general immediately following the French revolution and the transition from “empires” to “nations”. Not only do these universal claims erase those roots rendering them “natural” (as if it has always been this way) but also block the possibility to explore why these narratives were and continue to be re-deployed in different versions such as the serialized television format of the telenovela. I argue that it is not the absence of specific references of a local context, but the manner in which these local and global politics are mediated in any particular telenovela (explicitly or implicitly), that will allow for the chance to explore the cultural significance of their success. In defining the telenovela as a televisual format (rather than as a genre), I would cite Albert Moran’s statement that “to ask the question ‘What is a format?’ is to ask the wrong kind of question.” (261) A format, he argues, is more of a “technology of exchange in the television industry which has meaning not because of a principle but because of a function or effect”. (261) In a similar vein, I argue that the telenovela is synonymous with the generative and organizational nature of television formats. Moran explains that “the more concrete a format, the more chance it has of attracting copyright protection” (261) in contemporary global television program exchanges (from a legal perspective). The same applies to any particular telenovela, in the sense that, the more concrete or specific the story, the easier it becomes to copyright it (the most prominent example being that of Yo Soy Betty La Fea and 31 its adaptation around the globe and most recently in the US as Ugly Betty, or the acquisition by GMA, a Philippine network, of the rights to produce a local adaptation of Mexican Cinderella telenovelas Marimar and Rosalinda, which both achieved great success when they originally aired in the 1990s). I employ the term format in order to define the telenovela as such and differentiate it from “genre” for the following reasons: first, the origins of the term “format” as it pertains to broadcasting, began in radio and carried over to television as a way to describe types of programming, specifically serials 5 , hence I will study the historical emergence of the telenovela as a programming format. Secondly, even though the telenovela as a broadcasting format is too general to be copyrighted, it does possess a core set of basic formal and narrative conventions that are part of a particular programming strategy that is different from other types of television programs (such as news, variety shows, sitcoms, anthologies, game shows, etc). The final, and most important reason to discuss the telenovela as a format, is because there are several distinct genres and subgenres that subscribe to the telenovela programming format; labeling the telenovela as a television genre has for decades encouraged us to ignore the diversity of content and the possibilities that are available as a result of the format. For example, there have been a significant number of successful telenovelas that in fact, belong to the thriller genre (Cuna de Lobos “cradle of wolves”; Al 5 Albert Moran notes that the term originated with the print press regarding particular page sizes. In terms of broadcasting, “in radio first and then in television, the term has been intimately linked to the principal of serial program production.” (259) 32 Filo de la Muerte “at the edge of death”), children’s (Carrusel, Mundo de Juguete), teenage/musical (Alcanzar una Estrella I & II “reaching for a star”, Rebelde “rebel”, Clase 406 “class 406”), fantasy/adventure (El Abuelo y Yo “My grandfather and me”; Aventuras en el Tiempo “adventures in time”), supernatural/horror telenovelas (El Maleficio “the curse”, El Extraño Retorno de Diana Salazar “the strange return of Diana Salazar”) and national/historical telenovelas (La Constitución, Alguna Vez Tendremos Alas “someday we’ll have wings”, La Antorcha Encendida “the lit torch”). All of these genres still subscribe to core programming features and narrative conventions that are specific to the telenovela format. In order to move away from myths of universality it is necessary to recognize the diversity of genres within the telenovela format as an important first step towards fostering intellectual work that will go beyond the gross generalizations that characterize most studies of the telenovela in the US. Focusing on specific genres that emerge out of a particular historical context allow for a de-centralization of American television studies that is necessary for the understanding of global television in the current world system. An understanding of the format’s core conventions is necessary before any analysis of any particular genre because the telenovela has a unique way of relaying stories that is different from most other forms of mass entertainment. Its structure provides pleasures that embody important cultural, social, and political implications. Some of these concerns will be revisited in the final chapter, as a way to partly account for the failure of a prime-time experiment in the fall of 2006 to “translate” telenovelas for US audiences, and the success that occurred simultaneously for ABC’s Ugly Betty, an adaptation of Colombia’s Yo Soy Betty La Fea. 33 Following the discussion of these formal features, the history of broadcasting and cinema in Mexico together with US influence and tensions with the State will be explored in relation to the development of the telenovela. III. “Unpredictable Duration” As a broadcast format, telenovelas are a type of serial that in most cases consist of episodes that may last anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. Each episode is usually aired daily, most commonly on weekdays (Monday through Friday). A telenovela has an overall narrative structure that features a discernable beginning, middle and an end. These traits are commonly associated with a classical/Aristotelian structure adapted for visual media through cinema (e.g.: Hollywood and the development of Hollywood classical realism). Similar to classical realist cinema, and significantly different from the soap opera, at the center of the telenovela there are almost always clear protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters. These characters are part of a classical narrative that contain specific plot points, but similarly to the soap opera, these can be “stretched” or modified according to audience response in the case of a local production (i.e.: a successful telenovela that was programmed to last four months may be prolonged for weeks to take advantage of ratings, or vice versa. Similarly, a narrative of a telenovela may be shortened if the ratings are low in order to accelerate its ending). Regardless of the genre, storylines will almost always focus on themes pertaining to the melodramatic form, such as the integration, disintegration or reintegration of a family, or on heterosexual romantic relations (such as courtship, marriage, divorce), 34 among others. In terms of length, each telenovela may last anywhere from three to six months (sometimes lasting up to a year depending on their success, as with the case of Colombia’s original version of Ugly Betty). It is this aspect concerning telenovelas’ varying durations that result in a form of expectation that is of special relevance for my argument and needs to be explained further. The “middle” is of special importance to the telenovela as it constitutes the majority of the span of any given storyline regardless of the telenovela genre (Cinderella, thriller, supernatural, etc). That is, the telenovela will have an overall narrative arc that closely resembles that of classical cinema providing a beginning, middle and an end but of a much larger and almost always unpredictable duration. Each telenovela episode does not respect classical realist narrative conventions, as episode after episode the telenovela effectively reproduces the American soap opera narrative structure where each episode has no closure and is linked to the next by either cliffhangers, unresolved problems or a combination of both. Furthermore, each climax serves to introduce new problems and difficulties, and its unpredictability is based on the audience not knowing how long each telenovela will last (this resonates with fans of American prime-time series: “Will my show be canceled?”). Despite their unpredictability in terms of their duration (that is, regarding their termination date), endings for the most part provide absolute closure to the narrative. Unpredictability may be only limited to the duration of a telenovela, because when it comes to a narrative that may belong to a genre that is highly formulaic, the outcome may be highly predictable (as in the case of most Cinderella stories). For now, it is important to point out that it is because of the 35 long duration of a telenovela’s middle and its unpredictable end that I argue that the format represents a hybrid of classical narrative and the American soap opera. Figure 1.8: “Final Stage” Figure 1.9: “Nothing is Written” Figure 1.10: Jerónimo addressing the viewer Figure 1.11: Family embrace Figure 1.12: Tatiana addressing the viewer Figure 1.13: Reviving Enrique Figure 1.14: Victoria addresses the viewer Figure 1.15 Victoria embraced by ex-husband Figure 1.16: Victoria logo Above is an example of the kind of promotion that attempts to generate high anticipation for the ending of a telenovela. Victoria is the third remake of a Chilean telenovela, produced by Telemundo, which was highly successful in Mexico when produced by Televisa’s competition, TV Azteca in the early nineties as Mirada de Mujer (“a woman’s gaze”). The 36 announcer starts by saying that “in its final stage… nothing is written and in seconds, everything can change” (figures 1.8 and 1.9). This announcement is followed by images of possible deaths, unexpected reconciliations and conflicts that may threaten the “happy ending”: the romance that has slowly developed over the past five months between the protagonists, Victoria (an abandoned 50 year old housewife seen in figure 1.14) and Jerónimo (a 32 year old journalist, seen in figure 1.10). The advertisement posits the question of whether or not Victoria’s husband will leave his new wife who used to be his former mistress (figure 1.12) in order to return to Victoria, and if the latter will forgive him. I’d like to emphasize the anticipation that is deliberately generated by the promo “nothing is written… in seconds, everything can change.” Clearly this statement is meant to shock the viewer, signaled not just by the visual effects that emphasize these key phrases on screen, but by the implications: in just seconds, everything that has been developing in the five months of the telenovela’s duration may suddenly change. This is an example of the expectation generated by the format’s unpredictable duration. The latter is emphasized by the fact that the announcement concerns the introduction of the “final stage”, unclear and vague as to the precise date when the telenovela will actually end (the actual date of the finale is usually heavily advertised a week before airing). The success of this format is based largely on its ability to not only provide pleasure from the complications, struggles, and conflicts that prevail in the narrative over a period of months, but also generate pleasure in the expectation of an ending to the extended suffering and chaos of the story. Therefore, the extended narratives (with unpredictable durations) as well as their endings are equally important. For example, telenovela finales on Univision have beaten the ratings of American networks (such 37 as the Mexican version of Ugly Betty and La Madrastra, “the stepmother”, a mystery/thriller starring Victoria Ruffo, the star of Telemundo’s Victoria). The cultural implications and success of this blending of duration and closure in the telenovela format can be explored in relation to feminist scholarship on the American soap opera. Placing this work in dialogue with telenovela scholarship, while also considering global politics, allows us to discern the multiple ways in which vectors of gender, race and ethnicity exist in relation to registers of national identity, and, further, to discern how these are implicitly embedded in television formats such as the telenovela. As a first step to understand the global implications of the pleasures afforded by the telenovela structure, it is necessary to discuss the format’s development in Mexico at a time when frictions abounded between the main players in the formation of the Mexican television industry (primarily, the Mexican government, television entrepreneurs, US influence, and intervention from the Church). IV. Television History and the Emergence of Telenovelas The emergence of the telenovela in Mexico is inextricably linked to the development of television, to US influence, and to State intervention. These tensions resulted in the creation of a private owned monopoly in Mexico that was responsible for the production and distribution of most Mexican telenovelas. The format became perfected in the following decade, the 1960s, when dependency theory was circulating widely as a response to capitalist 38 developmental politics and as a critique of governments that subscribed to them. These critiques not only introduced the notion of nations and cultures being dependent on others, but also pointed out that capitalist development was not yielding the results that it promised, but instead, as time passed, the gap between the economically developed and underdeveloped nations grew dramatically producing a sense of stagnation, delay or regression. “Progress” was not an inevitable result of adopting capitalism, and time could pass, we could grow old without experiencing or witnessing a nation’s transition out of underdevelopment as the stages of economic growth suggested. I argue that the discrepancies with the conception of time in relation to economic progress became mediated by the telenovela format’s structure described earlier, generating pleasure out of an extended narrative that guarantees a conclusion (even though for most of its duration there will seem to be no end in sight). Furthermore, the Cinderella myth as a story of disenfranchisement, transformation, and upward social mobility that is deployed within the telenovela structure at this time solidifies the connection between the format’s structure and its mediation of developmental politics, and the consolidation of the genre in the 1970s is a testament of its mass appeal. In order to begin to understand in greater detail the tensions that shaped television programming and the development of the telenovela format I will discuss US influence in Mexican cinema and broadcasting and the tensions that this generated with the Mexican government. Elizabeth Fox has argued that “Latin American broadcasting is not an atavistic product of poverty, underdevelopment, or tyranny, nor is it an exclusive product of US 39 imperialism”. According to her, foreign influence was exerted strategically, randomly, and pervasively over many decades, to which she adds, “more than a product of foreign relations, Latin American broadcasting industries are the product of a complex interplay of strong and weak domestic governments and markets, authoritarian and populist policies, and largely excluded social forces.” (6) Fox details how the US government’s relation with Latin American broadcasting has been to “support commercial interests and counter the threat of control of broadcasting by a hostile foreign state or domestic political power (first Nazi Germany and following World War II, Communism). Fox clarifies that most of this influence was exercised through US private industries rather than state power (with the exception of World War II). (13) Fox notes how most studies have overemphasized foreign influence and often ignored internal conflicts between media companies and the state. (2) In most cases in Latin America, out of which Mexico is a clear example, a stronger state led to increased tension between the state and the media owners. Fox states that there were failed efforts by states in the late 1960s and 1970s to nationalize television industries which made possible for the “growing autonomy of media industries and their commercial operations.” (3) As Fox argues, such autonomy was granted in exchange for the media’s “political docility” as in the case of Mexican television (but as Fox argues, in some cases in Latin America the media was asked to actively support authoritarian, non-democratic regimes). (4) Mexico and Brazil have two of the largest media industries in the world that were monopolies at the time of Fox’s 40 study: Televisa (Mexico) and TV Globo (Brazil). Both have significant transnational operations and export their programs to many countries around the world, and they were grounded for decades in what was practically a monopolistic control of the domestic markets (4). In the case of Mexico, the monopoly lasted until the introduction of TV Azteca in the early nineties, and the Mexican television industry has been, since then, a duopoly. Despite the fact that every country has a distinct trajectory, it is important to note that Fox signals two commonalities shared by all Latin American countries such as the strong and strategic presence of the US government after World War II and US networks during the early years of broadcasting. (5) As an example of US direct influence during World War II, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) out of which Nelson Rockefeller (the second son of John D. Rockefeller II) was a principal player, had as its mission on the one hand “to inform public opinion in the Americas about the significance of events that are taking place abroad” and secondly, to counteract propaganda programs by the Axis. (20) Precinradio, a covert subsidiary corporation of the Radio Division (with the Motion Picture Division of the CIAA) was a non-profit membership based organization that according to Rockefeller intended to “to develop and encourage public sympathy with our war objectives on the part of the people of the other American republics… through the development of existing media of communication and the creation of new facilities.” (22) Despite the fact that as Fox notes, its efforts to influence Latin American radio were largely unsuccessful and therefore discontinued in 1945, Precinradio was involved in the stimulation of the Mexican motion picture industry. The agreement provided for the sale of US-made film equipment to 41 the two leading studios in Mexico City, training to Mexican technicians, the production of special projects and cooperation in the distribution of its films. (22, 23) The details of such collaboration between the US and Mexico are traced by Seth Fein in “Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,” and his discussion cautions against the assumption that a US promotion of the Mexican film industry led to an acceptance of the propaganda by audiences. For example, Fein discusses the production and exhibition of the film Juarez and its support by the US and Mexican government as it “refashioned the Monroe Doctrine as an instrument of defense of Mexican sovereignty rather that of US imperialism was discredited at both elite and popular levels.” (172) Not only do I share Fein’s view, but I also think that Fox’s approach is somewhat similar: she refuses to see these developments as “unavoidable result(s) of dependency”. Yet it is important to keep in mind the role that the US played in the development of the Mexican film industry. Latin America media industry scholars such as Elizabeth Fox and John Sinclair are in-line with Joy Hayes’s Radio Nation that details the way by which the development of radio in Mexico set the norms for the development of television in the 1950s. It is also important to note that radio’s relationship with cinema was that of a “mutual collaboration”. According to Hayes, broadcasting (radio and later television) were linked through sound technology and industrial relations that circulated narratives, popular music, and performing artists across the different media. The construction of Churubusco Studios under the direction of Emilio 42 Azcárraga in 1944 further solidified this bond and the Azcárraga family was at the head of Televisa until today. Cinema and radio were dependent on technological developments in the US at the same time that the Mexican government had vested huge importance on mass media as a way to foster national identity and viewed the media “as ideal instruments for articulating a national mythology. (xvii) According to Hayes, the relationship among popular culture, broadcasting, and nationalism in Mexico was shaped by a historical context of “nation building and cultural construction that followed the military phase of the Mexican revolution”. (xiv) This fervent nationalism is in line the analyses of Mexican cinema by scholars such as Joanne Hershfield, Charles Ramirez Berg and Carlos Monsivais who have argued that Mexican Classical cinema “adhered to the narrative paradigm of the classical Hollywood cinema” and that “the founding enterprise of Mexican cinema… [was] the nationalization of Hollywood.” 6 These statements are no surprise, given the heavy involvement of the US in the Mexican film 6 Joanne Hershfield discusses the work by Charles Ramirez Berg in his book Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. In it he argued that classical Mexican cinema adhered to the narrative paradigm of the classical Hollywood cinema, which he defines as being constituted by a linear narrative trajectory and an omniscient, highly communicative, and moderately self-conscious narrative. Carlos Monsivais: “the founding enterprise of Mexican cinema… is the nationalization of Hollywood.” He also noted that many Mexican stars and directors and film technicians were trained in Hollywood, and that many Hollywood genres were assimilated into Mexican cinema.” (qtd. in Hershfield, 7) 43 industry during its Golden Age, and the interest from the State to utilize the media to foster nationalism. In a small time span, television emerges as a communication medium and as a commodity that was central to modernization and “nation building” as it quickly became the dominant medium immediately after the cinema of the Mexican Golden Age begins to decrease in popularity. Revisiting Hayes’ statement that radio served as the model for television, one might also consider the large amount of foreign influence poured into the development of a commercial model as opposed to the European state-owned model of broadcasting. In 1945, AIR was formed (Asociación Interamericana de Radiodifusión/ Interamerican Broadcasting Association) an organization which formalized the links between Latin American entrepreneurs and the US networks NBC and CBS. As opposed to the CIAA that from 1940 to 1946 encouraged the expansion of US networks into Latin America by supplying Spanish and Portuguese language programming, AIR lobbied Latin American governments to follow the “American” (commercial) model of television broadcasting as opposed to the “European” state-owned model. Latin American entrepreneurs aligned themselves with US corporate interests in order to defend themselves from state regulation and, in the 1950s, AIR had a more active intervention with the signing of the “Panama Doctrine” which asked its members to defend their private interests. The influence of AIR can be seen even before television, as the people involved in AIR already exerted significant influence on Latin American communication and broadcasting. 44 Radionovelas have always been at the center of original programming during the early decades of Latin American broadcasting. For instance, the first president of AIR was a radio and television entrepreneur from Cuba’s CMQ, Goar Mestre, whose station was backed by NBC (at the time a division of equipment manufacturer RCA) and was one of the first responsible for exporting radionovelas. (Sinclair 13-14) After being exiled from Cuba, Mestre continued his work in broadcasting in Argentina, under the support of CBS. The vice- president of AIR was the man who built the Televisa “empire”, Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who had built two radio chains in the 1930’s, one affiliated with NBC (XEW) and the other with CBS (XEQ). (Sinclair 14, 34) This collaboration provided Latin American networks with equipment starting with radio in the 1930’s and continuing on to television in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Azcárraga’s channels had been producing radionovelas as well as importing them from Cuba, in addition to promoting local music and artists through his company Radio Programas de Mexico. The extent of the involvement of US broadcast networks played a crucial role in the development of television in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Despite the fact that Mexico had several networks that were competing against each other, pressure from the state to nationalize television broadcasting encouraged the owners of the networks to merge in order to present a united front against the State. The first three television channels in Mexico, channels 4, 5 and Azcárraga’s channel 2 merged to form TSM (Telesistemas Mexicanos) in 1955, the reasoning being that there were too few television sets in Mexico. TSM was under the control of Azcárraga and his partner, channel 4’s original owner Rómulo 45 O’Farrill (the owner of the third network was left out). TSM expanded its operations and production of programming in part thanks to ABC, which provided 25% of the funds. However, US network sponsorship ended in 1971, when the FCC ordered the networks to separate distribution from syndication, CBS and NBC sold off their foreign investments and ABC cut back in their spending. (Sinclair 16) Azcárraga Vidaurreta and O’Farrill merged TSM with another network that started in Monterrey and was its most fierce competitor at the time, TIM (Television Independiente de Mexico) out of fears of further government intervention in the face of increased threats of regulation after the ‘68 Olympics. 7 After the death of Azcárraga Vidaurreta, a triumvirate of sons, Azcárraga Milmo, O’Farrill and former president Aleman’s son took over TSM and formed Televisa (Televisión vía Satélite) in December 1974. (Sinclair 37-39) Andrew Paxman and Claudia Fernández state that in the beginning only the upper classes were able to afford television sets, but in the 1960’s Mexico began to produce its own black and white television sets, which brought the cost down considerably and allowed a greater accessibility to the technology throughout the nation. From 1963 to 1968 the number of homes with a television set is reported to have tripled to 2 million, and the spending on advertising on TV increased from $12 million to 40 million per year (121). Dietrich 7 The battles were regarding the building and operation of satellites. The State, TSM and TIM negotiated and the networks conceded to allow 12% airtime for government programming in commercial networks in exchange for the use of the satellites. However, both TSM and TIM felt threatened by the government’s actions to buy a bankrupt network (Channel 13) and start Television Rural de Mexico. 46 Berwanger briefly notes that the purchase of a television set in most (lower to middle class) private households did not represent an “unacceptable burden.” For most, it represented the single most expensive purchase, “but it’s not excessively costly compared to other purchases such as gas cookers, bicycles or refrigerators.” (315) In the late 1950’s, Mexican television airwaves were dominated by variety, sports and comedy sketch programs. Dramatic programming consisted mainly of teleteatros (“TV- theatres”) that operated in an almost identical fashion to the single-sponsor live plays on early U.S television. These were weekly adaptations of literary works for the screen interpreted by local theater groups. It was not until June 9, 1958 that the first dramatic series went on the air on a daily schedule, giving birth to the telenovela. Senda Prohibida (“the forbidden path”) was sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive, broadcast live and written by Fernanda Villeli (who ended up writing 60 telenovelas in the next 30 years). Between 1958 and 1961, telenovelas replaced teleteatros and dominated primetime programming. It is at the moment of the introduction of television that the decline of the Hollywood-influenced Mexican Golden Age took place and, as Sinclair has noted, the Golden Age of Televisa begins (32). Not only did many artists migrate from cinema to television but Televisa eventually became a privately-owned monopoly that operated similarly to the Hollywood studios prior to the Paramount decree (Sinclair 39). It has been argued that telenovelas, from an industrial point of view, emerged to fulfill a need: to promote the sale of television sets and assure a regular consumption of products for 47 the home in the Mexican middle-class. (Fernandez 74-75) Telenovela production in Mexico was solely controlled by Televisa, since it was a private-owned monopoly. Mexican radio, cinema and television industries struggled in maintaining a relationship with the government and often switched alliances between the US and the government in order to achieve commercial success. An example of this can be seen as late as 1982 with the Mexican government’s attempts to control the development of satellite systems in Mexico. Azcárraga Milmo, the head of Televisa at the time, overstepped the government and asked his US associates to apply for an international satellite in the region in order for him to control it. (Sinclair 40) The development of the telenovela format and the popularity of the Cinderella genre must be seen in this context of the industrial history noted above and in the tensions between the Mexican government, US influence, and privately-owned Televisa. If the industrial roots of the telenovela are important to consider, its aesthetic origins are also relevant (and, of course, embedded in this industrial context.) The aesthetic dimensions of the telenovela are rooted in radio and Mexican cinema of the Golden Age. Cuban radionovelas from the 1930s and 1940s that adapted the melodramatic style of 19 th Century writers such as Dickens and Balzac are commonly cited to be the main influence to Mexican telenovelas, coupled with American radio soaps from the 30s that were created by American companies to promote their products. (Fernandez 74-75) The first country to adapt radionovelas to television was Cuba beginning in 1951. However, after the revolution in 1959, many of the writers, who were predominantly middle-class women, abandoned the island and started working for Mexican, Venezuelan, Brazilian and other Latin American 48 television industries. Two of the most well-known and remembered exile writers are Caridad Bravo Adams who worked for Tele Sistemas Mexicanos (TSM) that later became Televisa in the 1970s, and Delia Fiallo, another famous writer, who produced dozens of hits for Venezuela’s Venevisión, Colombia’s RCTV and eventually Mexico’s Televisa. Two other Cuban exiles who are crucial to the Cinderella genre didn’t enjoy the same fame: Yolanda Vargas Dulche and Inés Rodena. In both cases, Televisa, and in particular telenovela producer Valentín Pimstein, bought their body of work and made a career out of refritos (“re- fried” versions or remakes/adaptations). (Fernandez 76) The Cinderella genre’s popularity did not solidify until the mid-sixties when television as a commodity was more accessible to the middle and lower middle classes. (Fernandez 123) Authors Claudia Fernández and Andrew Paxman claim that Cinderella telenovelas were a response to the increased attention that the new format received from the government and the Catholic Church. A law was passed in 1960 prohibiting content that “went against good customs.” According to the authors, the law did not actively censor television but encouraged self-censorship. Additionally, Fernández and Paxman claim that this generated an alliance between the government, the church and Televisa at a time when rural to urban migration was growing and there was great social unrest due to union and student protests. It is through this type of historiography that Cinderella genre telenovelas become synonymous with conservative values and social repression. In 1966 the first Cinderella telenovela to break ratings records was Maria Isabel, produced by Valentín Pimstein based on Yolanda Vargas Dulche’s short novel of the same name. The telenovela aired on TSM, 49 and scored a very large audience (based on door to door surveys administered by the TSM, 54% of the homes watched the soap, which superseded Corazón Salvaje, Ernesto Alonso’s adaptation of Caridad Bravo Adams’ epic romance) (126). Pimstein’s name soon became almost synonymous with the genre despite the fact that he also produced popular and well- known children telenovelas, such as Mundo de Juguete (“world of toys”, 1974), Chispita (“little spark”, 1982), and Carrusel (1989) among others. Pimstein would tape episodes a few weeks in advance from their air date in order to be able to change the script according to audience reactions. This was a practice employed by Colgate-Palmolive with the first telenovela Senda Prohibida 8 which Pimstein followed throughout his career. The historical importance of the Cinderella genre in relation to the development of the telenovela is often attributed to the fact that it is believed that this type of telenovela was a response to pressure from the State and the Catholic Church to produce noncontroversial programming in the 1960s. And it was in Televisa’s best interest to appease the government in terms of programming since the network was in the midst of tensions with the State over the influence of the US corporations. It is precisely in the 1960s and 1970s that the Cinderella genre crystallized and the political discourse of “dependency theory” emerged as a 8 This practice was imported from the US by Procter & Gamble that conducted focus groups to judge the reception of soap operas by their audience. For more on the industrial history of US soap operas see Robert C. Allen’s Speaking of Soap Operas University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill & London, 1985 50 prominent counter-response to an ideological framework of development and became “the most influential paradigm throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s”. (21) Having laid out all these ingredients, we’re now able to start mixing them together in order to understand why the Cinderella genre has become emblematic of Mexican telenovelas. The myth of the Cinderella genre itself seems to mediate the tensions between the discourses of development and dependency that shaped political, entrepreneurial, and artistic discourse at the time. A Mexican Cinderellas is disenfranchised, vulnerable, and innocent victim of an unjust society. Her upward mobility is not provided by her nation state, but is entirely dependent (literally) on the goodwill of a guardian, a wealthy parent. Further, this aid is facilitated by encounters that are always the result of happenstance (and not institutional intervention). Chapter 2 explores in greater detail the ways in which this genre mediates and undermines nationalist discourse. But it is important to understand the significance of this genre’s myth in relation to the political and economic context out of which it emerges. This generic iteration of the telenovela format perfectly mediates its historical moment of origin. Cinderella stories present a non-controversial, seemingly benign narrative of a disenfranchised girl who undergoes a fantastic transformation at a time when the United Nations was dreaming of a similar fantasy. The UN proclaimed the 1960s as the “Development Decade” in December 1961, as a result of a study that found the policies and efforts from the preceding decade as ineffective and that steps needed to be taken: “to sustain support for the measures required on the part of both developed and developing countries to accelerate progress towards self-sustaining growth of the economy of individual 51 nations and their social advancement” (17). The objectives of this “Development Decade” called for the achievement of self-sustaining economies, the elimination of illiteracy, hunger and disease, among other things. As the UN dreamed up the “Development Decade”, that proposed an objective of “minimum annual rate of growth of aggregate national income of 5 percent at the end of the decade,” Cinderella telenovelas were churning out their own fantasies of development. Both UN and Cinderella narratives are quite literally about development, growth, maturity. However, Cinderella telenovelas add another layer of complexity by focusing on the difficulties for a woman to become the citizen that she is called to be, an aspect that is completely absent from the logic offered by developmental ideology. Just as political discourse emphasizes the temporal aspect to modernization by calling for the need to accelerate progress, the telenovela format’s narrative structure, with its emphasis on its months-long “middle” of an unpredictable duration, generates pleasure out of the process and the expectation of its promise of a happy ending. This echoes the desire of the UN to highlight the importance of the “economic and social development [of] the economically less developed countries” as being “basic for the attainment of international peace and security…” In other words, the economic and social development of countries that are less economically advanced is necessary for us all to live “happily ever after.” The Cinderella telenovelas at once acknowledge and complicate these very desires. 52 V. The Telenovela: A Soap Opera with Closure Because of their “happy ending”, telenovelas can be seen as an aesthetic hybrid between soap operas and classical cinema that derives from the industrial history described in the preceding pages, a history that illustrates that Televisa operated similarly to a vertically integrated Hollywood studio and that many Mexican cinema professionals continued their careers on television after the decline of the Mexican Golden Age. Telenovelas emerged out of the intervention/sponsorship of US companies such as Colgate-Palmolive, and US networks. However, the significance of the narrative structure of the telenovela cannot be explained by this type of history alone. It is also necessary to consider the political implications of the pleasures obtained from the merger of both narrative forms (classical and soap opera narratives). American soap opera scholarship and Latin American work on the telenovela provide useful arguments in an attempt to explain the popularity of such formats. Tune in tomorrow, not in order to find out the answers, but to see what further complications will defer the resolutions and introduce new questions. Thus the narrative, by placing ever more complex obstacles between desire and its fulfillment, makes anticipation of an end and end in itself. (Modleski 36) The above quote describes one of the main pleasures that arise from watching a telenovela. Similar to her sister, the soap opera, the telenovela typically airs Monday through Friday with complications that seem to have no end in sight. However, as opposed to the soap opera, telenovelas do have closure, and, just as having no ending was crucial for Modleski’s argument in differentiating soaps from classical cinema as a “feminine narrative form,” my 53 argument relies on the dynamic interplay of anticipatory pleasure, a desire for an ending and the climactic termination of that prolonged sense of expectations. There is no set duration for a telenovela as each may last anywhere from three to six months to even twelve months. This formula succeeds in generating expectation while at the same time allowing for audiences to obtain closure. As I mentioned earlier, Tania Modleski has explained that neo- Marxist criticism of the 1970s argued that most of the ideological work in narratives relies on the representation of chaos, and on order being restored in the end according to dominant ideology. She writes: “this design implies a return to order, for expectation is disorder” and since soap operas (at least the successful ones) do not end, “truth for women do[es] not lie at the end of expectation but in expectation.” (36) The ending of the telenovela is in many ways an economic necessity, since these are “sold” throughout Latin America and distributed in similar ways as films and other US programming. However, despite the great benefits and critical insights of 1970s neo-Marxist criticism 9 , it is often the case that the “ending” is over privileged in order to “account” for the effectiveness of their ideological work and no attention is placed at the significance of the narrative’s duration. In other words, it is understandable that when Modleski wrote her article it was a necessity to make the ending sound ideologically “evil” in an effort to define it and defend it in relation to the over-privileging of cinema. That assumes that the television 9 See Christine Gledhill’s discussion of 1970s Neo-Marxism in Home is Where the Heart Is, pp. 8-9 54 audience, the women that Modleski is implicitly referring to, have a choice, just like she does, to either watch a soap opera or “go the movies”. In the case of Mexican audiences, as it is the case in many other Latin American countries such as my own, El Salvador, movie-going is usually reserved for the middle to upper middle and higher classes that can afford to pay for a movie ticket. In nations where the majority of the populations live in poverty, broadcast television and radio have been the primary form of mass entertainment as it only requires a one-time limited investment in a television set. As I suggested earlier, most of the pleasure in the telenovela lies in prolonged suffering and conflict. This is often a result of the repeated interruption, violation and rupture of the protagonists’ love relationship. Even though some of these events are mostly due to “chance”, the bulk of their suffering is instilled by a villainess (often more than one) who is almost always an upper class woman. The narrative therefore emphasizes class conflict episode after episode throughout the duration of the narrative. The ideological work regarding the restoration of order in the end must not be overvalued since the resolution of conflicts that are several months long usually come to an abrupt end in the final episode. Yet, I also argue that the ending most not be “undervalued” as it fulfills an important function in societies that are constantly imagined to be in a seemingly eternal process of economic development. The resolution of conflicts that have been developing for months come to an end in the last few episodes: in fact, more often than not in the last hour of airtime (the only truly “happy” moments in a telenovela can even take place in the very last segment which usually lasts about five minutes). The short duration of the ending, compared 55 to the overall duration of the telenovela, clearly points to a pleasure in expectation that has been inherited from the soap opera, but the fact that there seems to be pleasure in closure begs us to ask the question: Why an end to the telenovela? The answer lies in the format of the telenovela as it relies on both generating expectation and providing closure, both of which are equally important. Let us take the example of the Cinderella genre. As I mentioned earlier, the protagonist’s transformation may happen anywhere from the middle to just weeks before the end of the telenovela. In the following chapter, I will discuss the genre in greater detail, including an analysis of the different types of transformations and how the changes in storyline that follow her transformation allows each Cinderella telenovela to tell distinct stories. As I discussed with Disney’s Cinderella, her marriage will guarantee wealth and economic stability for “ever after”, and her transformation is a temporary one provided by her fairy God mother. The music box that presented a particular take on the story allows us to visualize how it is possible to privilege not only Cinderella’s transformation but also the importance and pleasure of the narrative’s “middle”. Cinderella telenovelas present female protagonists who obtain their wealth most often through recognition of blood ties or “divine intervention” (luck or charity) and not by heterosexual marriage (the ideological implications of this will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2). The ending is virtually the same for all Cinderella telenovelas showcasing two distinct features: first, the death and/or punishment of all villains (sometime one might repent and change their ways) and second, the romantic union of the protagonists (often marriage, re-marriage, or reconciliation). 56 VI. Fantasies of (under)Development Jesús Martín-Barbero, one of the most prominent theorists on Latin American telenovelas poses a question: “Couldn’t that be the secret connection between melodrama and the history of the Latin American subcontinent?” (27) In relation to that question he asks: Couldn’t that be the reason why no other genres have had the same level of success and appeal? […] Whether in the form of tango, telenovela or “Mexican cinema,” melodrama has an appeal to the collective imaginary and there is no possible access to historical memory that does not go through that imaginary mode. (28) I would like to extend Martín-Barbero’s question regarding the overall appeal of melodrama in Latin America, by rephrasing his question to: Why has the telenovela format been so successful across Latin America and other nations such as those that were part of the USSR, and the Philippines? Generally speaking, the vast majority of nations were the telenovela format has been very successful are in some way imagined in political discourse as not having fully achieved modernization. In other words, these nations are seen as being in the process of achieving the same level of modernity as first world nations. As previously discussed, the telenovela format offers a unique type of pleasure as a result of its programming structure that provides closure while at the same time presenting a narrative that extends over a period of months and that generates expectation based on the unpredictability of its duration. As I argued before, the pleasure that arises from inhabiting the process of an extended narrative, not 57 knowing when it will end, is remarkably similar to the ways in which underdeveloped nations are imagined to be in a process of modernization. Such process assumes a notion of linear progress similar to classical narratives (such as the stages of economic growth discussed in chapters 2 and 3), yet the material reality is very different as development seems a lot more complicated than the way it is imagined in economic discourse. Telenovelas present an alternative to the linearity proposed by classical cinemas and modernization theories through their structuring around interruptions, constant complications, reversals of fortune, etc. (a quality that is very similar to the soap opera). Unlike traditional end-oriented fiction and drama, soap operas offer process without progression, not a climax but a resolution, but miniclimaxes… [The] soap opera is the drama of perepetia without anagnorisis… It deals forever in reversals but never portrays the irreversible change which traditionally marks the passage from ignorance into true knowledge. (Modleski 43) Modleski responds to the male critic cited above, who was condemning the soap opera, by stating that “narrative pleasure can mean very different things to men and women” (45) and that soap operas represent a type of anti-progress: “…these constant interruptions and deflections provide consolation for the housewife’s sense of missed opportunities, by illustrating for her the enormous difficulty of getting from desire to fulfillment…” (44) She adds that “in direct contrast to the male narrative film, in which the climax functions to resolve difficulties, the mini-climaxes of the soap opera function to introduce difficulties and to complicate rather than simplify characters’ lives” (45) She concludes by claiming that soap operas represent a form of “collective fantasy”, or a “fantasy of community.” (46) 58 We might expand on Modleski’s articulation of the soap opera as “anti-progress” by linking the format’s emergence to the time when developmental ideology circulated widely as a way to conceive of global relations. Emmanuel Wallerstein in his chapter “On Progress and Transitions” (from Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization) claims that the ideology of progress has been central to Capitalism accounting for its dominance since its emergence as a reigning ideology in the nineteenth century. (97) Capitalism positions itself as an “inevitable trend”, as the official replacement of feudalism, and posits the latter as inferior in order to account for its superiority. Marxist ideology also had the same structure, where it pointed to the contradictions in Capitalism which would inevitably result in a worldwide worker’s revolution. As Wallerstein notes, “the Marxist embrace of an evolutionary model of progress has been an enormous trap… While the idea of progress justified socialism, it justified capitalism too.” (98) Therefore, it is relevant to consider the pleasure found in the prolonged structure of the telenovela format in the context of Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when many countries were undergoing civil wars sponsored by the US and the USSR, both promising freedom and modernization. The appeal of a format that relays stories in a way that deviates from the linearity of classical cinema, developmental and socialist ideology, may point to skepticism in such narratives of progress. In a context where both capitalist ideology and socialist movements accepted the idea of economic underdevelopment effectively generating a state where countries and their people are constantly imagined as being “in development” and expecting modernization, there is something to be valued about the pleasure of a prolonged expectation coming to an end. The ending of the telenovela therefore serves to negotiate between the inability to subscribe, 59 believe in or trust any given narrative of progress and modernization, the frustration involved with what is often perceived to be perpetual expectation of development. The ending becomes a necessary source of pleasure in its ability to comfort audiences by providing a sense of closure, an end to progress without progression. Dependency theory was the logic that fueled many of the revolutionary struggles throughout the Americas starting with Cuba in the 1950s and most recently (20 years ago), Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s. So, on the one hand, we have capitalist development that emphasized slow growth and progress through economic aid and inevitable modernization, and, on the other, a counter argument that still believed in progress and modernization but through the rejection of capitalist processes of development. The narrative structure of the telenovela mediates these contradictions by emphasizing pleasure in extended expectation and unpredictable duration that resonate with both premises of development and dependency theories, while at the same time providing closure to a narrative that echoes the seemingly endless expectation of a state of modernization that both theories fail to provide. Plainly put, the telenovela narrative allows audiences to “have it both ways”, by presenting a narrative structure of unpredictable yet finite duration. This structure represents a form of skepticism or resistance to the linear narratives of progress and revolution that would bring about a society’s transformation. Such understandings have shaped our views of global relations for the larger part of the 20 th century. At the same time one could read the quick “ending” as validating the very linearity of those narratives that the pleasure in the telenovela’s middle seems to undermine. I choose to see it differently. I believe that the 60 ending serves as a necessary fantasy that allows a temporary transcendence of the misery, violence and poverty brought about by the loss of hope in such linear narratives of progress of providing whatever necessary change to improve a person’s life. Ann E. Kaplan has stated in regards to the melodramatic form, “If melodrama is indeed like psychoanalysis a ‘sense-making system which man has elaborated to recuperate meanings in the world,’ we need to assess the kinds of meanings it recuperates.” (Kaplan 66) I would like to echo Kaplan’s questions and ask: What kind of sense-making system is the telenovela? And what meanings is it recuperating? In order to begin to answer this question, we can examine what would seem like an ambivalence of the telenovela structure, one that generates pleasure in expectation, disorder and “anti-progress,” while at the same time providing absolute closure through the deployment of an extended narrative, that even after countless complications, all is resolved. Rather than seeing the ending of the telenovela as strictly complicit with dominant ideology (as many critics have done), the ending might instead be understood to provide a fantasy of transcendence by allowing narratives of an unpredictable length come to an end, rubbing against the grain of dominant ideological paradigms of economic underdevelopment. The significance of this fantasy of transcendence in the context of underdevelopment is heightened if we also consider that these dramas usually air Monday through Friday. This inevitably links the experience of everyday life to the progress of a telenovela narrative. Jesús Martín-Barbero, in his response to a common critique of telenovelas that claims that they are 61 far removed from the reality of their audiences (leading to a dismissal of the dramas as pure escapism), argues that telenovelas actually mediate the “time” of everyday life (“cotidianidad”) with the story’s time. According to him, the story’s time is the time of the narrative and the time of its production. However, the story’s time is also the time of history, the time of the nation and the world, of those events that intervene in seemingly indirect ways in the time of the individual and the community. Martín-Barbero builds on Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy where he argues that not only populations in rural areas but working classes in the city experience events only when they affect the family. Martín-Barbero then explains that a war is therefore experienced as that event “when the uncle died” and the capital as the place “where the sister-in-law lives”. For it’s the “neighborhoods” (“vecindaje”) forming in large cities due to constant migration from rural areas (as a result of precarious economic situations) that give rise to this new form of extended family. In this manner, family and neighborhood become the primary way to socialize and experience the contradictions and ambiguities present in contemporary life. Martín-Barbero conceives of life in the city as anachronistic because of transformations by capitalism to work and leisure and the commercialization of the time at home and on the streets. It is this anachronism that makes melodrama necessary in Latin America because it mediates between the time of life and that of the story. The time of life refers to a majority of people denied participation in the public sphere (“socialidad negada”), with limited possibilities for economic and political advancement but who are still culturally alive. The time of the story allows them to recognize themselves and through a “melodramatization of everything secretly avenge the abstraction imposed by the commercialization of life and cultural dispossession”. (27-28) 62 For Martín-Barbero, audience’s “recognition” in the narrative is the crucial aspect that allows for the effective mediation between the time experienced in the everyday life and the time of the nation/telenovela. His argument regarding the telenovela format mediating abstracted notions of time (between the time of the nation, world and the individual and community) is of importance. He points out that melodrama is all about the “drama of recognition” 10 such as “that by the father or mother of their lost son…” and what mobilizes most melodramas is a desire to be recognized. Specifically, the telenovela, as seen by the disenfranchised in the Latin American subcontinent, recognizes and acknowledges their alienation from the nation state by allowing them to relate and connect on a daily basis to the different stories that it offers. There is a special relation between this characteristic of the telenovela format to the Cinderella genre if one takes into consideration the political context of the historical emergence of the Cinderella genre at the time of the development of the telenovela format discussed previously in this chapter. If the telenovela format allows audiences to connect with stories by linking the time of everyday life with the time of the story, Cinderella narratives explicitly recognize and articulate the very process of alienation from the nation state suffered by the disenfranchised as well as its eventual transcendence. Of equal 10 Martín-Barbero builds upon a 1974 essay by Peter Brooks which he later incorporates into his full study: The Melodramatic Imagination. 63 importance is the fact that all these stories effectively foreground the centrality of gender, race, and class to the experience of alienation. The inferiority associated with the conception of underdevelopment carries with it important racial, gendered and generational identities that are implicit in its economic formulations and become explicit in these narratives. For example, the gendered and generational implications of a young, immature girl who needs the help of a wealthy, loving adult in order to grow into a mature citizen clearly evokes the way in which Latin American nations are imagined in developmental discourse. The gendered and racial implications of the Cinderella narrative will be explored further in chapter 2. In chapter 3, I will discuss the ways in which Latin American people are infantilized in Mexican television comedies of the same period in addition to the ways in which different forms of masculinity are imagined to respond to this oppressive, feminized, and infantilized state of underdevelopment. In the case of the Cinderella genre as it unfolds within the telenovela format, the protagonist’s transformation allows for a more specific narrative of modernization: the transcendence of a poor uneducated girl into a sophisticated woman. The process of transformation takes place alongside the suffering of the protagonist throughout the airing of the story within this specific form of a daily, serialized televisual format. This effectively parallels Martin-Barbero’s argument regarding the ways in which the daily serial structure of the telenovela allows for rural communities to “experience the time of the nation”. If one takes into account the pleasure of inhabiting the seemingly never-ending middle of a telenovela, we can extend his argument and conclude that the pleasure in the duration, 64 interruptions, mini-climaxes, reversals, etc. of the telenovela represents a distrust of linear developmental ideology and dependency theory and a willful manipulation of a flexible temporality that subtly pushes against the imagined linearity of time under capitalism. VII. Concluding with a Kiss Figure 1.17: Luis Alberto brings a TV for Mariana as a gift Figure 1.18: Luis Alberto grabs Mariana’s arm Figure 1.19: Luis Alberto steals a kiss Figure 1.20: Mariana succumbs to Luis Alberto’s kiss I’d like to close this chapter with the first kiss that Luis Alberto “stole” from Mariana in Los Ricos También Lloran from 1979. As you can see, this happens shortly after he gives her a 65 television set as a gift, and as you may imagine, this was a defining moment in the narrative, as it started off their romance. I believe that the fact that their first kiss happened in front of a television set demonstrates the importance of television as commodity in Mexico, and it perfectly embodies my argument regarding the way in which Cinderella narratives mediated the politics that surrounded their emergence. This scene is a clear example of the way in which this telenovela is explicitly acknowledging the importance of television in society. This Cinderella story is always presented as undeniably being one of Mexico’s most popular television exports (said to have circled the globe by airing in over 72 nations) and as a cornerstone in Mexican television history, which makes the significance of this scene even greater. But for me, this scene is important for another reason. That is, this is the scene that starts off a romance that would make Mariana suffer more than she ever did when she was poor, to the point of her going insane and ending in a mental institution (literally, hence the title, “the rich also cry”), and this is only half of the story. Mariana’s story is pretty unique, as she is the only Mexican Cinderella whose “happily ever after” was extremely delayed within the story’s time, compared to other Cinderella narratives, that despite their torrid love affairs, always provide a “happy ending” with a catholic wedding at a church. The musical ornament that opened the chapter reinterprets the ending of Walt Disney’s Cinderella by privileging her transformation, a much happier moment in that narrative, in order to support the claim that “she lived happily ever after” without the need of a prince. Similar to the ornament, this chapter demonstrated how the transformation of the Mexican 66 Cinderella presents a fantasy of development, where she transcends a state of poverty and labor exploitation that is thematically linked to political narratives of progress, modernization and development. But just as the ornament froze her transformation, I end this chapter with the beginning of Mariana’s more complicated problems to emphasize how this fantasy of transcendence or development cannot be separated from the telenovela format’s unpredictable duration, as this plays a crucial role in articulating a specific logic of desire that is the result of a modernizing discourse that imagines and articulates nations, societies, and their peoples as being in a constant process of development. This signals the complexity of the telenovela format and the Cinderella genre, and the possible ways in which these articulate a resistance to perfectly linear narratives of progress and growth that have failed to yield any results. 67 Works Cited Baldwin, Kate. “Montezuma’s Revenge.” Ed. Allen, Robert C. To be Continued… Soap Operas Around the World. London and New Cork, Routledge 1995 Barbero-Martin, Jesús y Sonia Muñoz, eds. Televisión y Melodrama. Bogota, Tercer Mundo Editores: 1992 Berwanger, Dietrich. “The Third World” (Chapter 13), Television: An International History. Ed. Anthony Smith, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995. Fernandez, Claudia and Andrew Paxman. El Tigre: Emilio Azcarraga y su Imperio Televisa. Mexico City, Grijalbo: 2000 Fox, Elizabeth. Latin American Broadcasting: From Tango to Telenovela. Luton, UK, University of Luton Press: 1997 Fregoso, Rosa Linda. “Devils and Ghosts, Mothers and Immigrants: A Critical Retrospective of the Works of Lourdes Portillo,” Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films, ed. Rosa Linda Fregoso, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001 Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI Publishing, 1987. Hayes, Joy Elizabeth. Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico 1920-1950. Tucson, The University of Arizona Press: 2000 Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992. 68 Kuehnast, Kathleen. “From pioneers to entrepreneurs: Young women, consumerism, and the 'world picture' in Kyrgyzstan” Central Asian Survey Vol. 17, No. 4, Oxford, Dec 1998 accessed online Lopez-Pumarejo, Tomas. Aproximacion a la Telenovela: Dallas/Dynasty/Falcon Crest. Catedra: Madrid, 1987 Modleski, Tania. “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas.” Feminist Television Criticism. Ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, et. al. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1997. Moran, Albert. “The Pie and the Crust: Television Program Formats.” The Television Studies Reader. Ed. Robert C. Allen, et. al. Routledge: New York, 2004 Noriega, Chon. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sinclair, John. Latin American Television: A Global View. Oxford University Press, 1999 Tufte, Thomas. Living with the Rubbish Queen: Telenovelas, Culture and Modernity in Brazil. University of Lutton Press: Lutton, 2000 United Nations. “United Nations Development Decade: An Programme International for International Cooperation.” UN.org, 1084 th Plenary Meeting, 19 Dec 1961, Location <<http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/167/63/IMG/NR01 6763.pdf>> Waisbord, Silvio. “McTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats.” Television: The Critical View Sixth Edition. Ed. Horace Newcomb. Oxford University Press: New York, 2007 Wallerstein Immanuel. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. London and New York. Verso: 2003 69 Chapter II Diamonds in the Rough: Gender, Nation & Domestication in Cinderella Telenovelas I. Introduction We have discussed the origins of the Cinderella genre within Mexican television practices after World War II, and I have argued that the telenovela’s format effectively mediates the temporal component in developmental discourse (progress without progression) by generating pleasure out of the expectation that results from a telenovela’s unpredictable timing. The Cinderella genre’s myth of transformation is strikingly similar to the position in which nations that are economically underdeveloped are placed within narratives of development. Furthermore, the origins, development and general understanding of the telenovela in Mexico are inextricably linked to the emergence of the Cinderella genre, arguably the most critically hated, popularly watched and least understood telenovela genre. In this chapter, I will concentrate on analyzing the ways in which the most prominent conventions of this type of telenovelas mediate gender, racial and class identities in relation to Mexican post revolutionary nationalist discourse. The first convention that I’ll discuss is that of class conflict which usually takes place between the female protagonist who is poor and uneducated and a wealthy, ambitious woman who utilizes her sexuality to get whatever 70 she wants. Next, I discuss the convention that earned these types of telenovelas their pejorative label “Cinderella”: the transformation of the protagonist from a “savage” girl (as she is called in these dramas) to a sophisticated citizen who poses no threat to the patriarchal order. I discuss the implications of this convention in relation to two contexts: first, the local (or national) and, secondly, the global. I will discuss how and why these discourses (the national and the global) have tried to eliminate racial difference and how the Cinderella genre continually resuscitates the centrality of race that is implicit in both nationalist and capitalist ideologies of progress and development. As I argued in the last chapter, the convention of transformation has important implications on post World War II globalization discourse as it presents a “fantasy of development” that is in dialogue with politics of modernization. This chapter seeks to expand that discussion by analyzing the complex ways in which one of the most popular telenovela genres mediates both sets of discourses- post revolutionary Mexican nationalist discourse on the one hand and global developmental ideologies on the other. In terms of the global, these Cinderella narratives highlight global racial hierarchies that are implicit in developmental ideology. At the same time, this convention undermines local nationalist discourse on two fronts: first, by pointing out the ways by which power continues to be maintained through blood ties (continuing from the colonial era) and secondly, by critiquing neoliberal governments that promote free-trade and the withdrawal of welfare as ways to procure the basic needs of all citizens. 71 II. Class Conflict: Battling Femininities Class conflict is the primary source of antagonism in the vast majority of Cinderella telenovelas. The villainess is the character (or convention) that is utilized to facilitate confrontations between the rich and the undereducated protagonist. The villainesses in most telenovelas of this genre are wealthy, educated and ambitious, and they are almost always seeking to marry the male protagonist who is the uneducated girl’s love interest in order to increase their fortune. She is typically in her twenties, and will characterize herself as a modern, sophisticated and worldly woman with less moral scruples than the female protagonist; it is usually she who utters the most degrading insults towards the female protagonist and her “class of people” by calling her “savage”, “filthy”, “riff raff”, etc. There is also a tendency for the female antagonist to have the support of her future mother-in-law, who in some telenovelas will have a change in consciousness and support the female protagonist, while in other cases she will displace the younger villainess as the main antagonist after the latter fails to marry her son and will take direct steps to literally annihilate the protagonist, effectively becoming her main threat. Despite this, the protagonist in most telenovelas of this genre tends to rebel against such offenses often creating verbal and physical confrontations between the classes. This rebelliousness is presented as the result of a lack of education. Supporting characters and the 72 male protagonist himself will normally comment as to how her upbringing is to blame for her “savagery”. Her acts of physical aggression against the rich are presented as the result of the protagonist’s inability to defend herself verbally; some characters refer to her as a “savage but noble in nature” because her character is believed to be morally conservative, noble, and without undue ambition. Echoing and reinforcing this, her face will often be superimposed over that of the Virgin of Guadalupe or she will be depicted praying to her statue very frequently. This latter convention is more prominent than the physical or verbal fights between female protagonist and antagonist. The following negative critique of the genre highlights how the use of the Virgin of Guadalupe is so common that it has become an easy way to stereotype the genre. At the same time, it speaks to the way in which the stories organize conflict around binaries. What really mattered was not the scenery, lighting, or costume which always placed Pimstein’s (the producer’s) work below budget; the lack of psychological complexity also didn’t matter together with the issue of whether or not the acting was believable or not (realist or excessive). What mattered was that the heroines, like Maria Isabel –and the feminine audience that watched her closely- were frequently shaken up emotionally and moved to tears, elements which Pimstein liked to foreground. Equally important is the fact their faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe allowed them to endure their suffering and believe in love. (Fernández and Paxman 127) It is not uncommon for most of the elitist, negative critiques of the genre to depend upon a complete reduction of the complex social and aesthetic history of the genre and their 73 audience to a few stereotyped conventions. This critique in particular imagines the large telenovela audience as passive dupes, and their pleasures, beliefs and convictions are trivialized. Despite the elitism, the quote above highlights two important features of the drama; the first is that “psychological complexity” is absent, and the second, that the drama has no aspirations (or pretentions) to be considered a work of art. The “lack of psychological complexity” generates two dichotomies that place issues of class and gender against each other. The first binary emphasizes class conflict by presenting clear divisions between the rich and the poor. The second binary contrasts two distinct modes of femininity, one embodied by the female protagonist that does not directly threaten the patriarchal order and the antagonist whose “modern” conceptions of what it means to be a woman continually threaten traditional norms. Figure 2.1: Leonela’s Trap (a) Figure 2.2: Leonela’s Trap (b) 74 Figure 2.3: Leonela’s Trap (c) Figure 2.4: Leonela’s Trap (d) Figure 2.5: Leonela’s Trap (e) Figure 2.6: Leonela’s Trap (f) Figure 2.7: Leonela’s Trap (g) Figure 2.8: Leonela’s Trap (h) The preceding images illustrate a scene that depicts class antagonism in the form of the two types of femininity in the telenovela Rosa Salvaje (1987). Figures 2.1 through 2.3 illustrate 75 the plan by the villainess (Leonela) to set up the protagonist (Rosa) to find Leonela kissing Rosa’s man in order to break-up their union. Figures 2.4 through 2.8 show the actual confrontation, where Rosa throws a beverage in Leonela’s face (Fig. 2.6) and the verbal confrontation that followed shortly thereafter where the latter calls Rosa a “savage” and “low class,” among other insults (Figures 2.7 and 2.8). Another example is from a Cinderella revenge narrative, Marimar (1994). In this telenovela, the girl, Marimar, falls in love with Sergio, the son of a wealthy land-owner in a coastal village. Sergio, a soccer player who is continually traveling, is annoyed by the pressures from her father and mother-in-law (Angelica) to marry and settle down. He decides to cause some havoc in his father’s hacienda by marrying Marimar who, as every other Cinderella, is uneducated, rude but at the same time, very innocent and noble. Soon after Marimar moves in, Angelica wastes no time in trying to get her out of the house. Eventually, Sergio grows tired of Marimar and the situation in the house and decides to leave town. After hearing the news, Marimar becomes depressed and tries to commit suicide. Soon after recovering and still feeling depressed, she is humiliated by Angelica when she asks Marimar to pick up a bracelet that belonged to Sergio’s mom from the mud, using her teeth, and Marimar reluctantly agrees (figures 2.9 through 2.12). 76 Figure 2.9: Marimar’s Humiliation (a) Figure 2.10: Marimar’s Humiliation (b) Figure 2.11 Marimar’s Humiliation (c) Figure 2.12: Marimar’s Humiliation (d) Angelica calls the police and accuses Marimar of stealing the bracelet. While in jail, Angelica asks her handyman to burn the shack where Marimar’s parents live in order to scare them so they would leave town (and take Marimar with them after she gets out of the county jail). However, the grandparents become trapped and die in the fire while Marimar is still in jail. The death of Marimar’s grandparents forces her to move to the city and begin working as a maid at her father’s house (neither of them know about their relation). He sponsors her 77 transformation (which will be discussed later on in this chapter), after which she begins to plot a way to avenge the death of her grandparents and the abuse that she suffered at the hands of Angelica and Sergio. In one scene towards the end of the telenovela, Marimar has got possession of Angelica’s hacienda and tells her that if she wants it back, she needs to pick it up from the mud, effectively recreating the scene that happened earlier in the narrative (figures 2.13 and 2.14). Figure 2.13: Marimar’s Revenge (a) Figure 2.14: Marimar’s Revenge (b) This reversal of fortune is typical of most Cinderella narratives, stories that assure the viewer that “justice will prevail” and that all of the protagonist’s sufferings will be redeemed. This is one way by which the two sets of binaries that are set up by the story are resolved by the narrative. The villainess is usually punished, and the protagonist, through her transformation, becomes an ideal female citizen who is able to fully participate in modern society. She keeps her traditional values and noble character and now desires to help the needy by being 78 charitable; after all, she experienced unjust disenfranchisement and marginalization first- hand and feels responsible for those she left behind. These two binaries (rich vs. poor and traditional vs. modern) are resolved in part by the elimination of the corrupt woman (the villainess) and the transformation/“polishing” of the protagonist. The transformation of the protagonist will be discussed later. For now, let’s focus on the female antagonist. One cannot have an entirely conservative read on the role of the female antagonist. Feminist scholarship on the soap opera in the United States allows us the chance to rescue her despite her racist and classist ways. The role of the villainess is one of the features of the telenovela that are shared with the Anglo genre. Tania Modleski explained how in the case of American soap operas, the villainess often empowers herself through characteristics which are usually deployed against women (e.g.: hysteria and pregnancy). Modleski characterized the villainess as the only character the spectator is allowed to hate while at the same time allowing the spectator to see own her hidden desires in action since “the villainess seizes those aspects of a woman’s life which normally render her helpless and tries to turn them into weapons for manipulating other characters.” (40) An example of this is pregnancy. “The villainess thus reverses male/female roles: anxieties about conception are transferred to the male” (41). Modleski used the term “internal contestation” as a way to account for the possibility that the identification of the audience with the villainess may not be an entirely 79 comfortable one, and her plans must be thwarted or she must be punished. Virtually all villainesses are strong, determined women navigating a society that typically oppresses them. Furthermore, the antagonist is continually trying to disrupt the heterosexual union between the two protagonists 1 . Despite the fact that the purpose of the villainess is usually to marry the male protagonist herself (Angelica is an exception), it is quite explicit that marriage to her does not necessarily represent “true love”. In most cases, such as Leonela in Rosa Salvaje, the villainess will begin by saying that she always had a “crush” on the male protagonist which is why she is fighting to conquer his love, but as the story develops, she will state how her hatred for the female protagonist becomes stronger than her love for the protagonist, therefore placing her hatred for the heterosexual union as her primary concern to destroy the female protagonist. Furthermore, her plans do not only attempt to thwart the heterosexual union but also the resolution of class conflict through the marriage of the protagonists. Since villainess represent such an obstacle to the ideological closure of the telenovela, the antagonists will almost always be punished in the end and suffer horrible fates. Some 1 In his study of the Walt Disney Company, Sean Griffin discusses the appeal of Disney villains to gay audiences. Part of the reason for their appeal is the fact that similarly to telenovela villainesses, Disney villains also aim to disrupt heterosexual relationships. He also adds that most evil queens literally look like drag queens. Furthermore, a direct link can be made between Disney’s animated fairy tales to the telenovela genre as the latter has also been characterized as a fairy tale (as it is evident from it being labeled “Cinderella” stories). 80 examples of the most sadistic endings include the fate of Leonela from Rosa Salvaje who was trapped in her car over train tracks because she lost control of her vehicle after trying to run over the protagonist (who was pregnant with the male protagonist’s baby); she dies in an explosion from a collision with an oncoming train (as illustrated by figures 15 through 18). Figure 2.15: Leonela’s Death (a) Figure 2.16: Leonela’s Death (b) Figure 2.17: Leonela’s Death (c) Figure 2.18: Leonela’s Death (d) 81 Another notable example is Angelica in Marimar (1994) who even on her deathbed continues to curse the protagonist. Her death is similar to Leonela’s but much more graphic, as she is seen suffering severe burns that resulted in a disfigurement of her face after a car accident (figures 2.19 through 2.22). This time, she wasn’t trying to run over the protagonist but her ending is articulated in the telenovela as God’s punishment for burning down Marimar’s grandparents shack and killing them. Figure 2.19: Angelica’s Death (a) Figure 2.20: Angelica’s Death (b) Figure 2.19: Angelica’s Death (c) Figure 2.20: Angelica’s Death (d) 82 Having now sadly “disposed” of the villainess, we can focus on our Cinderella and the ways in which she mediates, in a contradictory manner, nationalist discourse regarding race and class. In the case of the Cinderella genre, the binary created by the rich, modern villainess and the poor, traditional protagonist enacts oppositions similar to those of nineteenth century appropriations of European melodrama in the US. Christine Gledhill describes how the expressions of class oppositions from European melodrama were translated in American versions into an opposition between country and city. In American melodrama, the country was invested with “America’s founding ideology of, egalitarianism, and regeneration” to be found in a rural past (24). This is different from Mexican nationalist ideology where the rural past does not necessarily enjoy the same symbolic privilege, but it is instead the idealization of the peasant and racial mixing that becomes the central concern. Gender conflict and class difference are always highlighted in Cinderella narratives. Class is implicitly racialized, yet race is erased. This is primarily because of the history of the category of “race” in Mexico in relation to national identity. III. Family Ties and the Undermining of Nationalist Discourse Julia Tuñon has noted the following about the Mexican art movement of the 1930’s indigenismo (“indianism”): “the fashionable indigenismo of the period reveals a great paradox: the indigenous peoples considered most representative of Mexicanidad (Mexicannes) were 83 precisely the ones who had been excluded from the nation’s development and marginalized into a separate sphere.” (179) Iconographies of nationalist discourse have permeated Mexican film and television, and a lineage can be traced from cinema to television. Cinderella telenovelas are part of this genealogy as they continue a trend started by Mexican classical cinema that represented indigenous people as white (through the casting of white actors). Susan Dever in Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas traces the strong influence of politician and thinker Jose Vasconcelos and artist Diego Rivera in the context of the renowned director of the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema, Emilio Fernandez 2 . The imagery of the peasant that Fernandez utilized in his films has influenced the portrayal of the poor in a number of telenovelas such as Maria Guadalupe in 1960 and Maria Isabel in 1966. According to Dever, Vasconcelos believed that “the role of culture is to morally uplift the miserable while simultaneously freeing them from the conditions of colonization” (20) and that the “Indian is ultimately redeemable” through civilizing education (21). This not only echoes my earlier discussion of education as domestication but also of the moral purity of the female protagonist, as Dever discusses how Vasconcelos idealized the Indian as a noble savage and as an icon of “autonomous purity” (22). 2 Dever also suggests similarities in the thinking of Fernandez and Vasconcelos based on similar upbringings (both born in the Coahuila desert even though both were born 75 miles apart and with a 22 year gap). 22 84 Emilio Fernandez emerged as a prominent director out of a Church- and State-approved cinema which borrowed heavily from the vernacular of the muralists and a reinvigorated rhetoric of vasconcelista nationalism. (23) As Dever points out, this rhetoric “both idealized women, mestizos, and native peoples in order to assimilate them into the nation; both mythified and believed themselves as new messiahs of nationalism; and both, ultimately, were profoundly religious.” (23) Furthermore, Dever states that just as Vasconcelos was influential, the muralist Diego Rivera was equally instrumental as “Rivera’s types became Fernandez’s stereotypes.” (25) Figure 2.23: Maria Candelaria (1944) Figure 2.24: Medium Shot of Dolores del Rio as Maria Candelaria 85 Figure 2.25: Silvia Derbez as Maria Isabel (1966) Figure 2.26: Adela Noriega as Maria Isabel (1997) The images above begin to illustrate the connections in the representation of indigenous people by white actors in film and television. Dolores del Rio, despite her white complexion plays the role of a Mexican Indian in Maria Candelaria as seen in figures 2.23 and 2.24 (a film directed by Emilio Fernandez, released in 1944). Such imagery is typical of the idealized representations of Indians in films from the Golden Age. The iconography is strikingly similar on television: figure 2.25 shows the original record-breaking Cinderella, Maria Isabel from 1966 starring Silvia Derbez, and figure 2.26 depicts its remake starring Adela Noriega in 1997. Both look very similar to Dolores del Rio in Maria Candelaria. From these images alone it would appear as if Cinderella telenovelas continue the work of the Golden Age rather seamlessly. But this is not the case, and in order to discuss the ways in which Cinderella telenovelas actually undermine nationalist discourse, it is necessary to explore the colonial context out of which these emerge. The origins of the centrality of the mestizo in 86 Mexican nationalist discourse are the result of an effort to erase racial hierarchies from the colonial era. During colonialism, the links between race and social power were explicitly connected. Claudio Lomnitz in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico details how soon after Mexico’s independence from Spain the central ideological problem to generating a unified nation was “how to transform Creole patriotism into a new nationalism that could include social groups that had been born in Mexico but did not belong to the Hispano-Mexican race.” According to Lomnitz, the homeland had to be given “enough stature so that patriotic concerns could eclipse class and caste questions.” (46) The definition of citizenship was also fluctuating and despite the efforts of nationalist discourse to try to conceive of every person born in Mexico as a citizen, not everyone was considered one. For instance, from 1835 until the Reform Laws, only men of legal age with an annual income of more than one hundred pesos could vote. In 1846, these men were also required to read and write. Furthermore, in order to hold public office a man needed to have an even higher minimum annual income (up to a 4,000 minimum to be president). (48) Thus nationalist ideology, according to Lomnitz, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century “permitted the defacto retention of colonial hierarchies (since distinctions made through class, immediately excluded the poor which were largely Indians or other people of color). (48) At a time when subaltern groups were protesting (50), social Darwinism became a popular way amongst the “official groups” to blame the victims for the inability for Mexico 87 to achieve the same social level as the United States, and the Indians were seen as a negative influence. The only way to mitigate the influence of Indians was thought to be through the “import” of more Europeans as an effort to control “evolution” or to dominate them through education. Lomnitz also notes that at this time indigenous slavery was revived and massacres were perpetrated in Sonora and Yucatan (52). During the revolution, indigenismo movement began as a way to defend the rights of indigenous populations (53). Lomnitz describes the imagining of the mestizo race in Mexican post revolutionary nationalism in a way that sounds strikingly similar to the narratives of Cinderella telenovelas. Lomnitz describes how the mestizo is seen in Mexican post revolutionary nationalism as the son of a Spanish father and an indigenous mother. He argues that this configuration serves the following purposes: first, it locates the Spanish conquest at the origin of nationalism (the conception of the mestizo child), secondly, the mestizo becomes the protagonist of a national history; and thirdly, the mestizo is feminized 3 requiring modernization and protection sponsored by the state. (53) 3 A response to the original feminization of the mestizos is that this “modification” resulted in a “stronger race” that could battle US hegemony. (53) This ideology was heavily influenced by Darwinism and one could argue it attempted to revise McClintock’s summary of the “tree of the human race” which saw whiteness as the desirable goal of human evolution. 88 There are a number of conventions of the Cinderella genre that resonate with this narrative while simultaneously modifying it in important ways, resulting in its mediation for a new era of global politics. Similar to Lomnitz’s account, most “cinderellas” are underage, uneducated girls (despite the fact that they are played by adult actors 4 ). They are presented as having no parents: one of them is usually dead and the other was forced to abandon them for reasons beyond their control. As I described in Chapter 1, the stories present the hardships of the girl living the life of the poor who are marginalized, while simultaneously depicting the anguish of the wealthy parent and the relentless attempts to find his or her lost child. As the search continues, the romantic relationship between the underage girl and her prince charming takes place. This set up is similar to Lomnitz’s account of the birth of the mestizo in nationalist discourse but differs in the sense that the parents are not necessarily of different racial origins (such as the Spanish father and native mother) but instead, a wealthy mother or father and a working class partner. The forced separation leaves the child vulnerable and unable to access education, health care and other basic needs. It is during the separation that the battles between the forms of femininity take place as discussed earlier in this chapter: noble (but “savage”) versus modern (ambitious). 4 In Chapter 3 I discuss how in the case of the Mexican television comedy El Chavo del Ocho that originated in the early 1970’s and aired until the mid 1990’s, older actors playing children represent figures of underdevelopment. 89 As described in the previous chapter, her transformation is only possible when the underdeveloped child receives the aid of a wealthy adult (whether or not s/he is the parent). The crucial aspect to note here is how the process of modernization is fueled by the desire to recover a lost child; hence the centrality of the recognition of blood ties to the Cinderella narrative. It is because of this convention that these dramas have been labeled escapist fantasies in order to warrant their dismissal. I argue that once one explores the cultural implications of this transformation, and their continued popularity in relation to their social and political economical context, one would be forced to question certain naturalized ideologies, such as developmental ideology and modernizing nationalisms that influence the way in which the world is currently organized in an era of globalization. The importance of blood ties has its roots in Mexico’s colonial period. During colonial times, the Spaniards “had a genealogical conception of the nation” where “it saw its members as descendants of the same blood”. Blood predicted and reflected an individual’s reliability (43) and “certificates of blood purity” were required in the fourteenth century in order to join the clergy or hold public office (42). One of the core conventions of the Cinderella genre is the recognition of blood ties which guarantees social advancement when the state is unable to provide for basic needs. This seems to go against nationalist discourse that sought to erase racial difference through the emphasis of a mestizo race. 90 In addition to the convention of blood recognition, the genre rallies the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon of Mexican nationalist discourse, through its association with the “purity” and “nobility” of the female protagonist 5 . But this purity and nobility end up being not a redeemable quality of the “Indian” as discussed earlier through Jose Vasconcelos’ writings but instead a direct link between blood purity and an individual’s moral character 6 . The role of the purity of the protagonist invoked through an association with the Virgin of Guadalupe echoes the fact that, as Lomnitz argues, the emphasis on “blood purity” during the colonial era had an additional importance because it linked the individual’s “reliability” to the “chastity” of women: “…Because honor was measured through the blood, biological paternity and maternity were critical, thus reinforcing links between honor, control over virginity, and women’s sexual fidelity after marriage.” (43) Therefore, the genre aligns the national icon of integration with colonial concerns of blood purity (separation). Because of this emphasis on blood relations, I argue that telenovelas present a type of critique of traditional nationalist discourse as the state is unable to provide for the basic needs for the poor. This not only seems to undermine post revolutionary 5 A series of symbols that had been familiar were deployed in order to rally patriotism, one of them being the Virgin of Guadalupe. The link between nation and religion was not “officially” broken until 1857 but as Lomnitz points out, the “denationalizing of religion has never really been fully achieved”. (48) 6 The exception to the rule is Los Ricos También Lloran where the female protagonist was an orphan. 91 nationalist discourse regarding the ability of the state to care for all citizens, but I would also argue that this genre, in its constant emphasis of class difference through blood relations, dismisses the modernizing precepts regarding the desire to consider all Mexicans as part of a unified mestizo race that was meant to battle US hegemony: …mestizos were thus a fortified version of the indigenous race, and the modifications brought about by this mixture of Spanish and Indian races would, eventually, create a population that would finally be capable of holding its own against the United States. (53) Despite the centrality of blood recognition to the narrative, the transformation of the protagonist is not dependent on this condition. That is, paternal sponsorship of the child is primarily motivated through a noble desire to help the needy, aka “charity”. In fact, with some exceptions, most transformations take place before the parent realizes that the girl is in fact his or her daughter. This is especially significant because, on the one hand, it echoes the liberal side of developmental ideology (that seeks to aid the poor nations of the world) and, on the other, it critiques the inability of the state to procure the basic needs of large segments of the population. If we conceive of a neoliberal state as one that promotes the free market and withdraws from providing for the welfare of its citizens, these narratives deploy their own version of a discourse of modernization that is similar to the liberal ideals of capital developmental ideology as expressed by the original mandates of the World Bank. That is, in the case of 92 Mexico, it questions modernization through the contemporary US and local government emphasis on free market trade and the withdrawal of welfare. The genre’s emphasis on charity suggests a context where state welfare is scarce. Furthermore, in all telenovelas of this genre, the transformation of the poor, uneducated (“savage”) girl into the educated, rich and sophisticated woman happens quite rapidly. This change is achieved by education and consumption. The fact that it happens so fast undermines the emphasis of development and modernizing theories that “it takes time” as this process focuses on the end result. Furthermore, as opposed to eugenic immigration policies which sought to encourage the mixing of whites with indigenous populations to “purify” the race or the years and struggles that encompass the completion of a high school degree, the fantasy of development focuses on results over process as the protagonist will undergo a transformation in relatively short period of time This fast transformation can be contrasted to the pleasures of prolonged duration linked to the suffering of the protagonist discussed in Chapter 1. And while these might seem to be slightly contradictory notions of temporality, they actually afford different pleasures. The accelerated pace of this transformation is akin to the quick ending that acts as a counter pleasure to the long duration. As I argued in the last chapter, the ending of the telenovela allows for a transcendence of the perpetual state of development that third world nations are imagined to inhabit in capitalist developmental discourse. At the same time, the main sources 93 of dramatic conflict that occupy the length of most Cinderella narratives involve racial and gender politics that are erased from nationalist and developmental discourse. Scholars Saldaña-Portillo (18-27) and Christina Klein (19-60) have argued that the overt racism and exploitation that characterized European imperialism were replaced by the liberal aims of the World Bank and developmental ideology (this will be discussed in greater detail in the following section). As I discussed in the case of Mexican nationalist discourse, the recognition of blood ties is a constant reminder of the ways by which power was maintained in the colonial period through racial purity and undermines post revolutionary efforts to erase racial distinctions. In terms of developmental ideology and modernization, Cinderella narratives render the state as incapable of fulfilling their supposed role of providing adequate education and opportunities for social advancement as articulated, for example, in the UN’s “Development Decade” discussed in Chapter 1. Therefore, not only does the quick transformation provide a counter pleasure to the long duration, but it also trivializes the emphasis on education that is characteristic of modernization discourse (UN 18). With the rise of NAFTA, CAFTA (North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements), and other similar treaties throughout Latin America, the exploitative nature of free-trade have become widely debated and protested against. The United Nations proclaimed the 1990s as the fourth “Development Decade” with similar goals as its predecessor that dates back to the 1960s. The significance of this is that having three 94 subsequent “Development Decades” show the persistence of the logic of capitalist development that emerged after World War II. Taking this into account, if one reconsiders the fact that the Cinderella genre emerged at a time when developmental ideology was put into question by dependency theory, it is therefore not a coincidence that the Cinderella genre had a resurgence in popularity starting in 1992 with Maria Mercedes followed by two popular remakes of telenovelas of the same genre, Marimar (1994) and Maria la del Barrio (1996) popularly called “the Maria trilogy”. The resurgence of the genre at this time has two important cultural implications. First, its emphasis on charity to aid the poor goes against the increasing dominance of neoliberal politics throughout Latin America that promote free trade and withdraw welfare. Secondly, the genre’s convention of the recognition of blood ties as a way to secure upward mobility is a constant reminder that, despite nationalist ideology in which the nation has transcended such inequalities, it is precisely through blood lines and race that power in Mexico has been maintained. So on the one hand, the narratives present an indirect critique of current global policies while at the same time they undermine nationalist discourse that sees all Mexicans as equal members of the mestizo race. Therefore, these narratives, through the convention of “transformation” that earned them their pejorative label “Cinderella,” emphasize the fact that racial hierarchies are linked to class hierarchies. 95 IV. Polishing Diamonds: Education as Domestication In most cases, the color brown is only present as part of the mise-en-scéne of the barrio that contrasts with the white skin of the “savage” girl who eventually undergoes a transformation. In most Cinderella stories, the transformation is sponsored by a parent who was forcefully separated from his or her child at birth. This restoration and re-recognition of blood ties is a crucial part of the narrative as it is the guarantee that the protagonist will move up the social ladder and be compensated (monetarily) for the suffering that she endured away from her parents. It is also necessary to note the exception to the rule in Los Ricos También Lloran (“the rich also cry”) from 1979, where the protagonist is transformed through a pure, uninterested, act of charity. The implications of this transformation are the same in all scenarios; the protagonist is not only “cleaned,” but what makes this “cleansing” particularly interesting is that it is accompanied by education. It is education, accessed through the recognition of blood ties, that allows for this transformation and makeover to take place. The “savagery” of the protagonist is denoted by the make-up and wardrobe as well as by behavior: dirt on white skin, filthy clothes, and an ignorant and rude behavior. Once the transformation is completed, the protagonist’s white skin is allowed to “shine” in all its glory. Despite the fact that the actress is physically white, there is a lot of mention of dirt in 96 association with racist slurs in these texts such as “savage”. The markers that differentiate the disenfranchised from the ruling class are “poor”, “dirty” and “savage” vs. “rich”, “clean,” “educated” and “worldly” in this Maniquean division. This collapse of racist discourse with class can be understood through reference to my discussion of Mexican nationalist discourse that demonstrated that the histories of the two forms of identity in Mexico are interdependent and inseparable. In the case of Los Ricos También Lloran (1979), the protagonist, Mariana, transformed thanks to the support of her guardian who agreed to help her at the request of a priest. In figure 2.28, we observe Luis Alberto (the male protagonist) telling her how to walk “appropriately”: “Don’t walk so stiff, do it with the grace that should come naturally to women!” Needless to say she would need a coach to actually teach her instead of telling her how women are supposed to be “naturally.” Figure 2.29 shows Mariana drinking soup straight from a bowl (illustrating her “lack of table manners” prior to her transformation) and in figure 2.30 Mariana can be seen fifteen years later, with her adoptive daughter where she has fully matured into a “responsible mother”. 97 Figure 2.27: “Dirty” Mariana Figure 2.28: “Clean” Mariana learning how to walk “like a lady” Figure 2.29: “Clean” Mariana with no table manners Figure 2.30: Mariana as a mature woman fifteen years later In Marimar (1994), the protagonist Marimar Perez is noticeably “dirty” but with a darker complexion as well (tanning from all the fishing, and being outdoors perhaps). In figure 2.31 one can observe her at the beach with her dog “Pulgoso.” Figures 2.32 and 2.33 depict her rapid transformation through education paid for by her guardian Gustavo Aldama (her father, though neither of them know they are related until right before his death). Figure 2.34 shows a fully transformed Cinderella who is ready to attend her first opera. 98 Figure 2.31: “Dirty” Marimar Figure 2.32: Marimar studying hard Figure 2.33: Marimar learning how to walk Figure 2.34: Marimar transformed and ready for the opera The racial implications of education as a form of domestication that are associated with this type of transformation are not only limited to the British imperial context as discussed by McClintock in Imperial Leather. Social Darwinism circulated (and continues to circulate) widely within Mexican society. It heavily influenced the formulations of official nationalist narratives in the 1930’s but also circulated widely amongst Mexican elites. Claudio Lomnitz discusses how the centrality of Darwin’s theories in Mexico in the 1930s allowed “for the 99 Porfirian elite to advocate an aggressive policy of European immigration before reforming the poor through education” foregrounding the link between nationalist discourse and eugenics (140). Fernández and Paxman argue that social Darwinist theory is the way in which elites (including Televisa executives) would rationalize their position of power as being a result of a “process of natural selection”. They also argue that this ideology is what resulted in the “racism” present in most Cinderella telenovelas. (80-85) Fernández and Paxman’s argument focuses on the local circulation of such ideologies and the ways in which they believe these influenced the racism in Televisa’s programming. Lomnitz discusses the ways in which these influenced nationalist discourse, and I extend this argument to stress the connection between these conceptions of race to the origins of global developmental politics. That is, the global circulation of these ideas was not limited to the first half of the 20 th century but in fact had a defining influence on post World War II discourse that shaped the ways in which we now understand global processes of modernization and development. Maria Saldana Portillo points out how initial articulations of development both resonated with and stripped away the social Darwinism invoked by British Imperial theorist J. A. Hobson when discussing England’s “public duty” in relation to its colonies whose subjects were seen to belong to “lower races”. She discusses how the idea of fostering development 100 was articulated by John Maynard Keynes as the “primary duty” of the World Bank: “to explore and develop, by every method which science can devise the hidden natural and human resources of the globe.” (21) As Portillo notes, Keynes’ view for the World Bank was not only to reconstruct Europe after World War II but also pay “special attention to the less developed countries, to raising the standard of life and the conditions of labour everywhere, to make the resources of the world more fully available to all mankind” (qtd. in Portillo, 21). This displaces the racism inherent in colonial discourse: “gone are the references to the indolence and torpor of character of tropical populations;” instead we have, according to Portillo, a “non-biological, evolutionary sociology of ‘less developed countries’ and a universalized ‘productive capacity’ of all world citizens.” (21) Portillo argues that it might be tempting to see colonial capitalism as a “warmed over colonialism”, or to think of it as a “complete break” with colonialism given its claim to deliver “liberty and prosperity to all”. As she argues, “it is important to see development’s difference from colonialism, rooted in its action as a vehicle to facilitate decolonization, and its links to colonialism, rooted in its redeployment of colonialisms logic and structure.” (21, her emphasis) Therefore this logic of global racial hierarchies has migrated from Britain to Mexico while it has also been redefined and re-emphasized by developmental ideology. One could argue that Cinderella narratives, by foregrounding the racial implications of education (by explicitly linking education to domestication), expose the implicit racism in developmental ideology. Further, this 101 exposition is achieved through an affirmation of racism, since education as domestication is represented as a very positive thing. In the case of Cinderella narratives, they do not only effectively foreground the colonialist roots of domestication but also the link between domestication and education as a “civilizing mission” (as argued by Lomnitz) that was partly blurred in the first world when such practices were exported abroad. That is, the female protagonist is an underage savage who must be domesticated. The process of domestication is explicitly associated not only with entering high culture and civilization (as modeled by the West), but this is done through a process of growth and maturity that is only achieved through education (and such education can only be accessed through wealth that is earned through blood ties). In other words, it is domestication through liberal notions of education and capitalist consumption that will turn out Mexico’s ideal woman. The reason for the existence can be located not in a desire from authors, producers, and/or actors to undermine nationalist ideologies, but in the very history of the genre itself that I presented in chapter 1. Most of the Cinderella narratives discussed here were written by Cuban exiles, such as the example of Ines Rodena who was born in Cuba in 1903 and left for Miami after Castro’s revolution. She was the author of many stories that resulted in the adaptations of telenovelas such as Rosa Salvaje, Los Ricos También Lloran, and Marimar 102 among many others. Therefore, the original circulation of these stories can be located at a moment when Latin American nationalist discourses were being heavily contested and/or redefined (as it is the case with post-revolutionary Mexico and pre and post-revolutionary Cuba). This means two things: first, these stories were mediating the tensions and conflicts that nationalist discourses were trying to resolve and secondly, they had a transnational appeal from the very beginning. That is, the fact that these stories could be easily imported and adapted to other national contexts speaks to the similarities in the experiences of colonialism and post colonialism of many Latin American nations. In other words, it is clear that the colonial conception of blood speaks to most of Latin America, yet every country had particular strands of nationalism which attempted to deal with the integration of people of color and hide the fact that colonial racial hierarchies were still in place as a way to maintain class differences. One could very well argue that these telenovelas are despised because of the very fact that they undermine modernizing nationalisms (“cheap, vulgar, and regressive”). Also, these narratives remind their audiences that despite of all these modernizing discourses, the way in which power was distributed through blood ties in a seemingly distant colonial past keeps haunting the present. In the previous chapter I discussed Jesus Martin-Barbero’s work on the significance of “recognition” in Latin American television melodramas and specifically as it pertains to the ways in which the daily programming schedule of the telenovela format allows for rural 103 communities to “experience the time of the nation.” Just as melodrama is all about the “drama of recognition”, he stated that the desire to recognize such as that of a “…father or mother of their lost son…” is what mobilizes most melodramas. (27) As I have mentioned before, this form of recognition is an important convention of the Cinderella genre as it facilitates the upward social mobility of the protagonist, for it usually happens when a rich parent “recognizes” his or her daughter and facilitates her “official” transformation. This transformation implies the sentimental integration, transformation, and modernization of a “savage” woman into the Mexican society. Yet the “recognition” of blood ties undermines the very nationalist discourse that sees Mexico as a nation of mestizos because it reestablishes the fact that power is maintained through race relations or blood ties (an ideology from the colonial period). As Christine Gledhill has stated regarding melodrama, even as the drama sides with the “good” it articulates its nemesis with equal if not greater strength accessing the underside of official rationales of reigning moral orders (33). Therefore, the drama of “recognition” that Martin-Barbero talks about as usually being grounded within family relations is necessarily about race as well, since discourse on blood and heritage are key to this “recognition.” In other words, as Martin-Barbero points out, official –“rational”— discourse de-valorizes the necessity to re-cognize because it seems redundant; furthermore, re-cognition in melodrama within family relationships is about re- cognizing race and revising official nationalist narratives of progress. 104 V. Domesticity, Race & “Soaps” As I have argued, Cinderella telenovelas mediate three important connections that have been lost in the past decades: first, these narratives bring to the forefront the colonial roots of domesticity by presenting education as domestication (a sort of “civilizing mission”). Secondly, through performance and make-up, explicit links are made between this process of domestication and the cleansing of the body. Finally, these two aspects are in conversation not only with local discourses of nationalism but also global politics of development. As I briefly noted earlier, Robert C. Allen made a link between soap operas selling cleaning products and the “dirty” secrets within the world of the narrative. Such dirt includes unfaithful spouses, unruly children, illness, etc. In the case of Cinderella narratives; the selling of soap associated with these stories would take cleaning to an entirely different level: the selling of soap and the cleaning of dirty people exposes the racial and class implications of the cult of domesticity 7 . As Anne McClintock argued in her book Imperial Leather, until 1964 “to domesticate” meant “to civilize”, and so domestic rituals rooted in Europe were deployed as a way to transform colonized people from their “natural”, “rough” and “savage” state into a hierarchical relation with white men. (35) This is exactly what happens in 7 Kate Baldwin makes this connection between the “soap” in soap opera and cleaning much more explicit. See “Montezuma’s Revenge” in To be continued… Soap Operas Around the World ed. Robert C. Allen, New York: Routledge, 1995 (292-293) 105 Cinderella telenovelas, where the protagonist undergoes a transformation that involves a notion of education as domestication. However, telenovelas adapt the end to result in a sophisticated woman who is ready to assume her role in relationship to Mexican/Latin American men. The obsession with cleanliness that is particular to most soap and detergent commercials in the US has never been associated with anything other than middle class domesticity. McClintock presents a compelling argument as to how the cult of domesticity and commodities “converted the narrative of imperial progress into mass produced consumer spectacles” at the turn of the century. (33) Her definition of consumer spectacles includes flags, uniforms, cuisines, team sports and architecture. She specifically refers to how the marketing and advertising of soap made available scientific discourses that were only available to the educated elite to a mass audience. These discourses can be summed up by her argument regarding how anatomy became an allegory of progress (38). McClintock argued that whereas scientific racism 8 was only accessible to the educated classes, imperial 8 McClintock analyzes the “tree of the human race” where social difference is seen as natural biological differences and these are all subsumed to a hierarchical order that is meant to illustrate the evolution/progress of the human race. This is seen according to McClintock as a “global family” of man, where women are invisible or disavowed a specific way to visualize the history of the world which also serves as a form of “spectacle” allowed by Social Darwinism in which “time became a geography of social power.” (37) 106 kitsch as a consumer spectacle could package and distribute evolutionary racism to the “masses.” McClintock sites examples of Pear’s soap campaigns (207). This emerged during a time of social crisis and calamity in the metropolis in order to preserve boundaries of class, gender and race because identity in a social order was threatened by slums, pollution, social agitations, imperial competition and anti colonial resistance. In short, soap promised spiritual salvation and regeneration through consumption; domestic hygiene could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body and the white race. (211) Just as the explicit racism of imperial ideology was replaced by developmental discourse, I’d like to suggest that the symbolic and allegorical role of soap and its promises to get rid of dirt is still present after World War II in the US and abroad. That is, there were powerful links between the selling of soap and an obsession with whiteness and racial boundaries or separation in post World War II era, both in Mexico and the US. The following are two examples that suggest both links in the context of Mexico and in the US. Cinderella telenovelas throughout their existence have made connections between the cleaning of the body and domestication. I do not think that it is a coincidence that, industrially, it was soap companies that promoted the development of the telenovela in Mexico. Most soap ads present an obsession with whiteness that is threatened by dirt and the links between soap and race have been made explicit in the US in the past. For instance, 107 a cartoon entitled “Little Black Sambo” animated by U.B. Iwerks in 1935, features a black boy being bathed on a washboard (where clothes would normally be washed) draws a direct link between the use of detergents and degrading the boy to an object (dirty laundry). Figure 2.34: “Little Black Sambo” Figure 2.35: Washing “Sambo” Figure 2.36: Bath water turns black Just as this racist cartoon from the 1935 depicted a boy who turned bath water black after being bathed as if he was a piece of dirty clothing, I believe that the associative link between race, domesticity and soap is an important one to re-emphasize. Black Sambo makes the racism of cleaning advertisements in McClintock’s arguments explicit, regarding the racism implicit in the advertisement of cleaning products and Imperial identity at the turn of the century. Locating this trend in the US allows us to consider the possibility that just as the beginnings of consumerism described in McClintock’s study articulated forms of racism as a way to promote the purity of whiteness in relation to England’s dealings with its colonies. Just as Klein suggests, , mainly discussing Hollywood films, that Orientalism is articulated in mass culture, it is not farfetched to argue that the obsession with whiteness and purity expressed in cleaning commercials has inherited racist connotations. The obvious example 108 that comes immediately to mind is the practice of skin bleaching that persists until today (though it is a bit more controversial, unless it is to treat skin conditions). The figures below are print advertisements from 1950s, and as the Nadinola ad announces, they are meant to be “good news for women with dark, oily skin!” and continues at the bottom, “Now every woman can be helped to a lighter, lovelier complexion.” Though these are not considered “cleaning” products, the rhetoric they use is clearly a hybrid between regular facial soaps and moisturizers and regular bleach and cleaning ads that promise to make clothes “whiter” and “brighter”. Figure 2.37 “Black and White Bleach Cream” Figure 2.38: “Nadinola Deluxe Bleach Creme” 109 In the case of Mexico, detergent commercials can be linked to class, race and even the Mexican revolution. A commercial for a clothes detergent called “Rápido” (“fast”) circulated widely in the 1970s. The commercial starred Maria Felix who was a very well-known movie star and was the protagonist of the first historical telenovela La Constitución ("the Constitution") in 1970. The year prior she starred in the film La Generala ("the female general"). In both films she portrayed a tough woman who took charge of every aspect of her life. For instance, in La Constitución, she played a woman who traveled to Mexico City to avenge the unfair massacring of her loved ones in Sonora, Mexico around 1908. She sought to kill no one else but General Porfirio Diaz (whom the revolution was directed against in Mexico). In the commercial, we see Felix playing a similar role of a "female general" ("generala") who comes into a town of soldiers that are under her command and gets upset at her lieutenant and complains by saying “all my soldiers are filthy” (figure 2.39). To which he responds: "Please forgive me general, that's the way war is, I can't always have them well washed!" (Figure 2.40) In figure 2.41 we see her responding: "Well every single one of them can go around shining if they use the new reinforced Rápido so we can have our clothes whiter than before so that there’s not one loser wearing grey!" The lieutenant then gives orders to start washing, as she proudly walks past the men hand washing clothes (figures 2.42 and 2.43). 110 After a quick wash the soldiers are happy with how clean and shiny their clothes are. The announcer then says that the detergent pulls out the grayness in clothes to leave fabrics white and shiny (figure 2.44). In the end, Maria Felix leaves on a moving train as she sings: "Reinforced Rápido sure is good!" (Figure 2.45) and the soldiers reply: "and that's something that no one can deny!" (Figure 2.46) Figure 2.39 Reinforced Rápido Commercial (a) Figure 2.40: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (b) Figure 2.41: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (c) Figure 2.42: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (d) 111 Figure 2.43: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (e) Figure 2.44: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (f) Figure 2.45: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (g) Figure 2.46: Reinforced Rápido Commercial (h) The commercial features a powerful, fair skinned woman complaining that her soldiers are filthy and therefore need to be washed. Not only is the name of the detergent “fast” that directly invokes the idea of “results over process” that I discussed earlier, this commercial is set during the Mexican revolution where all the discourses of mestizaje originated. Furthermore, the commercial makes an explicit link to modernity by having Felix leave on a train as she praises the cleaning power of Rápido dish detergent. There is also a significant slippage in the commercial, as she calls her soldiers filthy and dirty when in fact she was 112 presumably referring to their clothes. Finally, the commercial makes an explicit mention of dirt as being “gray,” brown would probably be too easily comparable to a racial slur. In another commercial of the same brand, starring another famous actress (Maria Victoria), a reference is made as to how Rápido will “terminate with the grey menace” and how this detergent actually “injects extra whiteness” (figures 2.53 and 2.54). An injection makes an explicit biological connection to whiteness and, more specifically, the transformation from darker to lighter. More importantly, dirt is represented as a “menace” that needs to be “eliminated”. The two white actors arrive at a village packed with people with much darker skins (figures 2.47 and 2.48). On top of that, they arrive in a white car that I argue, similarly to the train in the previous commercial, symbolizes modernity. However, this car is literally white and the fact that they arrive to a rural area with the sole purpose to demonstrate this new product that will erase “grayness” invokes the role of missionaries that come to enlighten dark skinned people (figures 2.49 through 2.52). 113 Figure 2.47: Driving to the remote village Figure 2.48: A warm welcome Figure 2.49: Commercial’s focus on women of color Figure 2.50: “Rápido will eliminate the grey menace” Figure 2.51: Showcasing the product Figure 2.52: A skeptical woman 114 Figure 2.53: Injecting whiteness Figure 2.54 “Rápido: Injects More Whiteness” In the case of a lot of the original scholarship on the American soap opera, the very fact that minorities were rarely visible (i.e.: the whiteness of the genre), seems to bare no relation to the genre’s roots in the marketing and selling of cleaning products. Prominent soap opera scholars such as Robert Allen and Tania Modleski have always acknowledged the absence of interracial relationships and the ways that according to Allen, “in all soaps black characters are relegated to a paradigmatic ghetto, always marked by their relational impoverishment” (75). Modleski in her groundbreaking essay “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Opera’s: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form” basically writes: “blacks and other minorities are completely excluded.” (38) Modleski’s statement was part of her summary of what she called “The Soap Formula” referring to the basic elements of the American soap opera. Her essay was first published in 1979 and re-published in 1997 as part of a television studies anthology, and although the politics of representation have changed over time, the roots of the genre in the US have been unequivocally linked to race and its erasure on American 115 television as well. This is especially telling when one considers the fact that the genre was imported to television at a time of great social unrest brought about the Civil Rights movement and that processes of suburbanization and the withdrawal of economic aid to the cities where most racial minorities were left behind with limited resources (this I believe is comparable to the neoliberal state that focuses on free-trade and withdraws welfare as discussed earlier). In terms of the soap opera, Allen stated that an “important, if indirect, intertext for the first soap opera listeners” was Amos and Andy. The show, according to Allen, “suggested the possibility of a narrative with an indefinite postponable termination.” (138) This show also has been at the center of many controversies regarding the racist representations of African Americans in US broadcasting history. Despite these significant facts, the links between soap operas, domesticity, cleaning products and whiteness are never fully drawn out. It could be a result that these aspects seem to many of the predominantly white scholars of the soap opera to be merely “incidental” as opposed to “central”. Just as Allen discussed Sandy Flitterman’s work where she suggested that one of the functions of soap opera ads is to provide closure to the open-ended nature of the soap opera narrative (79), I would like to discuss an ad for a detergent as a possible answer to the reason why race has been avoided in most of the canonical discourse on the soap opera. 116 The commercial is from the 1950s promoting the dish detergent “Joy”. The ad takes place at a dinner party where some guests are staring at plates, glasses and silver that were on a table (figure 2.55). The hostess (the woman on the left in figure 2.55) comes over and asks: “Hey, what are you girls doing? Looking for the name of my china?” One of the women responds: “No, I’m looking at myself!” (Figure 2.56) The hostess replies, “Like what you see?” The woman responds by saying yes and stating with a great deal of admiration how she can see herself on the plate. Another woman adds that she can see herself on a glass and soon another woman states that she can see herself on the silver (figures 2.57 and 2.58). At the end of the commercial a male announcer says: “That’s right; you can take real pride in your dishes. Joy gets dishes more than clean; you get to see yourself shine.” (Figures 2.60 and 2.61) Figure 2.55: Admiring clean dishes Figure 2.56: Woman’s reflection on a plate 117 Figure 2.57: Woman’s reflection on a wine glass Figure 2.58: Woman’s reflection on a spoon Figure 2.59: A proud housewife Figure 2.60: Joy Figure 2.61: Joy slogan: “See Yourself Shine” 118 I believe that the image of white, middle class housewives staring at their reflections on clean dishes and the hostess taking great pride in that (figure 2.59) is in some way representative of the blindness to the issues of race and nation in a lot of the soap opera discourse. Whether it was an apparent inability, lack of interest or because these issues were deemed to be irrelevant at the time, the absence of a discussion of such politics seems to be to be explained in part by the commercial that displays the obsession of the guests with their own reflection. I believe this is comparable to the academic agenda of most of the early soap opera writers to take women’s pleasures seriously, an aspect that I fully identify with. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work on the soap opera seemed to have ignored the relation of their work to racism and global politics of the time. This, I believe, is symbolized by the ladies in the commercial, who were so busy staring at their own reflection and so proud in their own handy work that they couldn’t care less about what was going on around them at the party. VI. Conclusion: The Death of Soap Opera Study? In response to this I would like to conclude by echoing the work by Charlotte Brunsdon in Screen Tastes: From Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes in 1997. Brunsdon, one of the pioneers in the study of the soap opera and British Cultural studies, presents in her book a history of the emergence of soap opera studies in the 1970’s. She does this to argue for the importance 119 in remembering the context out of which such critical work emerged in decades when media studies paid little attention to and often condemned narrative forms associated with women’s pleasures. The main purpose of this was to go against the notion that many scholars now regard the study of the soap opera as a “normal science” that “no longer requires the challenges to the existing paradigms that characterized the opening up of the area in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” (10-11) In a chapter entitled “In Defence of the Soap Opera,” she specifically critiques the fact that studies of soap operas have lost a sense of them being a contested object of study. In a sense, I am in agreement with Brunsdon regarding the fact that not all paradigms have been fully questioned; however I don’t think that defensive nostalgia is the answer as it runs the risk of reproducing the same blindness that resulted in the exclusion of race from “classic” soap opera studies. Therefore, recreating the polemics out of which the study of the soap opera emerged is important, especially for those who are unaware of the difficulties of gaining academic acceptance for the study of such cultural forms. However, the future of soap opera studies in the US and Britain will be very limited unless it actively encourages the study and analysis of multiple adaptations and versions of the form in different global contexts as a way to address the interrelationship of gender, race, national identity and global politics. 120 Works Cited Allen, Robert C. To be Continued… Soap Operas Around the World. London and New Cork, Routledge 1995 ---. Speaking of Soap Operas. Durham, University of North Carolina Press, 1985 Barbero-Martin, Jesús y Sonia Muñoz, eds. Televisión y Melodrama. Bogota, Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992 Brunsdon, Charlotte. Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. London, Routledge, 1997 Griffin, Sean. Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out. New York, NYU press, 2000 Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI Publishing, 1987. Dever, Susan. Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamerica. New York, SUNY Press, 2003 Fernández, Claudia and Paxman, Andrew. El Tigre: Emilio Azcarraga y su Imperio Televisa. Grijalbo, Mexico, 2000 Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. London, University of California Press, 2003 121 Lomnitz, Claudio. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, Routledge, 1995. Modleski, Tania. “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas,” Feminist Television Criticism. Ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, et. al. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 Tuñon, Julia. “Emilio Fernandez,” Mexican Cinema, London, BFI, 1995, pp. 179-192 United Nations. “United Nations Development Decade: A Programme International for International Cooperation.” UN.org, 1084 th Plenary Meeting, 19 Dec 1961, Location <<http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/167/63/IMG/NR0 16763.pdf>> 122 Chapter III Gender, Degeneration and the Creation of Pan-Latin American Identities in the Age of Development I. Introduction: “Fué Sín Querer Queriendo” 32 years ago, this Mexican program went on the air and became the symbol of an era. The phenomenon of a vecindad (low income neighborhood) seen through the eyes of an orphan continues to be the magic ingredient that doesn’t lose its currency and stays in the hearts of Latin Americans. Its innocent humor (“humor blanco”) survives the test of time and (television) series that appear and disappear without leaving a trace. The preceding quote is from an introduction to a graphic homage to the series El Chavo del Ocho in the Salvadoran newspaper El Díario de Hoy in September 2007. Called a “symbol of an era” the program is described as having a permanent place “in the hearts of Latin Americans.” Because of it being commonly regarded as the most successful television comedy to come out of Mexico and arguably, Latin America, I decided to consider it as the object of my analysis in relation to the ways in which not only telenovelas, but also the sitcom – another frequently degraded form of popular television – offers another ‘lens’ on popular mediations of gender and discourses of development. “Fué sin querer queriendo” literally translates to “it happened without me wanting to want it”. This is one of the many celebrated phrases of a fictional eight year old character who people refer to as “el Chavo” (Mexican slang for “the boy”). This was his preferred response 123 whenever he was asked to take responsibility for something that he did that irritated those around him, especially adults. El Chavo remained nameless throughout the series’ existence and he was the central character of a Mexican television comedy series that originated in the early 1970s named after him: El Chavo del Ocho. A well known example of the use of this phrase within the series is the way el Chavo would always welcome Sr. Barriga (“Mr. Belly”) by hitting him with whatever it is that he happened to be playing with at the time of his entry onto the set. The props would range from a soccer ball, a broom or the classic pie in the face. Sr. Barriga happens to be the fat landlord of the vecindad where el Chavo and the rest of the characters lived. He was the only wealthy character; he would always be received with an accidental hit by el Chavo whose response would always be: “fué sin querer queriendo.” Why would a major Salvadoran newspaper, Díario de Hoy, call this Mexican program the “symbol of an era”? And continue on by labeling the orphan as “the magic ingredient that doesn’t lose its currency” and that continues to stay “in the hearts of Latin Americans”? For anyone who is not familiar with the show, it may come as a surprise to know that the eight year old was played by an adult, the show’s creator and writer Roberto Gómez Bolaños (better known for his artistic name, Chespirito). Strong feelings of embarrassment and shame are what prompted my inquiry into two television texts from the 1970s, El Chavo del Ocho (“the boy from the eight”) and El Chapulín Colorado (“the red bumblebee man”). The first show featured an ensemble cast of 124 adults acting as prepubescent boys and girls, and the second featured a clumsy Mexican superhero. Both shows were produced by Televisa starting in the early 1970s until the early 1990s. The programs continue to be aired in reruns throughout Latin America and their popularity is comparable to that of I Love Lucy in the US. My interest in these two shows are the result of a lifelong investment in the series as a member of the transnational mass audience, an experience that dates back to my childhood in El Salvador in the decade of the 1980s during the civil war. Feeling embarrassed as an adult of my love for the series as a child never seemed like reasons that were compelling enough to be revealed at the opening of a chapter, especially to be presented as the inspiration of my critical inquiry… That is, until now. In my particular case, the reasons why I would often feel compelled to condemn Chespirito’s television programs --the creator of both series--not only happened once I felt that I had reached adulthood but also happened to coincide with my entry into graduate school. There I took a graduate seminar on the Latin American cinema where I developed a very strong attraction to the New Latin American Cinema movement. My distancing from the television programs coincided with my desire to consolidate and enter a state of maturity and adulthood and my attraction to the militancy of some strands of Latin American cinema; this facilitated my disdain for the show while at the same time it allowed me to forge an identity based on my attraction and passion for these cinemas that seemed to be respectable amongst 125 the faculty and my peers. This state of “academic maturity” that I was trying to forge was quickly put into question by my encounter with television studies. For quite some time, I didn’t know what to do with these embarrassing television texts until I was willing to take on my own anxieties and insecurities in relation to what it means to grow up and forge an academic identity and navigate these in relation to Western theories of development, progress and masculinity. Whereas the New Latin American cinema movement was explicitly struggling to critically and artistically express their political dissatisfaction and desires for cultural and social change, Chespirito’s programs seemed to be doing the exact opposite and, even worse, could be seen as exploiting some sort of inferiority complex for comedic effect. All of these struggles are framed under the assumption that there is a hierarchical relation between nations. This hierarchy is framed under the rubric of economic development—in other words— economically developed nations are superior to less economically developed nations. This type of global configuration leads to a conception of Latin America nations and their people as being backward. The boundaries between economics and culture have been blurred since the very origins of developmental discourse after World War II. These two sets of cultural productions – New Latin cinema and these popular sitcoms -- emerge during a similar historical moment, 1969 and the early seventies, and they solidified 126 their appeal in that same decade. And, as I have noted already, it is during this time that the emergence of dependency theory as a response to capitalist politics of development gained strength in academic and political circles. Of equal importance is the fact that both sets of cultural productions were concerned with forging a pan Latin American identity, whether this was done on purpose as with the New Latin American cinema or “sin querer queriendo” like El Chavo and El Chapulín Colorado. Chespirito’s popularity across Latin America is extremely easy to prove. For instance, in 2005, his publications related to his shows, such as El Díario del Chavo del 8 (The Diary of El Chavo) superseded the sale of Harry Potter books to become number one in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, El Salvador and Mexico (Notimex). In 2005, Roberto Gomez Bolaños received an honorary doctorate from the Salvadorian University Alberto Masferrer (Univision.com). On August 21, 2006, amidst a controversy of presidential elections in Mexico, a reporter for Televisa (Noticieros Televisa) covered a news story of Mexico’s ex-president Vicente Fox saluting and honoring Roberto Gómez Bolaños’ career by presenting a series of postage stamps that were meant to celebrate two of his most popular characters discussed in this essay, el Chapulín Colorado and el Chavo del Ocho. Not only were his characters celebrated for their popularity, but they were also officially recognized as icons of the Mexican nation. Such recognition was also accompanied by what was labeled by the reporter as the “universal appeal” of his characters. This universality in fact refers to the popularity of the characters in various Latin American countries, their appeal across borders that are also evidenced by the opening quote in this 127 chapter. A declaration quoted by the television report made by a public relations representative from Televisa described how his celebrated phrases can be recognized by any “Hispano-parlante” (Latin American Spanish speaker); hence, whenever Chespirito’s characters are discussed in relation to their perceived popular and mass appeal, it is always referred as a transnational and pan-Latin American success. This chapter compares the types of pan-Latin American identity forged by two of Chespirito’s most popular programs to that of the New Latin American Cinema and evaluates the ways in which independent and mass types of cultural representation attempt to deal with the cultural implications of dependency theories. Figure 3.1: “Popular Idols of Mexican Television:” Mexican postage stamps honoring El Chapulin Colorado and El Chavo del Ocho, 128 Both of these television programs, El Chavo del Ocho and El Chapulín Colorado generate comedy by developing characters that articulate binaries expressed in modernizing discourse. El Chapulín Colorado, a Mexican superhero who proclaims himself as the hero of Latin America, is clumsy, unattractive, stupid but noble, and always assumed to be an inferior version of an American superhero but still the best that Latin America has to offer, based on their underdevelopment. 1 El Chavo del Ocho makes the connection between notions of underdevelopment and immaturity by presenting a slapstick comedy where Mexican adults act as children from a low income neighborhood (vecindad). The shows were produced for thirty years, and the characters remained the same except the actors who played them kept aging until it got to the point that it would be too grotesque -according to their creator- to have such old actors playing children. Both shows have a crucial element in common; they both become representative of Latin America through characters that are in some way degenerate. In other words, lack of development has been manifested on their fictional bodies. Adults playing children suggest a notion of regression, and the inferior super hero invokes a notion of a deficient masculinity. In both cases, they image interrupted development or a development that went wrong. The reasons for this are never explored and assumed as manifest within the worlds of the shows. It is important to explore why this 1 My discussion of television comedies, produced for a mass audience as articulations of political ideology was greatly influenced by scholars such as Anne McClintock who argued that politics of race, class, gender and imperialism influenced the practice of everyday life. (33-38, 207-211) 129 “just seems to make sense” by examining the specific ways in which this logic is facilitated and reinforced by the prominence of economic developmental discourse at the moment of the shows’ origins, and the way in which this becomes articulated in the show “sin querer queriendo”. A comparative analysis that examines how developmental politics are mapped onto the subjects of underdevelopment in the two Mexican television comedies in relation to the approach to cinema by the New Latin American filmmakers and their historians allow us to denaturalize the pervasive nature of developmental ideology. As these television texts visualized underdevelopment with great success throughout Latin America starting in the 1970s, the New Latin American cinema and, particularly, the manifestos associated with the movement developed a very different response by which to transcend this state of underdevelopment. Here we observe a militant cinema that intended to raise the consciousness of Latin American people in order to battle neo-colonialism. II. “Si voy… … …” These television programs, Latin American cinema manifestos, and historiographies of the movement have one element in common: they all assume that the subjects of underdevelopment exist in an ignorant, blinded state. In the case of Latin American cinema manifestos these subjects would be awakened by a militant cinema. The television comedies in question seem to articulate dominant discourses of underdevelopment by mapping it onto the human body. The inept, passive and backward characters that star in the television 130 comedies are the figures of underdevelopment that would facilitate neo-colonialist penetration, effectively fulfilling the criteria that caused the disdain for commercial culture advocated by the New Latin American cinema manifestos, a criticism of mass culture that continues to have strength throughout Latin America. The quote of the subtitle, “si voy…” was a response given the Mexican superhero, el Chapulín Colorado whenever there would be something that needed to be investigated in an episode that would potentially expose him to danger. Whether it be exploring a dark cave or deactivating an explosive device, his response would always be “si voy…” which translates to “I’ll do it…” but his delivery is infused with a lot of uncertainty, doubt and insecurity. The victims that he is aiding would always respond with a vote of confidence every time he repeated the phrase in order to forestall his act of bravery. He would repeat the phrase so many times in order to delay his potentially dangerous act that the victims would lose their patience, yell at him and tell him to just go ahead and do it. I did not purposely postpone my exploration of the subjects of this essay, but it did take some time for me to become confident enough to compare such low brow television series to the New Latin American cinema as a way to challenge developmental discourse, as the shows seemed to epitomize every stereotype that the militant cinemas were fighting against. 131 This is partly explained because the subjects of this essay are uncomfortable on many levels for anyone who has a strong connection to any of the objects of this study, particularly, the New Latin American cinema or the militancy inspired by Che Guevara as a way to respond to Hollywood’s hegemony. My first encounter with a hostile reaction was at SCMS in Vancouver where a member of the audience was visibly upset at my comparison of the different constructions of masculinity as exemplified by a comparison of el Chapulín Colorado with the militant masculinity of Che Guevara that was praised in New Latin American cinema manifestos. She refused to accept my framing of Che Guevara’s masculinity as a construction since she claimed “that’s how Che was in real life.” It is relevant to point out how this is a strong testament to the emotional appeal of such reactionary masculinities. She is not alone in this, as many people share a love and passion for the militancy of revolutionary movements throughout Latin America and, arguably, many would probably have a strong reaction to this framing. After all, I am comparing a rather silly television super hero with “The” icon for liberation struggles throughout Latin America. The emotional appeal of masculinity in this militant, reactionary context could be explained by historically contextualizing masculinity as an expected response to a sense of foreign intrusion, domination and control. As a matter of historical fact a reactive nationalism—reacting against intrusion from more advanced nations—has been a most important and powerful motive force in the transition from traditional to modern societies… Men holding effective authority or influence have been willing to uproot traditional societies not, primarily to make 132 more money but because the traditional society failed—or threatened to fail—to protect them from humiliation by foreigners.” (my emphasis, qtd. in Portillo 33) The above passage is from a chapter called “Preconditions for take-off” in W. W. Rostow’s influential Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, that described the path to national development in fascinating linear simplicity. This chapter was according to him, the pivotal stage for sustaining and maintaining independence and growth. Arguably it is one of the most widely cited texts as it is regarded as the foundation of national development discourse after World War II. Maria Saldana-Portillo presents one of the most comprehensive critiques of developmental ideology in her book, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Portillo argues that this form of reactive nationalism has two important implications. The first is that this reading of reactive nationalism is homoerotically charged, and the second is that “colonialism is figured as a constitutive trauma initiating adulthood for the underdeveloped subject.” (35) This quote also embodies a third implication in Portillo’s study that argues that another prerequisite for self-sustained growth was to reject a “traditional society” that is seen as pre- modern, underdeveloped and as a negative force preventing modernization. This required a change in attitude on the part of the subjects of underdevelopment in order to embrace change. Portillo points out that there are two modalities to development; the first is that it is “assumed that societies move through stages of development” such as the ones suggested by 133 Rostow. (6) The second modality of economic development assumes that the movement of these societies is only achieved if there is a change in the consciousness in the subjects of underdevelopment; that is, “the development of the members of these societies into free, mature, fully conscious, and self-determining individual subjects.” (6) This discursive binary between pre-modern and modern is not limited to capitalist developmental ideology but it is also prominent in leftist revolutionary discourse 2 (33). This is because both leftist and neoliberal revolutionary rhetoric emerged at the same time. Emmanuel Wallerstein in After Liberalism discusses how in 1917, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin called for the independence of all nations from imperial domination 3 (108-122). In other words, developmental discourse was framed and continues to be framed as a type of revolutionary discourse (Portillo, 18). The homoeroticism is self-evident, by framing men who need to take control and protect themselves from the humiliating intrusion of a more advanced nation. Portillo further argues that Rostow frames colonialism as a benign force that, if anything, allows for the process of independence and modernization to begin. And, thirdly, there is a call for a change of attitude in men of traditional societies to effect change. 2 Portillo study focuses on Guevara’s and Payera’s diaries, Malcolm X’s autobiography and Sandinista agrarian policy. 3 For a more detailed discussion refer to Chapter 6 “The Concept of National Development” in Emmanuel Wallerstein’s After Liberalism. The New Press, New York: 1995 pp. 108-122. Also, see Portillo’s discussion of Wallerstein’s argument, p. 18. 134 (25) In addition, both presume a potentially elitist developmental logic whereby the pre- modern classes have to educated and transformed. III. “Mis antenitas de vinil están detectando la presencia del enemigo” “Silence… My vinyl antennae are detecting the presence of the enemy…” is a phrase that the Mexican superhero would say when his plastic antennae (that were topped off with puffy orange and red fuzz balls) would emit a beeping sound, similar to Morse code, whenever he sensed imminent danger or any sort of threat. Despite the fact that I am not equipped with that particular ability, I could say that I’ve always been bothered by the strong absence of Latin American television studies in comparison to the strong presence of Latin American cinema within media studies. It is this feeling that encouraged me to take this academic path. What follows is a further exploration of the history of developmental discourse and its cultural implications drawing upon the work of several authors. Each scholar brings into play a different aspect of global economic discourse, in particular, developmental ideology after World War II, that are explicitly or implicitly articulated in both sets of cultural productions that I examine. This prevalent discourse of development has resulted in a pervasive ideology that hasn’t been fully questioned and remains to be debunked. 135 As noted in previous chapters in more condensed format, developmental discourse has its roots in imperial reason and is racially charged. That is, the hierarchy of economic development is rearticulating a logic of racial supremacy and inferiority that dates back to European imperialism. Christina Klein writes in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination (1945-1961) that the US was consciously trying to define itself as a “non imperial world power in the age of decolonization.” (9) At this time, important changes in the understanding of the relationship between race and cultural difference took place. She argues that a “pluralistic model of society followed Frank Boas’ work: if intergroup differences resulted from relatively superficial cultural factors rather than essential biological ones, then these differences could be more easily accommodated within a relatively flexible social order.” (11) Klein argues that the US became the first western nation to legitimate its expansion by championing the idea of racial equality. According to Klein, the US produced texts that engaged with the Orient in a “sentimental mode” which is both progressive and expansionist. (15) Klein notes that most cultural histories focus on the US’s effort to contain an aggressive Soviet expansion while the US remained peaceful and defensive; however she also argues that one must consider the US’s “integrationist” impulse which is part of what she calls the “sentimental mode”: As a result, it sought to create an internationally integrated free market economic order, in which each nation would have unrestricted access to the markets and raw materials of all others, while capital, goods, and people would move freely across national borders. By giving up any efforts to self-sufficiency, individual nations would become dependent on each other 136 for their prosperity and thus, Washington believed, much less likely to engage in activities that would lead to war. (25) Klein contrasts European imperialism which was seen as “based on naked exploitation and self-interest” with US expansion seen in terms of progress and modernization “as fostering economic development, infrastructure modernization, political liberalization, and the promotion of free-trade” (198). This was done through modernization theories (the exemplary one being Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth in 1960). Klein does note that modernization theory “continued many of the precepts of the ‘civilizing mission’ which had underwritten Western colonialism. It assumed (and continues to assume) that the “nonwhite portions of the world were backward, they needed to be educated and uplifted by the West and that they would need long periods of supervision before they would be ready for complete self-government.” (199) Klein further states that in contrast to 19 th Century imperial ideology, modernization theory distorted an “explicit ideology of racial hierarchy in favor of a more social scientific ideology of Western developmental superiority.” (199) Klein uses The King and I as a way to illustrate sentimental modernization. It represents …colonialism as a feminized project of modernizing backward peoples by inculcating them a set of habits and a consciousness associated with middle class domesticity. Instead of exterminating backward peoples through savage war, as imagined in the frontier discourse of continental expansion, sentimental modernization called for their incorporation through a process of nurture and education. (200) 137 One of Klein’s most compelling arguments regarding the US’s pluralist and integrationist political discursive strategies is the way she incorporates mass entertainment and how these works in one way or another, articulated these new strategies. Most significantly, Klein succeeds in accounting for the emotional appeal of these rhetorical devices through her notion of “sentimental modernization.” Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo reinforces, strengthens and complicates Klein’s understanding of the impact of political economic strategies to culture. It is this sentimental mode that still pervades American culture that accounts for the all-too-common and highly irritating phrase “Why does the world hate us?” 4 The ignorance or child-like naiveté that pervades mainstream America regarding the reasons why the entire world seems to hate the US (or the childish nature of the question itself) is a direct result of the effectiveness of the post World War II rhetoric of development, or, as Klein labels it, “sentimental modernization.” This is a very different childlike behavior compared to the cultural representation of El Chavo del Ocho that involves adults acting like children that I argue points out the ridiculous nature of developmental ideology, while at the same time highlighting the racial and sexual politics underlying these political theories. Despite their effectiveness and the way in which developmental ideology and ideas of progress have permeated virtually every single 4 In her article “Entertainment Wars”, the and Lynn Spigel’s discusses how American audiences are placed in the position of a child in certain television programs in order to explained current world politics. She discusses specific episodes of South Park and West Wing. In Television: The Critical View edited by Horace Newcomb (2007). 138 discursive realm, it continues to be of marginal concern in US cultural studies that attempt to engage with globalization. US developmental ideology has been pervasive not only in first world and third world governments, but revolutionary movements as well. As Saldana-Portillo argues, these latter movements cannot be simply read to be against colonial and neocolonial capitalism but must also be read within a racialized and gendered ideology of developmentalism (7). In agreement with Klein, Saldana-Portillo documents how certain changes in political discourse took place after World War II that were intended to construct an image of the US and the World Bank as benevolent agencies that were to help underdeveloped nations achieve the same independence and economic prosperity as first world nations. Both Klein and Saldana- Portillo urge us not to dismiss these discourses as mere rhetoric to achieve US hegemony abroad. Just as Klein’s argument is useful in successfully accounting for the ways in which these politics influenced middle-brow American cultural productions generating a sentimental mode of development, Saldana-Portillo goes a step further to explain in detail how these ideologies generated narratives of liberation that were strikingly similar in both the developed world and in revolutionary movements in Latin America. These narratives of liberation generated subjects of development and underdevelopment. In other words, developmental politics and revolutionary movements created and implied models of subjectivity and consciousness for the developed and underdeveloped world. She states that 139 a “normative theory of human transformation and agency” took shape and this “is at the heart of the collusion between revolutionary and development discourses” (7). Further, the problem with developmental politics and subsequent reactions is that they render as “natural” certain notions of growth and progress that were to lead to modernity (5-6). As she clearly states, and it is important to emphasize for the sake of my argument, the issue here is not to critique a notion of progress in and of itself, but to deconstruct ideas of how progress was to be achieved post World War II by signaling that these discourses (first and third world governments and revolutionaries alike) are heavily dependent upon and underwritten by a theory of human transformation and agency that have an origin in Imperial reason: “In those Enlightment doctrines of progress, evolution, and change that were historically articulated with the practice of European colonialism and colonial capitalism.” (7) In her analysis, Saldana-Portillo points out how developmental politics in the first world followed a paradigm that saw societies move through stages of development. Furthermore, this movement had the prerequisite that individuals in those societies needed themselves to develop into “free, mature, fully conscious, and self-determining subjects.” (6) She further explains: World War II discourses of development and revolution were specifically articulated against colonial and neocolonial relations of power, (but) both shared a theory of human perfectibility that was itself a legacy of the various raced and gendered subject formations animating colonialism. (7) 140 El Chavo del Ocho presents a full assault on this developmental logic. The characters include children played by adults. The episodes would always end in chaos and disorder where adults are not only playing children but where the adult characters also start to behave like children. For instance, in one episode, Quiquo (a boy played by actor Carlos Villagrán) is ordered by his mother (Florinda Meza) not to get his sailor outfit dirty because he has to attend a birthday party that the other kids, el Chavo (Roberto Gómez Bolaños) and la Chilindrina (Maria Antonieta de las Nieves) haven’t been invited too. El Chavo and la Chilindrina get annoyed at Quiquo’s presumptuous attitude and decide to splash him with talcum powder. First, el Chavo and la Chilindrina miss Quiquo and end up pouring the powder on each other (see figure 3.2). Increasingly frustrated, el Chavo and la Chilindrina continue to miss by hitting the adults. The episode ends with all the characters trying to get talcum in each other’s faces, children and adults included, as the credits roll over. With the exception of some rare episodes, there was never a moral, or closure at the conclusion of an episode. As this example suggests, the depiction of adults playing the roles of children implicitly questions linear narratives of economic development and the ways in which the latter imagines its subjects. That is, developmental ideology envisions societies moving through stages of economic development through time. This linear narrative requires the people in those societies to be “…mature, fully conscious, and self-determining...” (Portillo 6) Through its humor, the show challenges the idea of progress implied in the linear logic of development by showcasing regression and degeneracy. This assault happens on two levels. 141 The first concerns the characters themselves with adults playing the roles of fictional prepubescent boys and girls. The second occurs at the level of the show’s conventions such as the refusal to provide closure and the choice to end the majority of episodes in some form of anarchy. This challenges the theory of human perfectibility implicit in these economic ideologies that are projected onto the subjects of underdevelopment. In addition to this, this refusal for closure combined with adult characters behaving like children also destroys the hierarchy of power present in child-adult relations. If the Cinderella narratives could be seen to privilege an extended middle that troubles developmental progress, these sitcoms instead trouble neat and tidy endings, permanently deferring the transformation that are so central to the Cinderella narratives. Similar to the episode involving the talcum powder, there are numerous episodes revolve around dirt. These episodes follow a similar structure to the talcum powder episode where la Chilindrina and el Chavo decide to get Quiquo’s outfit dirty but instead end up getting it all over each other’s clothes, faces and in one episode the entire vecindad (neighborhood). Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the majority of episodes do not contain any type of closure, episodes involving dirt often have el Chavo directly addressing the camera at the end briefly discussing the importance of personal hygiene. Another episode that stands out is one where the entire neighborhood is intent on getting el Chavo “clean”. In this episode, he children, mainly Quiquo and la Chilindrina try to throw buckets full of water on el Chavo. 142 Similar to the “dirt” and “talcum powder” episodes, they miss their target and get each other wet repeatedly and end up soaking up the adults as well. Having discussed the historical links between dirt, cleaning, and whiteness in the previous chapter, one could argue that episodes such as these highlight the implicit racial politics of the show. In other words, since the program never makes reference to racial difference, the multitude of episodes that foreground “dirt” and “cleaning” could be argued to imply the racial dimension to this particular view of development that is not explicitly acknowledged in the show. Further, the “talcum powder” episode stands as an example where the characters turn white instead of brown effectively produces slapstick comedy out of this “accidental” performance of white face. There is no explicit symbolic presence of the US within the show but there are a great number of episodes that take place in a classroom, and amongst the many subjects being taught to them is the English language. Their teacher, “Profesor Jirafales 5 ” would always get frustrated with the inability of the children to learn and their rebellious and uninterested attitude towards learning. In some episodes, he’d end up crying out of frustration and giving up, letting the kids go home early. This failure to educate or enlighten and the children’s 5 The teacher’s name is a play with words, “jirafa” means giraffe, since the actor, Rubén Aguirres was considerably taller than the rest of the ensemble, and he is one of three characters together with Ramón Valdez and Angelines Fernández who never played children (Aguirres, perhaps because of his height; Valdez and Fernández because they both looked much older than the rest of the actors). 143 apathy to education could be argued to be a responding to the logic of US integrationist and sentimental policies that conceived the “nonwhite portions of the world (as) backward, (in) needed to be educated and uplifted by the West and that they (also) need long periods of supervision before they would be ready for complete self-government.” (Klein 199) The show’s outright mocking of education in episode after episode, can be compared to the Cinderella narratives that trivialize the process of education by focusing on the end results as a fantasy of transcendence. Therefore, if the Cinderella genre presents a fantasy of development, I argue that El Chavo del Ocho offer a fantasy of underdevelopment, as the program fully embraces a notion of anti-progress. Figure 3.2: La Chilindrina holds the talcum powder after throwing it on el Chavo’s face 144 Figure 3.3: Profesor Jirafales’ classroom. IV. “Síganme los Buenos!” Questioning New Latin American Cinema Histories, Manifestoes and the Politics of Gender and Taste “Those who are good: follow me!” is el Chapulin’s phrase when he is about to start some sort of endeavor to defeat the enemy and is calling on those who wish him to do well and join him in his quest. There seems to be no better way to start the critique of the New Latin America after laying out the dominant ideologies of capitalist development and the accompanying cultural implications of gender, sentimentality and inferiority discussed in the previous section. Film historian John King provides an example of how Latin American cinema histories have inscribed the politics of developmental ideology into their accounts. He states that it produced an artistically and socially revolutionary cinema that offered hope that Latin American filmmakers could catch up to the West (67). He writes, “The sixties was the decade in which the artistic community felt that it had ‘come of age’ and could be ‘contemporary with all the men’ in Octavio Paz’s evocative phrase… The imaginative 145 proximity of social revolution was combined with a sense of cultural modernity”. (67) What is rarely discussed is how these types of historiographic accounts implicitly assume a state of cultural inferiority in relation to the first world. A sense of communitarian ideology can be developed out of feelings of inferiority as argued by Claudio Lomnitz in his revisionist discussion of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. It might not be particularly ground breaking to state that there are feelings involved in grappling with the consequences of being part of a state, region or nation that is economically underdeveloped. Latin American thinkers and artists have been grappling with these feelings for quite some time now. Anderson’s argument, as Lomnitz points out, is built upon a study of nationalism as inaugurated in Latin America which was later exported back to Europe. Lomnitz argues that nationalist or communitarian ideology goes back before the printing press and the novel and can be found in political writings in Spain about their affairs in the Americas. This was directly linked to a sense of Spanish inferiority compared to the other European powers, and much of the sense of pride linked to the conquest of the America’s was linked to a desire to be recognized as the equal of other leading European empires (the French, British and German). According to Lomnitz, policy making developed a sense of simultaneity based on the Spanish position of perceived backwardness in relation 146 to other European countries. 6 Nationalism played out as a desire for religious expansion in the Americas in direct relation to their feeling of inferiority to the rest of Western Europe. (21, 22) As it is evident from King’s approach to the New Latin American cinema movement, he applies economic developmental logic to artistic and cultural development. This falls under Portillo’s second modality of developmental discourse, one that assumes that the subjects in underdeveloped nations must reach the same level of consciousness as the developed world. In the case of John King, this was achieved through artistic achievement and recognition in international film festivals. In an apparent opposition to this type of artistic revolution, Mexican television offered a less critically acclaimed response to American neo-colonialism: a deficient, inferior form of masculinity and immaturity that seemed to permanently embrace inferiority through a visualization of interrupted growth, development and maturity. 6 The experience of “simultaneous time” which has been crucial to film and television studies and theories of liveness and community through television viewing in Britain and the US has always been imagined as leveled, however as Lomnitz indicates, the initial experience of simultaneity shows that this experience of time is also experienced through a hierarchical relationship. Furthermore, economic hierarchies are often characterized, imagined and narrativized in terms of “time”. The most obvious example is the conception of a “developed” and “underdeveloped” (or most commonly “developing”) world and as seen through theories of economic development which illustrates the path to “development” through economic stages which implies that the “developing” world are the “developed” world’s past, in the present. Lomnitz discusses what he calls a “pervasive peripheral cosmopolitanism,” “an acute conscience of wanting to catch up, to reach the level of the great world powers.” (81) 147 Chespirito’s programs articulate two different responses the notion of Latin American underdevelopment: El Chapulín Colorado is an underdeveloped male super hero, therefore presenting a sort of deficient masculinity. El Chavo del Ocho explicitly depicts underdeveloped adults. Exemplified by Octavio Paz’s phrase in the quote presented earlier by King, Latin American thinkers have been attempting to transcend this conception through literature, art, cinema and other artistic media. Therefore, it is not my intention to place blame on King or other scholars and intellectuals who implicitly follow developmental logic. New Latin American filmmakers were not only critiquing and challenging U.S. policies through art but were also attempting to transcend these conceptions. It is the latter issue of transcendence that is the primary concern, since the political aim of the movement, to question and challenge neocolonialist exploitation of the Americas, is not in question. So whether attempting to transcend or embrace these conceptions of underdevelopment, both cultural representations are engaging with aspects of their material reality and unquestionably accepting an articulation of a backward, underdeveloped subject that must be transcended. Juxtaposing both types of conceptions of pan Latin American identity that are responding to discourses of development allows us to evaluate the centrality of gender and race in the articulation not only of developmental discourse itself but also in the different cultural responses to it across different media. This is done in an effort to expose the centrality of gender and race in relation to understanding responses to Hollywood’s commercial influence 148 in Latin America. The traditional society is not only seen as a force that is holding back development, but it is blamed for the intrusion in the first place, as it is constructed as passive. This binary is one that is not explored in Portillo’s study in relation to media production, circulation and critical reception. In other words, commercial film and television have been historically and critically conceived as the opiate of the masses, conceiving them as passive and feminized in direct binary opposition to independent film. A film festival in 1967, a ‘meeting of Latin American film-makers’ at Viña del Mar is widely cited as a first step in the goal of achieving Pan-American solidarity. As John King points out, other meetings followed, in Merida, Venezuela in 1968 and Viña again in 1969. King uses the following quote to summarize the similar declarations of intent of these cinematic practices: The authentic New Latin American cinema was, is and will be one which contributes to the development and strengthening of our national cultures, as an instrument of resistance and struggle; one which works with the objective, over and beyond the specificities of each one of our peoples, of integrating this body of nations so that one day the great nation, stretching from Rio Grande to Patagonia, will become a reality; one which participates in the defense and fight against imperialist cultural penetration and their anti-national collaborators …one which increases awareness in peoples, so that history will be transformed. (71) This is the moment when, according to King and other scholars, the “theoretical statements of a ‘cinema of hunger’, an ‘imperfect cinema’ and a ‘Third Cinema’… would light up and guide the liberation struggles throughout the continent” (72) For the New Latin American 149 cinema, “the enemies were North American imperialism, multinational capital, the seamless diegesis of Hollywood cinema, the fragmentation caused by neo-colonialism. The goals were national and continental liberation.” (69) These cinemas attempted to be militant, overcome and/or embrace their rudimentary forms of production in order to find a new film language, instead of “imitating” or “blindly embracing” Hollywood’s cinema. King merely exemplifies a dominant tendency in film studies historiography that desired to find an alternative to Hollywood cinema. The effort to valorize a particular strand of independent Third World cinemas in this light is a laudable one that has its roots in US and Latin American academic cinema scholarship from the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is no coincidence that it is during this decade three important developments occurred: the flourishing of film studies as an academic career, radical movements in the US felt solidarity with anti colonial struggles and the rise of dependency theory. This particular combination of political and social factors allowed for the acceptance of the New Latin American cinema in film studies and a dismissal of television as a viable subject of academic study for the decades to follow (with few exceptions). This alignment of politics, history and taste has been widely cited and accepted in film histories but not as widely questioned (Pam Cook’s The Cinema Book, Roy Armes Third World Filmmaking and the West, and others). They all assume Third Cinema as a challenge or an alternative to Hollywood cinema. 150 The term ‘Third World’ refers to the colonized, neo-colonised or decolonized nations and ‘minorities’ whose structural disadvantages have been shaped by the colonial process and the unequal division of labour. The term itself challenges the colonizing vocabulary which posited these nations as ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped’. (Pam Cook 120) This definition was offered by film scholar Pam Cook in a chapter aptly called “Alternatives to Classic Hollywood” in the widely cited and distributed The Cinema Book. The widely cited historical roots of the term “Third World’ speaks volumes regarding the alignment of politics, history and taste; the term was coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in the 1950s as an analogy to the “third estate” of France that meant to represent the class differentiation between the “commoners”, the “clergy” (second estate) and the nobility (first estate). The term in relation to anticolonial struggles first emerged from the 1955 Bandung Conference of “non-aligned” nations considering the Third World to be every nation excluding the First World (Europe, US, Japan and Australia) and the Second World (the Soviet Bloc). Pam Cook provides a good overview of the use of the term “third world cinema” in film studies by citing Roy Arme’s and Paul Willemen’s definitions. Armes includes all films produced in third world nations even before the term was in use. According to Cook, this differs from Paul Willemen who prefers to speak of third cinema as an “ideological project that (is) adhering to a particular political and aesthetic programme, whether or not they are produced by Third World peoples themselves.” (120) As Cook rightly suggests Third World cinema ideology emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the manifestos of Glauber Rocha “Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), Fernando Solanas and 151 Octavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969) and Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969). In a nut shell, Cook describes these manifestoes as valorizing …an alternative, independent, anti-imperialist cinema more concerned with provocation and militancy than with consumer satisfaction. The manifestoes contrasted the new cinema not only with Hollywood but also with their own countries’ commercial traditions, now viewed as ‘bourgeois’, ‘alienated’ and ‘colonised’. Just as the French New Wave raged against le cinema de papa, so Brazil’s Cinema Novo directors, rejected the entertainment oriented chanchadas and European style costume epics. (Her emphasis, 121) Cook proceeds to dismiss the manifestoes as being “overly binaristic in their rejection of antecedent commercial film traditions” and too “euphoric” (122). The dismissal of such rhetoric as outdated is very common and usually accompanies the dismissal of dependency theory. Yet the very nature of the developmental ideology that gave rise to them in the first place is never questioned. After the first, ‘euphoric’, period of Third World Cinema then, the early manifestoes were critiqued, positions were modified and updated, and cinematic praxis evolved in a whole range of directions.” (123) As Cook does, the collapse of the USSR is often cited as the source of the pessimism that accompanies the desire to dismiss the militancy as an initial “euphoric” stage that gave rise in the 1980s and 1990s to “more diversified themes and aesthetic models as filmmakers partially discarded the didactic model predominant in the 1960s in favour of a postmodern ‘politics of pleasure’, incorporating music, humour and sexuality.” (123) I would like to use Pam Cook’s very dismissal of what she labels “binaristic” manifestos as an illustration of the problems and pervasiveness of developmental ideology as it pertains to historiographic writing. In other words, Cook 152 generates a binary to dismiss another binary that results from her lack of engagement with developmental ideology. Her binary consists of a dismissal of a “simplistic past” replaced by a more complex and diversified present. The ideologies of capitalist development and its response, Dependency Theory in the 1960s and 1970s, that produced the manifestoes is overtly ignored. The fall of the USSR is meant to signal the rise of more diverse practices that softened the earlier dismissal of commercial cinemas; this is the equivalent of saying that the predominance of capitalism as a world system produced more diverse and complex themes and aesthetic practices. My effort to re-evaluate the manifestoes in relation to Mexican commercial television are part of an effort to develop a comparative, transmedia approach that would allow us to question reigning political ideologies of the time and denaturalize developmental ideology that might otherwise be omitted with a medium- specific approach to historical analysis. The embrace of a militant masculinity that was to illuminate people’s consciousness and ignite Third World revolt was also accompanied by a politics of taste that was itself gendered. There was an embrace of realism over melodrama: the former was seen as a tool to examine life and expose corruption and the latter as escapist fantasies that reinforced capitalist ideology. It has been well established that filmmakers aligned their desires for realism with Italian neo-realism. Even though it is important to note that Italian neo- 153 realism’s appeal was the context out of which it emerged 7 , there was also the added appeal of the movement’s positive reception at international film festivals. Historical accounts emphasize the desire of independent cinemas, as expressed by filmmaker’s manifestos, to define themselves in opposition to Hollywood (and Hollywood- influenced) culture industries. Filmmakers did not want to produce “cheap” imitations of Hollywood cinema; in other words, there was a great investment in an individual’s originality and talent. Julio García Espinosa called for an ‘imperfect cinema’ (1969) that was about embracing the limitations of production that result from low budgets and posits them against Hollywood’s “perfect cinema.” Espinosa also called for a cinema that spoke and dealt with people’s struggles going against notions that high art (‘perfect’ art) is bipartisan or uncommitted; Espinosa states that one must embrace an ‘imperfect’ cinema that is fully committed to a conscious engagement with politics. Quoting Glauber Rocha, Espinosa wrote that the motto of ‘imperfect cinema’ entails filmmakers who “are not interested in the problems of neurosis; we are interested in the problems of lucidity.” (79) Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, on a similar vein says that a revolutionary cinema “should serve to mobilize the masses 7 It is commonly noted that the appeal to New Latin American filmmakers of Italian neo- realism stemmed from the efforts of the latter movement to show the harsh realities of Italy in ruins after World War II and the way in which this was achieved through aesthetic practices that embraced their low budget (such as: shooting on location, employing non- professional actors, etc.) In addition, many Latin American filmmakers were trained in Italy. 154 and channel them toward revolution.” Alea summarizes the problems that face a revolutionary cinema as being an issue of audience’s taste rather than distribution: “As a revolutionary practice it has been effective within the narrow limits in which it operates but it cannot reach large numbers, not only because of political obstacles it encounters with the distribution and exhibition system, but also because of its style. Most people continue to prefer the more polished product which the big industry offers them.” (114) Alea also condemned what he calls the typical capitalist consumer film show, the “light comedy or melodrama.” (126) Alea adds to what he calls a characteristic that “has been denounced all too often” which present an “irritating situation.” That is, commercial cinemas act “as a refuge in the face of a hostile reality cannot but collaborate with all the factors which sustain such a reality to the extent that it acts as a pacifier, an escape valve, and conditions the contemplative spectator vis-à-vis reality (127). The “happy ending” becomes the formal characteristic to blame (and will continue to be in film studies to the present day), and Alea states that the “happy ending” “has provided and continues to provide a rather efficient ideological weapon to promote and consolidate conformism among large sectors of the population.” (126) As Ana Lopez has pointed out: “in their analysis, the old melodrama of the Latin American Cinema was reflective of the economic dependence of Latin America and ultimately also responsible for the maintenance and reproduction of economic and cultural dependence.” (7) In other words, the New Latin America Cinema manifestos largely articulated their projects around conceptions coming out of dependency theory and they set 155 out to reconfigure hierarchies of taste which aligned capitalist cultural production with feminine pleasure (light comedies and melodrama) and infantilized and/or naive audiences who took pleasure on sucking on “the pacifier” which was Hollywood and Hollywood inspired cinemas (they needed to be “awakened”). Jorge Sanjinés as recently as 1987 denounced filmmakers who strayed from the politically committed cinema of the late 1960s by saying: “Many propose or produce a sellout cinema under the misguided justification that the important thing is to occupy the screens, as if the remedy for prostitution were to prostitute yourself.” (Qtd. in Aufderheide 67) A “sellout cinema” is not only equated to prostitution, but more often than not a sellout cinema also signified cinematic practices that attempted to follow formulas, implying that it would be “bad taste”. El Chapulín Colorado emerges as a cultural icon out of the same time period of Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema”. The show was produced with a very low budget, it had simple costumes, lighting that attempted to follow the three point system, scenery and props which imitated Hollywood but it was apparent that it was made out of cheap materials. In the case of “Third Cinema” (1969), the directors proposed a cinema of subversion aimed at “the new man exemplified by Che Guevara”. The authors compared filmmaking to guerilla warfare by 156 stating that they conceived of the camera as “a rifle”, the projector as “a gun that shoots 24 fps”, film as “the detonator” and the filmmaker as a “guerilla fighter who travels along paths that he himself has opened with machete blows” (qtd. in Armes 99). Some might say that the very existence of el Chapulín Colorado and the underdeveloped adults in El Chavo del Ocho are the antithesis of Solanas and Getino’s “new man 8 ” proving the very need for a new militant masculinity if one is to question and denounce neo-colonization. However, I juxtapose the degeneracy articulated by el Chapulín’s deficient masculinity and el Chavo’s infatilization in direct relation to Solanas and Getinos hyper masculine response to Hollywood hegemony. Even though these manifestos produce progressive ideologies that reject capitalism, their narrative of liberation is imagined through a militant masculinity and violence that unquestionably reproduces the gendered logic present in developmental ideology. This gendered logic is articulated in the notion of a “reactive nationalism” described by Rostow where foreign (in this case, US) intrusion is characterized as forceful penetration, that could then be homophobically interpreted as resulting in the emasculation and/or feminization of the state that is being “economically raped.” I would like to argue 8 In a psychological study on the effects of television ideology in children from Costa Rica, the authors claim that El Chavo del Ocho represents marginal life that is characterized by the reproduction of impotency, dissatisfaction, failure, misery, lack of responsibility, vagrancy, ignorance, aggression and disintegration of the family…” they also add that this conception “is the recreation and diffusion of a stereotype regarding the Latin American condition that is very common in North American programs, to which the mestizo- American conscience and especially Costa Ricans are exposed to.” (36) 157 that the comedies not only articulate but embrace the inferiority and degradation rejected by the manifestos. Developmental ideology usually implies that the subjects of underdevelopment are backward and those conceptions were (and continue to be) so pervasive that even Solanas and Getino shared a similar view of the “retarded” audiences they were attempting to reach. However, they had faith in such audiences as they claimed that “social layers considered backward [are able] to capture the exact meaning of an association of images, and effects of staging, and any linguistic experimentation placed within the context of a given idea” (qtd. in Armes 100). Solanas and Getinos conception of the audience as backward, in the need to be educated and uplifted, goes hand in hand with the masculinity and violence of the cinema that is to counter Hollywood hegemony effectively reproducing the gendered logic of developmental ideology while at the same time rejecting capitalist politics. V. “Lo sospeche desde un principio.” “I suspected it from the very beginning” is a phrase el Chapulin says in order to prevent ridicule when a character points out to him something obvious that he didn’t realize, such as the fact that the door he has been trying to force open is actually unlocked. As noted earlier, Claudio Lomnitz’s concept of a peripheral vision of the world not only becomes very useful in highlighting the implicit inferiority complex that energizes the militancy of the New Latin 158 American, but it also explains the appeal of El Chapulín Colorado and El Chavo del Ocho. The latter two explicitly articulate the position of inferiority that is implicit in Latin American Cinema manifestos and historiographies, but make no attempts to “catch up.” Instead these shows take underdevelopment as their main subject, presenting a satire of Latin American society as it is commonly represented in political and cultural discourse. In other words, what does a society look like that is constantly trying to “catch up”, what do people look like in a society that is underdeveloped, not only economically but also culturally? A possibility that has received wide acceptance throughout Latin America are the infantilized adults in El Chavo del Ocho. Both of these comedies achieved a tremendous amount of success throughout Latin America. Their creator, Roberto Gómez Bolaños aka “Chespirito” was given this nickname when he was a staff writer for various television comedies. As the story goes, he was such a clever writer that the producer who hired him called him “Shakespearito” (Little Shakespeare), thus his artistic nickname became an easier way to pronounce this nickname, and Roberto Gómez Bolaños named all his characters including the now defunct Spanish alphabet letter “CH.” This effectively links an embraced “lower” cultural version of Shakespeare with a Mexican television comic that later was praised for his pan-Latin American appeal. 159 El Chapulín Colorado is a Mexican version of a superhero and every half hour episode details the efforts of the hero to resolve people’s conflicts. The conflicts range from the ordinary (preventing the unfair eviction of tenants) to the “extraordinary” such as helping a scientist recover his recent invention (paint that turns people invisible) from a spy. The hero is short in height, not very attractive and dresses in a red suit with a yellow heart on his chest with the letter(s) “CH” (which until a few years ago was considered a letter of the alphabet until the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language decided that “CH” is not a letter because it is made up of two individual letters). The program began to air as a half hour sitcom on Mexico’s channel eight in the 1972 and was quickly exported throughout Latin America. The show was produced from 1972 until 1979 as its own half hour show. However, the character was developed before the 1970s, and from 1970 to 1971 sketches were aired on variety shows. There were approximately 250 episodes produced between 1972 until 1979, around 60 of them were remakes of previous episodes, and it could be argued that the remakes present a blatant disregard for any notion of artistic originality. Starting in 1980, the character was featured as a sketch, sometimes lasting an entire episode, as part of the Chespirito variety show, an hour long program that continued to be produced until 1995 airing Monday nights on Televisa’s channel 2 in Mexico. The original series continues to be aired in the United States and throughout many Latin American countries. 160 The show presents an interesting counterpoint to the militancy of the New Latin American cinema where an emasculated hero is embraced, the exact opposite of the idealization of the militancy of a revolutionary fighter. Furthermore, his insignia with the letter “CH” attests to el Chapulín not only as a Mexican hero but also a hero of Latin America by choosing a letter that at the time was particular to the Spanish alphabet (yet identifying Latin American as united based on its Spanish heritage). The super-hero was extremely clumsy and could never do anything right, despite all his good intentions. He would triumph, but it would always be either through chance or through the help of the original victim(s) who invoked him. El Chapulín also refused to use fire arms or violence; instead he carried a “chipote chillón” (crying hammer), a plastic toy hammer that he would use to strike his enemies (most of the time he would confuse the enemy with the victim, never getting it right). The show fully embraced and explicitly expressed the hero’s inferiority to the US. In a 1974 episode of El Chapulín Colorado, the Mexican super-hero attempts to prevent the unfair eviction of a grandfather and granddaughter from a dilapidated house since the tenants refuse to pay the rent until the building is fixed. As a convention of the show, one of the characters in trouble invokes the presence of el Chapulín by asking the question: “Oh! And now who will be able to help me?” The hero always enters the scene attempting a spectacular surprise entrance that always goes wrong. As the grandfather realizes that his granddaughter invoked the red bumblebee man he asks with great disappointment: 161 “Couldn’t you have called Batman or Superman?” The grandfather repeats his disappointment with the superhero’s presence every time he fails to accomplish a task-- which happens repeatedly throughout the story. At one point the daughter responds to her grandfather’s unhappiness with the bumblebee man by stating: “Please grandfather- el Chapulín Colorado is the hero of Latin America (Hispanic America)” to which the grandfather replies: “No wonder why we’re underdeveloped!” Later in the episode after even more failed attempts by the Mexican superhero to save the two from eviction, the grandfather says to her “you could’ve at least called Bugs Bunny or Speedy Gonzales!” to which the daughter replies, disappointed, “I am beginning to think so myself.” This comparison of the inferiority of el Chapulín compared to that of US action heroes is a common theme of the show and a source of its pleasure and humor. The inferiority of el Chapulín is not only signaled by the way in which he is compared to US action heroes, but also in relation as to how he doesn’t measure up to cultural expectations of what it means to be a grown man. The comedy lies in the fact that a Mexican superhero is inept, weak and cowardly. Needless to say, according to militant movements and US policy, this is not the type of implied masculinity that would guarantee stability, growth and independence of a nation. The superhero is constantly being offended and humiliated by the victims that he intends to rescue. The opening credits for every episode presents a spoof on Superman’s traditional description; instead of being “faster than a speeding bullet, more 162 powerful than a speeding locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”, el Chapulín is described by the narrator as being “stronger than a mouse, more agile than a turtle, and (having a) heart as a shield… ” This effectively conflates el Chapulín’s inferior masculinity with that of Superman. There are also countless jokes about the superhero’s height, one of them being how he is always proudly proclaiming himself as a “self-made man,” and then another character will respond with the question: “and who interrupted you?” El Chapulín Colorado is therefore presented as an interrupted man, a figure of underdevelopment. Taking pride in such deficiencies and failures accounts for the hero’s popularity not because it is indicative of the achievements or lack of achievements of Latin American nations but because the show registers, exploits and pokes fun at the notion that an entire continent can be imagined through political and economic discourses. Some might argue that the conformism, clumsiness and the very presence of el Chapulín on television proves the very need for a new militant masculinity to question and denounce neo- colonization. However, I have used the example of the popularity of the “degenerative masculinity” of el Chapulín in direct relation to Solanas and Getinos’ hyper masculine response to the perceived disadvantage of Latin American national cinemas in the face of Hollywood hegemony as a way to highlight how gender becomes the terrain in which cultural hegemony become contested and imagined. In other words, this is done to highlight the centrality, and therefore, the importance of gender in articulating these cultural struggles. 163 That said, despite the fact that the show foregrounds the superhero’s inferiority compared to the US, el Chapulín remains as an icon to many Latin Americans: Figure 3.4: “Ojo con el ALCA” Figure 3.5: “NO TLC” The anonymous creator from Ecuador of the image on the left claims: “this cartoon doesn’t require an explanation for most Latin Americans.” He follows this statement by writing that this image is free to use and was published with the purpose to encourage its use as a personal icon in an online messenger system (Microsoft’s messenger). ALCA stands for “Area de Libre Comercio de las Americas” a free-trade agreement sponsored by the United States. The author explains that “OJO con el ALCA” (watch out for ALCA) “is a message for Latin Americans to support our industries, our companies and our initiatives, represented by el Chapulín, instead of supporting the US, represented by Superman.” The second image from a Costa Rican website that promotes political activism, used el Chapulín’s shield, replacing the “CH” with “NO TLC” (“No to the Free Commerce Treaty 164 (Tratado de Libre Comercio)”. These images demonstrate not only the status as a cultural icon of el Chapulín in many Latin American countries but they also serve as examples of ways in which it has been re-contextualized for political purposes. Despite the fact that the El Chapulín Colorado’s iconography has been repurposed for contemporary political purposes, the program itself articulated its own geopolitics back in the early 1970’s in an episode titled “De los metiches libranos Señor” (“God save us from the nosy”). In this show, el Chapulín was called upon to save a peasant girl from a Russian villain and featured a rare character who only appeared in three episodes played by Ramón Valdez, who was part of the ensemble of actors that performed each week. Ramón Valdez’s character posed the biggest threat to el Chapulin’s position as Latin American’s super hero within the world of the show, his name was Super Sam. As the title of the show that featured his first appearance suggests, this parody of superman is characterized as a mere annoyance, not an actual threat. Super Sam is a blend of superman and Uncle Sam played by an actor who was considerably older than Roberto Gómez Bolaños. Ramón Valdez is also taller and skinnier than Roberto Gómez Bolaños. Super Sam’s outfit is virtually identical to that of the man of steel, except he wears a top hat with a pattern of the US flag similar to Uncle Sam. Ramón Valdez’s face is long, wrinkled and resembles that of Uncle Sam, except Valdez’s face is considerably more tanned. As weak and dim-witted as El Chapulín Colorado, Super Sam uses a bag of money as his weapon of choice (comparable to el Chapulin’s chipote chillón), 165 and every time that he strikes an enemy, an old cash register sound is played back as its sound effect. Super Sam speaks some Spanish mixed with English (many refer to this as “spanglish”) with a very heavy Spanish accent. He repeatedly says the phrase: “time is money, time is money!” as a way to signal the fact that he intends to hurry and attack the villain. Super Sam only appeared in three episodes out of the entire 37 year history of the show and his main weakness was his ambition. Three years after his first appearance, Super Sam returned for a second episode in order to compete with el Chapulín to save yet another damsel in distress. El Chapulín decided to distract him by telling him that there is gold deep within the mine where they were trapped. This distraction gave el Chapulín enough time to rescue her before the mine collapsed, effectively defeating Super Sam. Similar to the political repurposing of el Chapulín’s shield in the images above, the show itself made a direct association between politics and fiction by combining superman and Uncle Sam into Super Sam. Through Ramón Valdez’s physicality the “the man of steel” is reduced to a non-threatening counterpart to el Chapulín, and the only reason why Valdez was the most appropriate actor from the cast to play the role is due to his resemblance to Uncle Sam. Therefore, one could argue that the show takes away the mythical power, 166 strength and appeal of superman by foregrounding the action hero’s rampant American capitalist ideology 9 . The two previous episodes present a competition between Super Sam and el Chapulín to become the superhero of Latin American through rescue narratives: saving the girl from the evil claws of the enemy, in one case a heavy-set Russian (Edgar Vivar) and in the other a man that resembles the stereotype of an old movie villain; dressed in black tuxedo, sporting a long cape, a top hat and a long moustache curled at the tips (played by Carlos Villagrán). In the episode against the Russian, el Chapulín and Super Sam are both competing against each other to save the peasant girl (Florinda Meza) but are united against a mutual enemy. It effectively aligns Mexico with US cold war politics against the USSR, while simultaneously registering the sense of competition with the US. In most other episodes, this competition is non-existent, whenever a US action hero is referred to is to highlight el Chapulin’s inferiority. In these two episodes, the US action hero is satirized: his superpower was money and his ambition was his ultimate downfall. The Russian says very little and uses brute force to fight el Chapulín and Super Sam, such as bumping them with his big belly. The Russian has kidnapped and is attempting to kill the peasant girl. He has taken her into a cabin and loaded it with dynamite. The detonator is by a well, outside of the cabin. 9 Though there are many instances of American capitalist ideology in superman, refer to the film Superman IV: The Quest for Peace from 1987 as an example. 167 These episodes depict politics of allegiance between the US and Mexico and at the same time register the anxiety of US invasion, the threat of usurpation and a sense of competition between the neighboring nations. It also adds a moral tone to the geopolitical landscape which guarantees the triumph of el Chapulín over these other threats: the Russian has an evil nature and Super Sam’s only strength is his money. El Chapulín is noble, good and has no material ambitions. The fact that at the center of all this is a peasant girl allows for another level of analysis to this competition. As we saw in Chapter 2, the peasant has occupied a symbolic role in nationalist narratives not only in Mexico but in countries throughout Latin America. The fact that the Russian is attempting to destroy her and el Chapulín and Super Sam are battling each other to save the “bonita señorita,” as Super Sam calls her, indicates the importance of the “national” superhero to save the national symbol. In this episode, the show collapses the rescuing and saving of national symbol with a rescue narrative. In the end though, the peasant girl frees herself and meets el Chapulín and her boyfriend outside. El Chapulín accidentally sits on the detonator and the cabin where Super Sam and the Russian are explodes. The bomb that the Russian built to destroy the peasant ultimately destroys him, and Super Sam and the Mexican characters are left unharmed (being a comedy, Super Sam and the Russian villain emerge unharmed as well, except covered in flour and other debris as they continue fighting). 168 Figure 3.6: El Chapulín emerging from a well Figure 3.7: Super Sam. Figure 3.8: Super Sam, el Chapulín Figure 3.9: Dimitri Pansov However, just because the show embraces a degenerate or inferior form of masculinity doesn’t mean that it presents a viable alternative to the heterosexist politics inherent in US policies and New Latin American cinema discourses. As late as 1992, a re-make of a 1970s episode shows el Chapulín restoring the order in a home by saving a man from adopting the role of a housewife. The man used to be a doctor that lost his confidence as a professional. His wife was making more money than him and continually put him down and ordered him to do house chores. The wife dressed in business attire, wearing pants and short hair, and acted aggressively. El Chapulín helped the man with his duties around the house. At the end 169 of the episode, the husband’s confidence is restored by delivering a next door neighbor’s baby. In the end, he returns to his profession, and the women returns to the home. So in fact, the program was also the defender of traditional gender roles even as it troubled the contours of masculinity. VI. Conclusion: “Bueno… La Idea es Esa.” I conclude this chapter with yet another phrase from one of the comedies that translates to: “Well, that’s the idea!” El Chapulín would often try to illuminate the victims with some of his wisdom by referring to any old saying. He would start out by stating: “Como lo dice el viejo y conocido refrán…” (“As the old and well known proverb says…”) However, he would get all the quotes and sayings confused and would end up irritating the people that he was trying to enlighten as he tries to figure out what it is that he is trying to say. Once he realized that everyone was annoyed, he’d end up saying: “Bueno… la idea es esa,” the assumption being that he has laid out enough information for everyone else to figure out the saying or proverb that he was trying to communicate. Similar to el Chapulín’s mixing of different proverbs, some might say that I have engaged with discourses from fields that aren’t always in conversation, or expected to be in dialogue with one another. That said, in the case of the Mexican superhero this was a result of a mistake, of getting his ideas confused, whereas I present this 170 as a methodology that will enable a comparative study of different media cultures that will place different fields in conversation with one another. These two sets of cultural productions – Chespirito’s sitcoms and New Latin Cinema -- emerged at a similar historical moment and generated two distinct articulations of a Pan Latin American identity. These analyses of the differences and similarities in these articulations of identity in response to US economic and cultural influence have demonstrated the centrality of gender and race in the articulation of these identities. For example, El Chavo del Ocho presents adults acting like children; this is an explicit form of regression that embodies the ways in which developmental logic conceives of Latin American nations and their peoples as “underdeveloped”. El Chapulin Colorado presents an inferior, Mexican version of a super hero who lacks smarts, agility and strength. Within the show, he is presented as the “super hero of Latin America” and the best that an underdeveloped continent has to offer. In the case of the New Latin American cinemas, the artists were attempting to transcend this position of underdevelopment by championing a militant cinema that was heavily gendered male and that was embodied by the figure of Che Guevara (as evidenced in several manifestos). This militant cinema was to awaken the masses that were blinded by commercial entertainment. 171 I believe that this study illustrates the limits of medium-specific approaches to the study of media culture which is why I place these two types of media in conversation, the television comedies on the one hand, and non-commercial forms of film production on the other. Doing this allows me to place three important fields in conversation with one another -- film, television and Latin American studies -- in order to demonstrate how the critical study of cultural representations of age and human processes of growth --and stunted growth allow us to denaturalize the racial and gendered logic of developmental ideology; a way of seeing the world that has heavily influenced our understanding of global politics beginning in the second half of the 20 th Century until today. 172 Works Cited Alea, Tomas Gutiérrez. “The Viewer’s Dialectic”. Martin, Michael, ed. New Latin American Cinema Volume One: Studies of National Cinemas. Detroit, Wayne State University Press: 1997 Armes, Roy. Third World Filmmaking and the West. University of California Press, 1987 Aufderheide, Pat. “Latin American Cinema & The Rhetoric of Cultural Nationalism: Controversies at the Havana in 1987 and 1989”, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 12(4), pp. 61-76 “Chapulín vs Superman/ Caricatura para usar en el messenger de Hotmail” Online image. 27 Aug. 2004 Centro de Medios Independientes 17 Sep. 2007 <http://ecuador.indymedia.org/es/2004/08/6518.shtml> Cook, Pam. The Cinema Book. London, BFI, 2000 Díario de Hoy. “Homenaje Gráfico a El Chavo del Ocho” ElSalvador.com 7 July 2007 Accesed: 27 September 2007 <http://elsalvador.com/mwedh/nota/nota_completa.asp?idCat=6378&idArt=1520455> Espinosa, Julio Garcia. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Martin, Michael, ed. New Latin American Cinema Volume One: Studies of National Cinemas. Detroit, Wayne State University Press: 1997 King, John. “The 1960s and After: New Cinemas for a New World?” Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. New York & London, Verso, 1997 173 Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. London, University of California Press, 2003 Lomnitz, Claudio. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2001 Lopez, Ana. “The Melodrama in Latin America: Films, Telenovelas and the Currency of a Popular Form,” Wide Angle 7, No. 3 (1985): 5-13 Noticieros Televisa. El Noticiero con Joaquin Lopez Doriga. Prod. Televisa. Galavision, Los Angeles, 21 Aug. 2006 Notimex. Chespirito.org. Day and month unknown, 2005. Accessed on 1 January 2007 <http://www.reniet.com/chespirito/chavo_del_8/chavodel8_noticias_harry_poter.h tm>. “No TLC.” Online image. Author and title unknown. 11 Sep. 2007 ConCostaRica.com 3 Oct. 2007 <http://www.concostarica.com/files/images/chapulin_grande_0.jpg> McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, Routledge, 1995. Portillo, Maria Josefina Saldana. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Duke University Press, 2003 Solano, Isaura Lobo et. al. Televisión, Ideología y Socialización: Su Papel en la Formación de la Identidad Personal y Social del Niño y la Niña Costarricenses. Actualidades en Psicología, Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica. Vol. 13, No. 92: 1997 174 Univision.com. Chespirito.org. 28 10 2005. Accesed on 5 November 2006 <http://www.reniet.com/chespirito/chavo_del_8/chavodel8_noticias_oct28.htm>. Wallerstein, Emmanuel. After Liberalism. New York, The New Press: 1995 175 Chapter IV The Telenovela Experiments I. Introduction: Telenovela Nightmares Episode 24 of ABC’s Ugly Betty entitled “How Betty got her Grieve Back”, begins with a scene that attempts to imitate a very low budget telenovela. In the short scene, Betty is a maid brushing the portrait of her boss as she cries because she has a crush on him (image on the left, below). Henry comes in wearing a cowboy hat, tells her that he loves her and they both embrace and kiss. At that moment, Charlie comes in, pregnant with Henry’s baby, and tries to shoot them both (image on the right, below). The telenovela ends as soon as Betty wakes up and realizes that it was all a bad dream, and the opening credits for the show begin. Figure 4.1: Betty crying over the photo of her boss Figure 4.2: Charlie threatens to shoot Betty and Henry The scene features lots of camera zooms and close-ups (so-many it almost looks like reality television), bright colored walls, over-the-top acting (accentuated by the badly spoken 176 Spanish). This scene is representative of many Latino-style telenovela moments that can be seen through the television set in the Suarez’s home in Queens. Those scenes, similar to the one above that could be described as “a telenovela nightmare” that opens up the episode, could be read as a homage to the telenovela and its roots in Latin America. I also argue that these scenes create a distance between the prime-time series and its original version, creating a distinction of taste that has important geopolitical implications. In effect, ABC’s Ugly Betty was cleansed from its ugly-duckling Latino telenovela format version, “progressing” from low production values and over-acting to a more sophisticated, high definition and high budget weekly comedy/dramatic series for a more “discerning” American audience 1 . Ugly Betty’s format transformation from the cheap and dirty Latin American telenovela to the clean, crisp high definition (where available) look of an American series proved to be commercially successful. The appeal of these comical interpretations of 1 Tongue-in-cheek references to the original form could be found in the first season of the series that would air as short scenes of telenovelas on television playing in Betty Suarez’s house. The nightmare discussed above is an exact replica of those scenes that were watched by Betty’s father recreating stereotyped conventions Latin American telenovelas. These would feature cameos from Mexican telenovela stars such as Salma Hayek herself, playing the role of a maid in the first episode, similar to the one Betty plays in her nightmare. These references could be read as both paying homage to the serial’s Latino telenovela roots, while at the same time as I suggested before, effectively distancing itself from this low budget, racialized form of entertainment. 177 Latin telenovelas was big enough that ABC’s website started producing mini-episodes of two telenovelas: Murder by Death and Sins of the Heart. This success is even more outstanding in light of Fox’s MNTV concurrent attempts to reproduce the actual Latin American telenovela format in the US by producing prime-time telenovelas, airing an episode every night for thirteen weeks which proved to be a terrific failure and a true telenovela nightmare for the network. MNTV bought the rights for several Latin American telenovelas, mostly from Colombia, and translated and condensed them for American audiences. As I argued in Chapter 1, television formats embody particular ideologies that are specific to the context out of which these emerge. Formats such as the telenovela and the prime-time serial reveal specific expectations of the audience’s that watch them. I begin here by discussing the skepticism surrounding MNTV’s efforts to adapt the telenovela format starting in the fall of 2006 and ending in the following season. I will also explore how the skepticism behind the attempt to adapt telenovelas was linked to their characterization as a “foreign format” and argue that their adaptive failures were primarily due for two reasons. First, they failed to follow an essential telenovela convention that I described in Chapter 1, the format’s “unpredictable duration”. Second, I argue that certain versions of the prime-time serial are already so close to the telenovela format that the US has 178 developed its own version of a “television novel” that is very similar to the telenovela. This last point will be fully explained by means of an analysis of the cultural implications of Ugly Betty’s adaptation. In order to do this, I will explore how the excitement towards the adaptation of the format reveals the way in which the telenovela is seen as embodying (for better or for worse) a form of (pan) Latin American identity. Not only are telenovelas seen to articulate a sort of Latino identity, but Ugly Betty’s success in American television has been articulated as its own “ugly duckling” or “Cinderella story”. This will be discussed as yet another example of the ways in which television texts and formats are “ethnicized,” and how these narratives reproduce global hierarchical economic relations between the US and Latin America. Resonating with Chapter 2, where I explored the context out of which Cinderella telenovelas emerged in Mexico, I will argue that the show’s success is the result of the effective combination of reproducing the telenovela’s quality of an “unpredictable duration” (described in Chapter 1) in relation to the deployment of a narrative that effectively mediates the gendered, racial and class politics of beauty culture in the US. That is, I ask and answer the question: What is the immense appeal of Ugly Betty as an “ugly duckling” story where the “ugly duckling” stays ugly? One can suggest that this presents a connection to the issues of temporality in relationship to ideologies of progress raised in previous chapters. That is, Betty’s non-transformation recalls the comedic forms of underdevelopment in the previous chapter, making the show a hybrid of the telenovela and comedy of underdevelopment. However, Ugly Betty as a “comedy of underdevelopment” 179 has very different implications from Chapter 3 as it questions ideals of beauty, race, ethnicity, and immigration in the US. In addition to a discussion of these issues, this chapter will conclude by explaining why I believe that the debate regarding the possible adaptation of the telenovela format in the US is irrelevant in the face of increased prime-time serialization. Thus, this chapter will illustrate how Ugly Betty serves as an example of the similarities between the telenovela and contemporary American prime-time serials. Finally, in turning to a successful U.S. “dramedy,” this chapter both underscores the mutability of televisual formats (as Ugly Betty effectively draws from both sitcoms and telenovelas and other serials) and highlights the degree to which formats can travel in an era of globalization. II. “Make Way for the Super Soaps”: MNTV’s Canned Telenovelas Beginning in the latter half of this decade, the television industry in the US has been generating significantly more buzz regarding the possibility of adapting telenovelas than in previous decades. In the fall 2006, amidst the merger of UPN and the WB, together with the creation of a brand new Fox network, two telenovela experiments took place. One of these experiments was wildly successful while the other was a catastrophic failure. It is a rare television phenomenon that two separate and very different attempts to adapt a foreign television format to American television would happen simultaneously. The significance of this of course is that it locates both experiments in the same historical and socio-political 180 context. After the merger of UPN with the WB to form the CW, News Corp., the parent company of Fox, acquired the remaining UPN stations and formed My Network TV (MNTV). As a new network, MNTV had to quickly figure out a network identity and in order to try to achieve this, it took a step that was considered very bold by some early media outlets: the network’s prime-time would be dominated by American adaptations of several telenovelas (mostly from Colombia and Cuba). As noted in previous chapters, telenovelas are usually heralded as the cornerstone of Latin American television, and there haven’t been any significant attempts such as the one that occurred since 2005 to adapt the format and stories for US television. News outlets expressed skepticism towards the adaptation of a Latino format and stories for American audiences. This reluctance was true for both ABC’s Ugly Betty and MNTV’s Desire and Fashion House. It may be hard to imagine, given the success and industry recognition that Ugly Betty enjoys now, that the series would have once been the object of the same skepticism that MNTV’s telenovelas received. Fox’s incursion into the telenovela adaptation business was originally intended for syndication in local stations through Twentieth Television, but after the acquisition of the networks that were left out of the UPN-WB merger, Fox decided to turn them into the new network’s prime-time line-up as a last minute attempt by executives to provide programming for MNTV (Lisotta 22). Desire and Fashion House were the first two that were first destined for syndication, and the 181 original plans were to produce three telenovelas a year. However, after the news of the creation of MNTV, Paul Buccieri (Twentieth Television production president) decided to crank out eight per year. (Learmonth 13) These two telenovelas were the only ones that aired as originally envisioned, five nights a week with a Saturday recap. The ratings were so low that the network cut back on the amount of episodes aired during the week and replaced them with reality programs. From very early on, MNTV’s telenovelas were mostly described as a foreign format. In August 2006, a writer for Variety wrote: “MyNetwork has been a tough sell for advertisers leery of the concept. Can Americans adapt to the sort of every-night-viewing that make telenovelas billion-dollar franchises around the world?” (Learmonth 13) The same article quotes Jason Maltby, director of national broadcast TV at media agency Mindshare (a unit of global advertising firm WPP) as saying: "Outside of late night, people are not in the habit of turning on the same channel five nights a week; it's a key behavioral change." Adding to the skepticism, another advertising executive is quoted as stating "we don't know what kind of appetite there is for an English-language telenovela." (Learmonth 13) The writer concludes that, according to both executives, the network really needed to convey the idea that these are nightly and not weekly shows and gain a substantial amount of initial numbers in order to convince advertisers that this was a viable type of programming. I cite these industry professionals as I found it mesmerizing that there is absolutely no mention of the soap opera 182 programming format, despite its long U.S. history that dates back to radio. But “educating” audiences is what MNTV decided to do with their limited advertising dollars. As a new network, the job of education had to be done simultaneously with generating a network identity. The results were generic ads that promised “new episodes every night” and “no repeats” and that is how, for a very short time, a network’s identity was entirely based on the prime-time telenovela format. Below is a break-down of an early promo, an example of the network’s attempt to introduce and define itself through this different type of programming: Figure 4.3: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (a) Figure 4.4: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (b) Figure 4.5: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (c) Figure 4.6: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (d) 183 Figure 4.7: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (e) Figure 4.8: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (f) Figure 4.9: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (g) Figure 4.10: MNTV “no repeats” ad shot (h) MNTV was promoted as “an all new network” with “new shows every night” and “no repeats” with anonymous women stating that this was “TV my way”. The new programs were not heavily advertised outside the network (airing some promos such as the one depicted above on local Fox stations). As late as approximately a month before the network went on the air, Fox sales team in New York were trying to round up $50 million for advertising which is nothing compared to the hundreds of millions anticipated by the CW (Learmonth 13) and such skepticism was blamed on the format. 184 III. Educating the American Audience about a Foreign Format An article on Television Week discussed how it was believed to be necessary to educate audiences for the telenovela format as if it was something entirely different; in fact it was explicitly referred to it as foreign. The president and general manager of the Louisville, Kentucky Fox affiliate Bill Lamb was quoted as saying: “We're kind of introducing a new way of watching TV in the United States for the Anglo public or the non-Hispanic public… There’s going to be a little education required'' (Greppi 8). Below is an example of this type of education cited by executives that resulted in a slew of promos that depicted this “new” prime-time format. Figure 4.11 “six nights” ad shot (a) Figure 4.12 “six nights” ad shot (b) Figure 4.13 “six nights” ad shot (c) Figure 4.14 “six nights” ad shot (d) Figure 4.15 “six nights” ad shot (e) Figure 4.16 “six nights” ad shot (f) 185 Figure 4.17 “six nights” ad shot (g) Figure 4.18 “six nights” ad shot (h) Figure 4.19 “six nights” ad shot (i) Figure 4.20 “six nights” ad shot (j) Figure 4.21 “six nights” ad shot (k) Figure 4.22 “six nights” ad shot (l) Figure 4.23 “six nights” ad shot (m) The previous captures depict not only MNTV’s advertising strategy 2 regarding the showcasing of new content every night. The promo is so literal, going to the extent of listing all the days of the week in which the telenovela would air. This illustrates the network’s 2 For more on advertising strategies to reach the Latino community see Arlene Davilas’ book Latinos Inc. 186 efforts to educate its audience as to their “new” type of programming which at best, makes them sound repetitive. The network's format is far different from the prime-time norm, and therefore a gamble for not only its owners but also the local stations, like WMYO, who sign on. That's especially true in markets like Louisville, where the MyNetworkTV format is largely unfamiliar to most viewers. The format borrows heavily from Spanish-language telenovelas, which are popular throughout the world but familiar in this country only to viewers of the Spanish-language networks. (Greppi 8) It is true that the format is different from prime-time, yet it becomes clear how the format is marked as “Hispanic” and foreign. This is despite the fact of the existence of American soap operas, which are completely erased in this discussion of MNTV’s efforts to promote the prime time telenovela format. This is despite the fact that it is a common feature of most coverage to use the terms telenovela and soaps interchangeably. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, it is a well-known historical fact that telenovelas and radionovelas developed out of the American soap opera and were promoted by American companies such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. While the business press regularly frames the programs as “foreign,” the format’s foreignness is not acknowledged or discussed in MNTV’s promos that introduce this type of programming strategy. Instead, they present the format as something completely new and different, and they clearly attempt to “educate” viewers as to what their shows are all about without signaling their telenovela origins or their ties to US soap operas. 187 In an attempt to explain the format to reporters, Bo Derek, star of MNTV’s Fashion House says: "for me, it's like being in a 65-hour feature film over 13 weeks that has a definite beginning, middle and end." (Dominguez 35) The promotions of the telenovela format, made it seem like the formula of the telenovela serial format was based on predictability. The marketing heavily emphasized the fact that the stories would only last for thirteen weeks. A promotional video for My50TV from Albuquerque exemplifies the way in which these series were promoted by the network and introduces the series in the following way: “We have two new shows, one that airs at 7, the other at 8. Both of them air six nights a week and last thirteen weeks. Some call them night time soaps, some call them American telenovelas. In reality, they are short dramatic series. Even though this prime-time concept is new in America, they have been generating fanatical followings in more than 100 countries around the globe. They are a potent blend of tight story-lines and non-stop cliff hangers with grand finales every thirteen weeks.” Figure 4.24 My50TV ad shot (a) Figure 4.25 My50TV ad shot (b) Figure 4.26 My50TV ad shot (c) The first thing that this does is to reveal that these are pre-packaged shows, and as opposed to telenovelas that are based in an unpredictable duration as explained in Chapter 1. This meant that audiences could easily predict when these were going to end, effectively erasing the pleasure of expectation or uncertainty that is characteristic of not only the telenovela, but 188 the soap opera and even US prime-time series. MNTV was trying to sell audiences telenovelas as if they were cheap vacuum packed American cheese with a clear expiration date. At the same time that ABC was offering a gourmet interpretation of a Colombian telenovela that has been a world-wide success as opposed to Fox’s “Taco Bell” approach. After barely lasting two seasons, and after extremely low ratings for a broadcast network, their line-up was revamped and effectively increased ratings enough to bring in 35 new advertisers. The new program line-up consisted of second-run movies, sports shows and male-oriented reality programs (such as IFL Battleground, NFL Total Access and reality shows such as Jail, US Marshals and Cops) (Lafayette 1A). The ratings increase with female viewers 18-49 was up 15% from the previous year, and this is believed to be thanks to celebrity specials and concert series (Lafayette 1A). When the new line-up took place and telenovelas began to be phased out, the new shows were credited as bringing in “higher ratings”; however, these reality programs such as International Fighting League brought in less viewers than the opening weeks of Fashion House and Desire (about a 0.8 share for IFL and 1.0 for Fashion House). The Anna Nicole Smith special, Anna Nicole Smith: A Centerfold Exposed produced by the production team behind Access Hollywood garnered a 1.1 share on a Wednesday night and was credited as gearing the network towards producing shows like Celebrity Expose (Hibberd 3). 189 The following sets of images illustrate MNTV’s shift from scripted to unscripted programming (as well as the shift in demographics) while still maintaining its tabloid approach. The first four figures are captures from a promotion clip of a confrontation between Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild on a Monday night in the fall of 2006. Following Fashion House’s promotion captures, a very different type of “fight night” is being promoted for the same prime-time slot on the very same network: IFL Battleground. Figure 4.27 “Battle of the Blondes” (a) Figure 4.28 “Battle of the Blondes” (b) Figure 4.29 “Battle of the Blondes” (c) Figure 4.30 “Battle of the Blondes” (d) 190 Figure 4.31 IFL ad shot (a) Figure 4.32 IFL ad shot (b) Figure 4.33 IFL ad shot (c) A mere five months after the debut of the CW and MNTV, Television Week ran an article summing up the attitudes towards both networks by critics and the television industry taken through an informal poll. MNTV was described as “disposable television” regarding its prime-time dramas. Doug Elfman from the Chicago Sun-Times said that it deserved the low ratings for investing so little money on programming and was quoted as saying that “porn is the only thing that can bring up its ratings at this point.” (Hibberd “Poll” 25) It is not surprising that low-budget melodramatic programming aimed mostly towards women would get such scathing comments, especially when compared to the “quality” and viewer following of the other serials offered by the main networks. What still surprises me however is how critical and industry reception becomes much less hostile once the network decided to abandon the “foreign format” in favor of genres that are, if anything, lower in the totem pole of television tastes. The difference seemed to be that, on the one hand, reality genres are not considered foreign, and, most importantly, they tend to target young males (at least in the MNTV variety). As the captures above demonstrate, MNTV quickly switched from girl cat fights and bitch slaps to the real “punch” of martial arts fighting. 191 IV. The “Telenovela Fever” and Pan Latin American Identity It could be easily argued that the original Ugly Betty’s popularity across the globe worked to its advantage, not only because of the publicity and expectation that this generated but also because it effectively placed it as part of a world-wide phenomenon that was to be completely reinvented for American audiences. Even though it is common practice for successful program formats to be imported and adapted for US television (sitcoms, reality shows, etc.), it is much less frequent (and some would argue “rare”) that a television program from a Third World nation would achieve such notoriety in nations and cultures around the world, including several developed nations (read: former colonial empires). What is significant about this is that a mere understanding that Ugly Betty is an adaptation of a Colombian telenovela that has circled the globe facilitates an awareness of the unequal flow of media culture between the US and Latin America. I am in no way arguing that “awareness” automatically leads to an “understanding” of the politics of the global television industry. What I do argue is that an awareness of the unequal program flows between nations allows for a potential encoding of such dynamics into the show. “…this is something that we know how to do very well [watching telenovelas], and when we figure out how to translate our sentiments, well, then just watch out.” (Rohter 4) This statement was made by a telenovela director in the US in an article by Larry Rohter for the 192 New York Times released on January 2007. What this quote suggested was the possibility that Ugly Betty was merely the beginning of a successful attempt to adapt telenovelas for American audiences. Rohter’s article makes an attempts to address the cultural transformation of Ugly Betty and creates a link between Ugly Betty, its’ Colombian original version, Yo Soy Betty La Fea, and the historical origins of the telenovela in Cuba from radionovelas. Rohter generates a transnational and trans-media timeline that locates the origin of the telenovela in the radionovela in Cuba prior to the revolution, based on his interview with Silvio Horta. Such historical accounts that transverse nations and mediums could be regarded as an attempt to formulate a pan Latin American identity embodied here by the telenovela format and its conventions. As I argued in Chapter 3, the generation of a pan Latin American identity was crucial for the New Latin American cinema movement of the 1960s, and it has always been the subject of much critical debate and controversy. After all, the formulation of such identities risks erasing the heterogeneous nature of different Latin American nations (and cultures within these nations). At the same time, the solidarity behind such impulses are hard to dispute, primarily because of the political significance for Latino rights in the US and the potential political influence of the creation of such a power bloc of nations that has been the ultimate fantasy of leftist political movements in Latin America for the last fifty years (its most current articulation voiced by Venezuelan President Chávez). 193 In the article, Rohter interviews the series’ executive producer Silvio Horta, a Cuban- American raised in Miami. Not only are Cuba and Colombia acknowledged, but Mexico is added to the list when Horta explains that the villainess in the American version, played by Vanessa Williams, was heavily influenced by one of Mexico’s most notorious telenovela villainess, Catalina Creel from Cuna de Lobos (“cradle of wolves”) who wore an eye-patch. When explaining the appeal of such a character, he referred to Disney villains and characters by stating “it’s all very Cruella de Vil and Cinderella”. It is important to signal that there is here an effort to link the present with the history of the telenovela format in Cuba and its transnational viewership through the circulation of telenovelas in different Latin American nations. In just a few paragraphs, four nations that embody different cultures are cited as having some influence over the shaping of Ugly Betty: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and the US. And in the images below, Vanessa Williams as Ugly Betty’s Wilhelmina is followed by the villainesses that influenced her character as described by Silvio Horta, from left to right: Wilhelmina, followed by Maria Rubio (Catalina Creel in Mexico’s Cuna de Lobos) and Disney villains Cruella de Vil and Cinderella’s wicked stepmother. 194 Figure 4.34: Wilhelmina Figure 4.35: Catalina Creel Figure 4.36: Cruella de Vil Figure 4.37: Cinderella’s stepmother In the next pages, I will return to this reference to fairytales and Mexican villainesses when I discuss the ways in which the program itself is characterized as its own type of Cinderella narrative. But before proceeding with that, it is curious to note that just a month before Rohter’s article, a very different story ran in December 2006, when Bill Carter, another New York Times writer proclaimed that the “telenovela fever” was over, and his main example was to point-out that Ugly Betty is not a telenovela in its original form. In order to explain the (implicitly necessary) transformation, he quoted Ben Silverman, who originally conceived the idea of Ugly Betty following the telenovela format, but according to him they wouldn’t have been able to hire a star like America Ferrera and to shoot on location in New York (take that Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild). He goes on to claim that “the expensive look of the ''Betty'' series, which is set in the glamorous world of New York couture magazines, could never have been fashioned on the budget of a real telenovela”. (1) Adding to this, Carter also discusses how executives thought that they would only alienate viewers if they provided shows of a “distinctly lesser quality than their regular [prime-time] shows”. (1) In 195 stark contrast to Rohter’s article (that points to the potential of telenovelas as bringing aspects of “Latino” culture to American audiences), Carter’s focus on aesthetics and budgets shows an effort to separate Ugly Betty from its original form effectively foregrounding what is a trend to frame ABC’s adaptation of Ugly Betty as type of “transformation” from a lower cultural form, the telenovela, into a more sophisticated type of program, allowed by the weekly serial. V. Ugly Betty: A Story of (non)Transformation “It’s basically The Devil Wears Prada” is what a colleague of mine said to me regarding Ugly Betty to which I instinctively responded, “I don’t think so, if anything, The Devil Wears Prada is like Ugly Betty since the Colombian version aired in 1999 and the novel was written in 2003.” That shut her up. It is not my intention to start out this section with an argument about originality, but the politics of cultural imperialism embedded in those kinds of assumptions is what originally ticked me off. In defense of my Anglo-Saxon colleague, the skepticism surrounding Ugly Betty’s resemblance to The Devil Wears Prada was a feature in many newspaper and trade-press articles. For example, “It's The Devil Wears Prada for the high-school set” claimed one critic (Ryan L4) and another wrote "Ugly Betty has The Devil Wears Prada and Working Girl stitched into its DNA” (Gilbert, C1). Most critical reception was more positive than my colleague’s; some cited Hollywood films as a cultural reference 196 for the reader; others performed semi-rigorous comparisons between the two. In the end, most agreed that the series transcended the film to which it was being compared. One reference to this transcendence stands out because of its use of language. An article written by critic Mark Lawson for a British newspaper observed: “Although the pilot episode of Ugly Betty had the misfortune to share several jokes and one plotline with The Devil Wears Prada, it immediately seemed a more mature and surprising version of the Cinderella at Vogue storyline.” (Lawson 28) “More mature and surprising” not only echoes developmental logic but to assure the reader that I am not delusional or overtly paranoid, the following description of the protagonist foregrounds the geopolitics embedded in these types of hierarchical articulations of taste: Ugly Betty is the story of Betty Suarez (America Ferrera), a gauche Latino woman who lands a post as assistant on a top US fashion magazine, Mode, despite a coiffure that knows only bad-hair days, dental braces that resemble the fences at Guantanamo Bay, eyeglasses issued by the Colombian National Health Service, and a wardrobe bought from discount brochures. (My emphasis, Lawson 28) Obviously meant as a joke, this description of Betty clearly maps global politics onto the wardrobe of a nation-less and racialized Latino woman. The global violence and human rights violations represented of Guantanamo are mapped onto her braces, and her big eye glasses are described in terms of global social and class inequality through a reference of Colombia’s health service. Such a description was preceded by a comment that states that 197 the US series “has some way to go before it belongs in the company of Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses and The Office.” (Lawson 28) This is significant because not only is Betty’s “ugliness” associated with crises in Latin America (that are in great part influenced and worsened by the international policies of the US towards Latin America and violations of the Geneva conventions) but also labeled as inferior to British comedies, a recurring source of storylines for American TV. After describing the basic premise of the plot --that it is precisely Betty’s “disadvantages” (ugliness) that lands her the job at Meade fashion magazine -- Lawson proceeds to describe Ugly Betty’s success in the US as an adaptation of a 1999 Colombian telenovela, even when “America has an export rather than import mentality.” The critic seamlessly flows between descriptions of the fictional character’s ugliness, “Cinderella at Vogue” plot, references to global politics, and the uneven exchange of television programs between Latin America and the US. The article serves up some well-known facts that circulate widely, such as the lower status of the telenovela in terms of hierarchies of taste in relation to American prime-time and British television programming. The highly uneven flow and/or exchange of cultural productions between the US and Latin America has been historically associated by Latin American thinkers and artists with the exploitation of the Latin American subcontinent which has in turn shaped our understanding of “cultural imperialism.” And as I described in Chapters 1 through 3, these types of hierarchical relations are always gendered and racialized. 198 But what does this have to do with Ugly Betty? Ugly Betty is a Cinderella story about a supposedly ugly, lower class Mexican American girl who is underestimated and welcomed into a high fashion magazine, initially because of her supposed “less-than-desirable” physical attributes. Soon her talents and abilities to manage a magazine garner her recognition as she does it better than her Anglo-Saxon, upper class, womanizer boss. Similar to my argument in Chapter 1 regarding the work that Cinderella narratives did in mediating the geopolitics out of which they emerged, the narrative of Ugly Betty that I just recapped bears a striking resemblance to the way in which the success of the adaptation of Yo Soy Betty La Fea for American prime-time is articulated in the press. That is, just as Betty, a Mexican-American struggles to succeed in an industry that is hostile to her; Lawson’s article describes the success of the adaptation of the Colombian telenovela in the US in similar terms to his “Cinderella in Vogue” approach to Ugly Betty’s plot, pointing out how rare it is for American television to import programs from Latin America. This effectively renders the Colombian adaptation for US prime-time as its own Cinderella-type of transformation, from a degraded and overlooked, cheap Latin American format to its glossy reinterpretation for US screens. Silvio Horta said to a trade-paper, "so we always wanted to have a depiction of a first- generation Latin American family. To me, the appeal was always this girl straddling these two different worlds of working-class Queens and a glamorous Manhattan setting" 199 (Dominguez). This quote could also be reinterpreted as a description of the adaptation of Yo Soy Betty La Fea to a prime-time U.S. serial. After all, Ugly Betty is the first to adapt a telenovela to the serial format –“a first generation” attempt—and there was a lot of pressure from the press as to whether or not it would work as this quote suggests, referencing the potential of the telenovela for American audiences, “the success of the telenovela is still dependent upon the genre's early pioneers.” (Sternberg 11) Yo Soy Betty La Fea is a telenovela that directly engages with the politics of class and gender, both in its Colombian and Mexican versions (La Fea Más Bella). Ugly Betty’s adaptation on the other hand, foregrounds the racial component that is implicit (or arguably, erased) in Latin American versions of the story. As I have discussed in chapter 2, racial and ethnic identities often get conflated with class in Mexico due to its history of colonialism and the ways in which emerging nationalist discourses sought to erase racial divisions and unify the nation (this is a common phenomenon throughout many Latin American societies). The opposite happens in the US, where class seems to less visible than race and ethnicity, and this in turn allows for a more complex translation in the American version, by which the politics of class, race, and ethnicity in Ugly Betty allow for a potent critique of American ideals of beauty. 200 VI. Pleasure in Expectation: Transcending vs. Embracing “Ugly” Thus far, I have suggested that Ugly Betty has already gone through its most important transformation, in its adaptation for US audiences. As Lawson wrote: “Ugly Betty is haunted from its opening episode by the question of when the central character will submit to a makeover.” (28) I quote him this time not to critique his assumption but to raise the issue as to the expectation that the series’ has successfully created regarding whether or not Betty will in fact undergo a transformation. “Ugly is the new beautiful” is the new claim that has been promoted by the show and widely accepted in the mainstream press. Even students of mine in Introduction to Television, in the fall 2006, the very same semester that the series premiered, wanted to write papers about how the show questions ideals of beauty. In the original version, as well as its Mexican interpretation, the protagonist eventually undergoes a physical transformation, as part of a process where she gains self-esteem and takes over the magazine in a revenge-style plot, and her boss falls in love with her. Whenever I told that to my students, they looked at me as if I was being blasphemous. But my students are not the only ones who don’t want Betty to change; John Bailey writing for Australia’s Sunday Age quotes Silvio Horta as “promising” the following: "She'll always be the outsider . . . She's never going to be the six-foot-two Amazon." (7) Whether or not the US version of Ugly Betty follows the original plot in regards to her transformation is beyond the point. The issue is that certain audiences seem to want Betty to remain “ugly,” the desire for 201 transformation doesn’t seem to be “required” or “expected” for the American version as it seemed to be for the Colombian and Mexican versions. This is largely based on how the narrative associates class and ethnicity with the “ugliness” of Betty. The following October 2007 issue of Glamour magazine depicts America Ferrera on the cover and reads: “America Ferrera; Ugly is HOT!” A blog by Brooklyn based journalist Kelle Terrell pointed out the heavy photo editing that took place to slim her down and went to the extent of writing to the editor of the magazine to voice her anger towards the lack of representation of women of color and her outrage that when they do put a curvy woman of color on their cover, they change her in order to conform to their standards of beauty (especially in an issue described as the “1 st Annual Figure-Flattery Issue”). You are not doing us women of color or curvy women a favor by putting us in your publication. It’s not like Ugly Betty just came out–it has been on for a year and now after the Golden Globe and the SAG and the Emmy nomination, she gets to be on the cover. It is bad enough that we are barely represented, but PLEASE represent us right or not at all! … This is insulting for many reasons: one, because you assume that this is what your readers want to see and two, that we are so stupid that we were actually going to believe this nonsense. Try again. Look at those arms! (Terrell, her emphasis) Below is the infamous cover followed by a picture taken at the Emmy’s just a month before the cover’s official release (in order for the reader to look at her arms): 202 Figure 4.38: Oct. 27 Glamour Cover Figure 4.39: America Ferrera at the Emmys The anger, frustration, and fury expressed towards the fashion industry as articulated in Terrell’s blog (whether or not Ferrera was “photo-shopped” or not) derives from the fact that Ugly Betty is commonly deployed as a way to critique ideals of beauty, making Betty’s potential radical transformation into a “swan” on the magazine cover a very controversial issue. As one journalist puts it, “With her metal braces and bushy eyebrows, Betty's a ‘before’ with no chance of becoming an ‘after.’” (Gilbert C1) Such quotes hint at a clear desire for a slightly curvy, woman of color to become a mainstream icon. Part of the reason why this has worked is because the series has strived for “realism” when it comes to depicting Betty’s “ugliness.” The American Betty’s ugliness is different from her other Latina fictional counterparts not only in the disparity between the beauty of the protagonist and the “ugliness” of the make- 203 up, but also in the style of acting. Betty’s supporting cast might be over-the-top, but Betty herself isn’t. Letty, the Mexican version, was played by a well-known comedian. Her facial expressions tended to be very over-the-top, her movements extremely clumsy and her face full of acne. A very similar transformation occurred with the original Betty played by Ana Maria Orozco, but as opposed to Angelica Vale and America Ferrera, both known as “curvy women” in their respective countries, Orozco was very slender. Betty’s ugliness in the Colombian version was wildly exaggerated to the point that the issue that was discussed and gossiped about was how ugly they made a pretty actress look in the show and how badly she was treated and taken advantage of by her boss who used her for her abilities while she was wildly in love with him. In the case of Ugly Betty people discuss how America Ferrera really isn’t ugly and that she represents the type of beauty you don’t always get to see in fashion magazines. Ferrara’s previous role in Real Women Have Curves strengthens her persona as a proud Latina who is comfortable with her appearance. That said, Ugly Betty does attempt to change Ferrera’s appearance, but not to the extent that the Colombian or even Mexican versions changed the protagonist. Below are images of America Ferrera, Ana Maria Orozco and Angelica Vale in full Betty and Letty make-up. These pictures are followed by photos of the actresses outside of their role, and as you can see, the most drastic change is in the Colombian version, followed by Mexico (the exaggerations 204 were mostly in terms of her acting style) and lastly, the US version that is clearly striving for a more “realist” approach. Figure 4.40: Betty Suarez Figure 4.41: Beatriz Aurora Pinzón Solano Figure 4.42: Lety Padilla Solís Figure 4.43: América Ferrera Figure 4.44: Ana María Orozco Figure 4.45: Angélica Vale "Ugly Betty is a unique ugly duckling story," says America Ferrera, who plays Betty. "It's not about her becoming a gorgeous swan; [rather] you're waiting for people around her to realize 205 she already is a beautiful person." (Idato) This type of statement not only eliminates any expectation of a transformation, but articulates a desire for acceptance of Betty’s beauty despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to fit high fashion stereotypes of beauty. But again, the truly significant transformation already took place in terms of format and especially considering its ratings success (after all, any good Cinderella make-over must provide us with the pleasure of the surprise and amazement of the incredulous supporting cast). As I discussed earlier, there is a sense of pride that comes with the successful translation of a Latin American telenovela (as it signals to the intervention of Latin culture in the US), at the same time as there was skepticism towards the very same adaptation. Both sentiments arise out of the history of uneven, hierarchical economic and cultural relations between the US and Latin America. VII. Conclusion: “The Television Novel” Meets the Telenovela Figure 4.46: American Betty and Mexico’s Lety posing for the camera 206 Described as a “beautiful dreamer, America Ferrara as Betty” (Idato), we see her posing with Angelica Vale, protagonist of Mexico’s version of Yo Soy Betty La Fea, La Fea Más Bella (“the prettiest ugly one”). In an episode entitled “East Side Story” Vale plays an orthodontist assistant named Angelica. I present this as not just another example of the efforts of Ugly Betty producers to reference Latin American telenovelas but also because we have the protagonists of two different adaptations of the same telenovela together, which illustrates my argument to follow regarding the emerging similarities between American prime-time, with its increased emphasis on serialization, and the telenovela. Steve Bochco (creator of LA Law and NYPD Blue) once used the term “television novel” in 1995 to describe his procedural show Murder One that would follow a single case over a 20- week season. The format wasn’t very successful, but that has changed, according to The Guardian critic Mark Lawson (cited earlier in this chapter). He argues that the success of programs like 24, Desperate Housewives, Lost, The Sopranos “and now Ugly Betty” and The Wire “all extend a single plot arc across half a year of programmes.” (28) Lawson describes this trend in a very negative light as he considers them simplistic, and he thus pretty much follows a well-established elitist critique of television serials. What I find useful about Lawson’s disdain is that he includes shows that have garnered an amazing amount of critical as well as popular recognition (I was surprised to see a course reader on HBO released by Kentucky Press recently). I find his redeployment of the term useful as it allows 207 for a connection between prime-time serials, telenovelas and daytime soaps to be made, in terms of the similarities (and differences) regarding their serial structure. I won’t delve too much on the validity of his negative arguments, but I do have to highlight their importance to this chapter, as his dismissals of the “television novel” are very much the same as those commonly associated with telenovelas and soap operas, further enhancing a link between successful American prime-time serials, telenovelas and soap operas. He claims that “Ugly Betty is typical of the US television novel in that, while each episode has a new central plotline, the major stories are continuous,” and he goes on to compares Ugly Betty to Lost in that “this new style of television” involves “series aspiring to tell their stories over a longer time often involve dramatic scenarios with limited potential to develop…” He goes on to claim that the situations are “so static that they seem more suited to a sitcom, the most repetitive kind of fiction, rather than a form that seeks to bring the expansiveness of the Victorian novel to the screen.” (Lawson 28) Lawson creates a link between the prime-time blockbusters such as Lost, HBO series and Ugly Betty through the concept of the “television novel.” This concept as employed by Bochco closely resembles the telenovela format as I defined it in chapter 1: the telenovela has a linear story-line that follows the soap opera format very closely as it delivers many mini climaxes that lead to a grand finale. The telenovela narrative, as a soap opera with closure, is 208 the product of crossbreeding between radio, cinema and television talent in Mexico that resulted in the format which I argued can be understood as a hybrid of Hollywood and Mexican classical cinemas and the American soap opera. Ugly Betty’s successful adaptation to a “television novel” (a prime-time serial) signals the similarities between both programming formats and highlights the way in which American prime-time series have become increasingly more and more serialized. The serialization of prime-time series is nothing new of course in American television; miniseries from the late 1970’s and 1980’s are some examples that come to mind, together with prime-time melodramas such as Peyton Place (1964-1969), Dallas (1978-1991) and Dynasty (1981-1989), etc. Throughout the 1990’s prime-time became increasingly more serialized, featuring characters with more complexity, and having some focus on characters’ interrelations throughout the season, but the focus would largely remain on the story contained within each episode (e.g. ER, 1994). In the 2000’s shows like 24, Lost or Heroes not only have more defined narrative arcs that lead to clearer narrative endings across time, but their large budgets are often compared to that of Hollywood blockbusters. Prime-time episodic series are now borrowing an extensive use of narrative structure and other conventions from the historically devalued pioneers of such formal characteristics on television, the American soap opera and shortly thereafter, the telenovela. 209 The Sopranos for example, successfully hybridized the serial via an association with film genres such as the gangster film that are usually associated with male audiences (Newcomb 566, Jaramillo 586). The HBO serial is a generic hybrid of the gangster and family melodrama (Newcomb 565) and is the result of a history of prime-time television programming strategies that began experimenting with seriality as early as the 1970’s with Norman Lear’s comedies that despite their episodic nature, began showing signs of “memory” (the events of one show could have consequences on the next) (Newcomb 569). The shift from a strongly episodic structure to the continuity of a serial in prime-time, through genre hybrids that strongly feature melodrama, is a significant departure in the sense that most prime-time television has historically been episodic as it has been geared towards a male audience that would want quick pleasure and the satisfaction of a resolution, and less complications with less involvement (Newcomb 568). Before The Sopranos very few shows had such a degree of seriality such as Hills Street Blues, LA Law, and St. Elsewhere, programs that experimented with continuity in different degrees (Newcomb 569). However, as it is common in television studies, attention is given to successes, rather than failures. Bochco’s experiment, Murder One from 1995 is rarely, if ever mentioned. In addition, The Sopranos was not the first attempt in the last decade to successfully bring serialization to prime-time. An important example is David E. Kelley’s popular Ally McBeal from 1997. The failure of MNTV’s prime-time telenovelas might point to the limits of the level of investment that audiences are willing to put into prime-time shows with continual story arcs, 210 and also shows the necessity for networks’ prime-time schedule to present high budget content when it comes to scripted television. The networks’ turn to prime-time blockbusters could be seen as a successful response to the “threat” presented by cable premium channel series. Ironically, this sense of competition is largely on the discursive level, as economically speaking, the entertainment industry is formed by conglomerates whose board members serve in several companies. This is why I believe it is more useful to frame such shifts as result of “synergy”, a conglomerate’s efforts to maximize profits from the use of all the resources that it owns. 3 As I argued in previous chapters, one of the defining features of the soap opera and the telenovela is their ability to generate “pleasure in expectation”. In relation to this, I’d like to ask, what are the implications of this pleasure, generated and strengthened by this breed of shows that began at the very end of the 1990’s and that continues today with increased popularity? For a time last year [2005], American networks seemed eager to produce true telenovelas. That enthusiasm seems to have waned. But South American veterans of the telenovela industry suggest the genre may have a North American future, after all. The growing income gap in the United States reminds them of their own societies, they say, and it may assure an appetite for feel-good stories about social mobility. (Rohter 4) 3 Many have also argued that the turn to serialization also responds to broader technological shifts, like the threat of the internet. 211 First, I would like to argue that the increased trend towards serialization is a result of recent political and economic shifts. The rise of the “television novel” requires audiences to find a very similar pleasure in expectation that soap operas and telenovelas first introduced quite some time ago. As I discussed in chapter 1, the telenovela could be regarded as a merger of Hollywood and the soap opera in terms of having a narrative that has a clear beginning, an extended middle, and an ending, and this happened during the decline of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. The last few years have seen an increase in the popularity of widescreen plasmas and LCD’s (major electronics stores such as Best Buy decided to discontinue all traditional television sets in 2007). Deregulation in the 1990’s led to the mergers of many entertainment companies and the formation of large conglomerates. The film industry has seen reduced profits overall from summer blockbusters and now that “Hollywood” consists of five major conglomerates, one could assume that the blockbuster serials could be seen as a response to generate a loyal audience base over an extended period of time. One can only hypothesize as to why the predominance and success of “television novels” that did not stick back in 1995 but have emerged as a strong trend in the last ten years. But what could this “pleasure in expectation” be mediating? As I just said, the emergence of this trend is financially possible due to deregulation, but this decade has seen major shifts in global and national politics and economics where the US “officially acknowledged” after 9/11 that the “war against terror” did not have an end in sight. The immediate start of the 212 Afghanistan war followed by the invasion of Iraq against United Nations support has placed the nation in a state of uncertainty about its future. This is not to say that situations had not been similar in the past, but Watergate, economic crises, and the social unrest of the 1970’s led to a very different kind of television (such as Norman Lear’s socially conscious comedies, and Mary Tyler Moore’s company’s notion of “quality television”). In conclusion, Ugly Betty, as an adaptation of a telenovela, signals to the epitome and merger of three trends from the last few decades, and arguably half a century: the high production values of a Hollywood blockbuster, the weekly programming structure associated with dramatic prime-time series and the conventions of the soap opera, which I argue are largely the result of deregulation, and the formation of media conglomerates. As opposed to The Sopranos which aired on HBO, a network that promoted its identity at the time by disassociating itself from network/broadcast television entertainment (as evidenced by HBO’s motto: “It’s not TV it’s HBO”), Ugly Betty makes explicit references to its roots in the telenovela format (such as the one that opened this chapter). Therefore, while HBO disassociates its programming from broadcast television by acknowledging the low cultural value usually associated to “TV”, Ugly Betty achieves its differentiation in a more subtle way, one that also can be read as paying tribute to show’s original predecessor. That is, Ugly Betty distances itself from the low-budget, over-the-top melodrama of the telenovela by presenting a hybrid between comedy and drama. Textually, as a genre hybrid, comedy (a feature present 213 in the original version of Betty la Fea) has played a crucial role in facilitating the show’s ability to straddle both dramatic formats. Comedy provides a critical distance that allows audiences to laugh, or cry, or both, generating a “safe” environment for both men and women to potentially watch the show by providing “emergency exits” to the melodrama, usually associated with women’s pleasures. 214 Works Cited Bailey, John “Face it, Things are Getting Ugly.” Sunday Age (Australia) 4 Feb. 2007; News: 7 Carter, Bill “Sizzling a Year Ago, but now Pfffft!” New York Times 25 Dec. 2006; Late Ed. Final, Section C, Column 2: 1 Cridlin, Jay “A New Kind of Prime-Time.” St. Petersburg Times (Florida) 2 Sep. 2006; Saturday First Ed.: 1E Dominguez, Robert “Make Way for the Supersoaps, Over-the-top, Campy & Compelling… The New American Versions of Latin Telenovelas” Daily News 4 Sep. 2006; Final Ed.: Section: Now, 35 Gilbert, Matthew “Ugly Betty has the Look of a Winner.” The Boston Globe 28 Sep. 2006, ARTS: C1 Greppi, Michele “Challenge is to Sell Audiences on Novelas; WMYO-TV” Television Week 14 Aug. 2006; TV Current: 8 Idato, Michael “Maid in America” Sydney Morning Herald Feb. 5 2007 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/02/04/1170523951458.html Rohter, Larry “How ‘Ugly Betty’ Changed on the Flight from Bogota.” New York Times 7 Jan. 2007; Sunday Late Ed.: Section 4, Column 1: 4 215 Lafayette, John “Advertisers Tune in to Revamped MyNet; Sophomore Network Has Added 35 New Advertisers.” Television Week 1 Oct. 2007; News: 1A Larmonth, Michael “MyNetwork turns up heat on spicy telenovelas.” Variety 31 Jul. 2006; TELEVISION: 13 Lawson, Mark “The beauty myth: Its star is no pin-up and The Devil Wears Prada stole all its thunder - but Ugly Betty is proving a surprise hit on American TV. Will it work here?” The Guardian 19 Dec. 2006; Final Ed.: 28 Lisotta, Christopher “Breaking New Programming Ground with Telenovelas; MyNetworkTV” Television Week 15 May 2006; 22 Hibberd, James “MyNetTV Changes Production Script; Limp Ratings Prompt Shift From Telenovelas to Reality.” Television Week 5 Mar. 2007; News: 6 ---. “New Nets Left Out in Cold by Critics; CW, MyNetwork Not Taken Seriously in Poll.” Television Week 8 Jan. 2007; Special Report: 25 Jaramillo, Deborah “The Family Racket” Television the Critical View: Seventh Edition¬ Oxford University Press: 2007 Newcomb, Horace “This is Not Al Dente: The Sopranos and the New Meaning og Television” Television the Critical View: Seventh Edition Oxford University Press: 2007 216 Pursell, Chris “Chernin Steps In to Plot MyNet Fix; News Corp. CEO, Top Execs Might Trim Soaps on Some Nights” Television Week 18 Dec. 2006; News: 1 Ryan, Andrew “Ugly Betty looks pretty good; New comedy is The Devil Wears Prada for the high school set.” The Globe and Mail (Canada) 16 Sep. 2006; STYLE: L4 Terrell, Kate “When Photoshopping Goes too Far the America Ferrera and Glamour Magazine Edition.” popgumbo.wordpress.com 6 Sep. 2007, http://popgumbo.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/when-photoshopping-goes-too-far- the-america-ferrera-and-glamour-edition/ 217 Conclusion This conclusion is divided in two parts. The first suggests how the arguments presented in Chapters 1, 2 and 4 regarding the pleasures afforded by the telenovela format, the Cinderella genre have a transnational appeal as the serial structure, combined with the narrative that is deployed mediate experiences of modernization in other national contexts. Following this section, I will propose how the logic of capitalist development is naturalized by influential psychological discourse that emerged concurrent to US theories of modernization after World War II. In order to do this, I will first map out the links made by scholars regarding the emergence of melodrama at the time of the French Revolution (when the concept of the nation is introduced to replace imperial identity) and its relation to Freudian psychoanalysis. Secondly, I will consider the re-evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis by Erick Erikson, who in 1950 published a study in which he outlined his eight stages of psychosocial development in relation to the “developmental” approach of economic theories at the time. This is done in an effort to show how ideas of human growth and development serve to naturalize economic policies and global hierarchical relations. I. Exporting Tears The last chapter concluded with a hypothesis about how the shifting position of the US as a world power in the current global economy might account for the increased appeal of serials 218 as evidenced in American prime-time. Bochco’s term “television novel” is a useful one as it draws a connection between US and Latin American serials. I do not make this connection to erase important differences between the two formats; instead, I present an argument as to how the “pleasure in expectation” generated by serials may be a way to, first, mediate the skepticism and/or uncertainty that result from the linear narratives of progress in dominant economic and political discourse that have failed to yield the results that they promised, and, second, also mediate the shifts in global power relations that place some regions as economically, politically, or culturally inferior to others. The skepticism, uncertainty, and insecurity brought about global and local politics that may cause varying degrees of discomfort or pain seem to be turned into pleasure by the serial programming format, skilling the audience in waiting, expectation and duration. As I have discussed earlier, an examination of the formal or industrial aspects of programming formats is not enough to understand their complexity; one also needs to take into consideration the successes and failures of particular texts in relation to the culture out of which they emerge or those to where they are imported. This approach opens up a space to explore the popularity of telenovelas in other contexts, including some that may seem radically different such as Moscow, or the former soviet state of Kyrgyzstan. As I argued in Chapter 1, the telenovela format emerged out of a specific historical context that coincided with the reconfiguration of global relations following World War II and the 219 development and heavy promotion of developmental ideology through the World Bank, IMF, among other institutions. At this moment, previous hierarchies from the colonial era were re-articulated using the logic of capitalist progress. Marxism presented itself as the antithesis of capitalist neo-colonial exploitation promising to liberate Latin American peoples, but as discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, capitalism also presented itself as a liberating force that would enable social change and economic advancement (Wallerstein 108-122, Portillo 33). The development of the telenovela format in the 1950s, out of the influence of radionovelas, the American soap opera and classical cinemas provided a narrative structure that, regardless of genre, presented a way to mediate ideologies of progress. This is achieved through the pleasure generated in experiencing a prolonged sense of expectation from the extended length of the narrative that comes to a sudden end. With this in mind, the continued and increased appeal of this type of serialization in many national contexts may highlight ongoing doubts about dominant projections of economic and social progress or growth. Drawing from Hollywood classical films, which presented a view of the world where all the loose ends would be neatly tied at the end according to dominant ideology, and from American soaps, which did the opposite by rejecting ideological closure and foregrounding the pleasure in suffering and expectation, telenovelas present an interplay between process (a pleasure in anguish and chaos emphasized by the telenovela’s middle) and ending (providing a conclusion to that suffering). 220 The transnational appeal of the complex relationship between the unpredictable middle and the ending of a telenovela, and the pleasures that it generates can be observed in an ethnographic study by Sonia Muñoz that included adult women from a low income neighborhood (“barrio popular”) in Cali, Colombia. Her study detailed the ways in which the pleasure ascribed to the closure in telenovelas was closely linked to “predictability” (textual) and “justice”. That is, according to the interviewees, a “good ending” (one that received a positive approval from the subjects) was one that assured that the female protagonist would be compensated in the end for the suffering that she endured for all the days and months that the telenovela aired. This foregrounds that the pleasure in the ending for the interviewees is directly linked to their identification with the protagonist’s prolonged suffering throughout the telenovela’s middle. That is, the success of the pleasure in the ending of a telenovela is entirely dependent on the ability of the serial to generate a prolonged sense of expectation, chaos and suffering. The fact that the pleasure in the ending is connected to a conclusion that provides “compensation” for all the suffering of the protagonist suggests a desire for a long middle that consists of complications, anguish and uncertainty, but a middle that eventually comes to an end. Muñoz describes how an “open” ending that would tend to attract more educated audiences (“televidente culto”) is not well received by the women she interviewed as this 221 would mean that uncertainty prevailed (“realización incierta”) and that there had been an “unfinished story” (“un relato inacabado”). (Martín-Barbero 253) The women preferred a telenovela with a predictable ending in the sense that they demonstrated a need for a resolution that was favorable to the protagonist, thereby offering pleasure through the experience of a closure that might not be present in their everyday lives. As Muñoz discussed, the women would identify with the female protagonist who is usually a “woman that suffers”. Not only would the women in her study see the stories on the screen as “similar” to their own existence, but they would also “confuse” them at points with everyday life. Not only did many women claim that “the fictional narrative [became] a metaphor or a testament to their own lives” but some also claimed that “they could make a telenovela out of my own life!” (255)… and that “women were born to suffer… A woman who hasn’t suffered doesn’t know what life is.” (254) This suggests that the appeal of closure to the suffering in a telenovela is directly associated with the uncertainties of their everyday lives, strengthening the argument that telenovelas allow for a mediation of experiences of marginalization by providing a sense a gratification through a closure that compensates for the suffering that the protagonist endured throughout the length of the narrative. The above example illustrates how the telenovela format, provides certain pleasures as argued in chapter 1, but as the study by Muñoz suggests, one also needs to take into consideration the particular narrative at work, as the success of a telenovela for female 222 audiences relies on the “predictability” of the ending in terms of the desire for the protagonist to be compensated for her suffering. One can thus better understand the ways in which particular telenovela narratives such as Cinderella stories mediate local experiences of modernity. In another ethnographic study, Kathleen Kuehnast discusses how audiences in the former soviet nation of Kirghizstan received Los Ricos También Lloran (that originally aired in Mexico in 1979) when it aired there in the early 1990s. It was seen as coming from “America” without any mention of US and Mexican cultural differences. According to Kuehnast, this was because the main dilemma that occupied the women’s minds revolved around how to resolve the ongoing tension between their sense of collective identity, as reflected in both Soviet political and Kyrgyz kin-based models of group alliances, and the opposite sentiment of individualism which was actively being propagated by the new global media. For example, she describes how one of the subjects of her study, Aida, obtained her ideas about being a Kyrgyz woman not from a list of attributes of Soviet heroines, but typically from characters found in foreign movies, soap operas or novels. Such “soap operas” included the American series Santa Barbara and the Mexican telenovela, Los Ricos También Lloran. As Kuehnast noted, younger audiences were for the most part uninterested in finding strategies for creating soviet socialism, but rather imagined surviving by imbuing their worlds with strategies derived from mass media. 223 Newly independent former soviet nations entered into a global hierarchy ruled largely by capitalism and it could be argued that the marginal position of the telenovela Los Ricos También Lloran in relation to US programming, allowed audiences in post-communist nations to mediate capitalist notions of consumerism, individuality, family, etc. from this perspective. As discussed earlier in this dissertation, the telenovela, and specifically the Cinderella genre, became a successful programming formula after World War II, a time when the politics of capitalist development and the counter narratives of dependency theories were circulating widely amidst continued tensions between the Mexican government, the television industry and US influence. Therefore, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to suggest that the initial impact of these telenovelas in former soviet nations might be partly explained by a nation entering in a world system that has been largely organized under the logics of development, and later, free-trade and deregulation. Similar to Kuehnast, Kate Baldwin has argued that the popularity in Moscow of this particular telenovela in the fall of 1992 could be seen as “American culture as filtered through the lens of western-style Mexican social groups in present day Russia (1992)” (287) When Los Ricos También Lloran aired in Russia it was estimated that 70 percent of the population, or 200 million viewers, tuned in regularly (Baldwin 286). She attributes the success of this telenovela to its status as “marginal” in relation to the scarcity of local Russian programming and in relation to the mainstream nature of US dramas such as 224 Dynasty and Dallas (these series did not succeed when aired in the summer of that same year). (289) This “marginal” status in relation to US programming is important in light of the fact that Russia entered a system dominated with capitalist logics of progress, consumption, trade and development. The telenovela provided for a mediation of capitalist notions of progress and development through the skepticism and “pleasure in expectation” provided by the telenovela format and the Cinderella narrative that emerged out of Mexico’s own economically disadvantageous position to the US. This is happening at a time when according to Baldwin, a switch in the paradigm of good and evil, were taking place, from communism being good and capitalism being bad to the other way around. 1 1 Baldwin’s argument focuses on a negative critique of the telenovela based on what she perceives as a type of marginalized whiteness in a society where kinship ties prioritize blood and race (291). She cites Anatoly Sobchak (mayor of St. Petersburg) as stating: “In the Soviet Union, an empire of Holocaust survivors and the children of survivors… (a) gnawing uncertainty was the usual condition of life. It’s as if the regime was guilty of two crimes on a massive scale: murder and the unending assault against memory. In making a secret of its history, the Kremlin made its subjects just a little more insane, a little more desperate.” Baldwin comments on this by stating that “the problems produced by a suppressed collective memory in the face of genocide at its most “cunning and naïve,” and the simultaneous instancing of “generic” death, result, finally, in the desperation for superficially demarcated lines of good and evil as serialized in the Salvatierra melodrama which promises closure and likewise an “end” to suffering”. She argues that the general appeal of the show resides in the process of identification it provides to the Russian viewer (through an exoticized female other) by a process of marginalization (294). 225 The fact that it was a Cinderella narrative that initiated Russia’s love affair with the telenovela must not be overlooked for, as I have discussed, the myth of Cinderella mediates important global politics through the character of an underage girl transformed by undergoing a process of domestication in order to become an ideal female citizen. I have argued that race becomes articulated through the narratives’ obsession with the recognition of blood ties and the domestication that goes with the transformation of the savage girl into a mature woman. The ways in which intergenerational power dynamics are displayed in these stories echo the role of El Chavo del Ocho in presenting adults behaving like children as figures of underdevelopment. El Chavo del Ocho articulates the absurdity of such narratives by presenting infantilized adults within the sitcom structure. In other words, the comedy presents a pleasure in repetitiveness and predictability based on the sitcom format that it follows and through its characters, who by pretending to be children, go against any notion of progress or development. The Cinderella genre is a bit more complicated, as the young girl suffers, falls in love, battles villainesses, transforms, gets married and finds a lost parent (i.e.: “grows up” or “matures”) over a period of months by connecting her story of transformation to the extended duration of the telenovela broadcast. And this difference illustrates how the Cinderella genre foregrounds the temporal and generational dimension of economic narratives of progress that serve to maintain global hierarchies. 226 II. Melodramas of Development As I have noted throughout this project, economic discourses after World War II enacted a shift from racial supremacy to developmental superiority as a way to explain the power and dominance of the first world (Klein 199). The full cultural and ideological implications of contemporary notions of development remain to be unpacked. This dissertation has foregrounded not only the racial and gendered nature of such discourses, but also the predominance of such ideologies during the emergence of television serials such as the telenovela. In this light, I have argued that the structure of the serial mediates the expectation, uncertainty, suffering, skepticism, and even resistances brought about by processes of modernity. The format has enjoyed greater success in regions and nations that are part of the third world (such as nations or societies that are seen as being part of the developing world) and, in the case of Italy and Spain, these nations that have been historically articulated, since the imperial era, as being “inferior” to other non-Latin and Western power blocs. The reaction to the format is similar to the emerging popularity of the novel during the 19th century in Western Europe. Just as the telenovela, many of the most popular novels of the 19th century, such as the works of Charles Dickens, were first published in serialized form. Literary works are beyond the scope of this study, but I would suggest that the serialized format of the novel established a similar sense of expectation in the reader as the telenovela generates in its viewer, but the nations in which it became most 227 popular were nations undergoing processes of modernization, similar to the nations that are now adapting the telenovela format. Film theory and television studies have developed a love affair with psychoanalysis for decades, usually privileging the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. This comes as no surprise as Peter Brooks has discussed the many ways by which drama in the media “is fully homologous to political melodrama.” (204) A significant number of critical works take on psychoanalytic terms to analyze the different ideologies at work in a variety of media texts. Just as I have highlighted the connections between developmental ideology to imperialism based on the former being a conscious redefinition of the latter, I must briefly point out the connection between the centrality of melodrama during the propagation of nationalism and the rise in popularity of psychoanalysis. This is done in an effort to present a link not only between melodrama in the form of the telenovela to developmental ideology and nationalist discourses but also to present a connection to prominent psychological theories after World War II. This allows us to gain further understanding regarding the ways in which notions of human growth and development are central to economic theories of development. The origin of melodrama as a “modern form,” as Peter Brooks calls it, can be located in the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath (14) when it became the language of the 228 revolution, and psychoanalysis applied melodrama’s conventions in a systematic way to the human mind. As Brooks suggests, the French Revolution was the “last act in a process of desacralization that was set in motion at the Renaissance, passed through the momentary compromise of Christian Humanism, and gathered momentum during the Enlightment” a time when sacred myths lost their social influence (with the loss of their legitimacy in social and political representations) (16). The sacred became relegated to the personal (16) whilst the melodrama served as the language of the revolution that aimed to “impose a new society, to legislate the regime of virtue… The Revolution attempts to sacrilize law itself, the Republic as the institution of morality.” (15) It is melodrama that revolutionary discourse produces: with its “incessant struggle against the enemies, branded as villains, suborners of morality, who must be confronted and expunged, over and over, to assure the triumph of virtue.” (15) This language of virtue, of victory over repression, which according to Brooks characterizes melodrama, shares a surprising affinity to Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality. “Psychoanalysis can be read as a systematic realization of the melodramatic aesthetic”; “the dynamics of repression and the return of the repressed figure the plot of melodrama” and is articulated in Freud’s theories of the mind. Conflict in psychoanalysis is “stark and unremitting, possibly disabling, menacing the ego, which must find ways to reduce or discharge it.” (201) 229 Throughout his argument, Brooks makes several references to melodramatic works that articulate Freudian psychoanalytic concepts. (19, 175, 183) He argues that if we consider the extent to which psychoanalysis can be conceived as the “modern fulfillment and codification of melodrama”, we can confirm the claim that “melodrama has become a necessary mode within modern consciousness”. (202) He concludes his book by comparing political events at the time of his writing with the language of revolution of Robespierre and Saint-Just: all speak of a “manichaeistic struggle for virtue, against vice, the enemies of the Republic, the traitors, the uncitizens, the nonpersons.” (203) I firmly agree and align myself with Brooks when he states that “it is delusive to seek an interior conflict, the ‘psychology of melodrama’, because melodrama exteriorizes conflict and psychic structure, producing instead what we might call the ‘melodrama of psychology’.”(Brooks 35) However, Brook’s analysis needs to be extended to account for contemporary global relations and the gender and racial politics which are absent from his analysis. This dissertation set out to uncover the relationship between television genres, specifically melodrama and comedy, in relation to political discourses after World War II. I would like to emphasize key arguments that I’ve put forth so far that attempt to theorize in one way or another the importance of the experience of time for these formats. In chapters 1 and 2, I 230 argued that the telenovela as a melodramatic form foregrounds the melodrama of developmental and dependency arguments through the example of the Cinderella genre. Just as third world nations are imagined as underdeveloped and in need of foreign aid, the Cinderella genre articulates this very same story/myth, and complicates it, through the story of a girl that achieves her own modernization with the help of others. For instance, the format generates a pleasure in expectation of a “happy ending” while also expanding the pleasures of the middle. I explored the interplay between process and duration as a way to mediate the imagined experience of underdevelopment (as articulated in political and nationalist discourses) with whatever the audiences’ actual/lived experience of the everyday might be. In chapter 3, I engaged with the melodramatic rhetoric of the New Latin American cinema movement and their efforts to create a unified pan Latin American identity embodied through a militant masculinity that was to battle neocolonialist exploitation. Even though I dealt with the New Latin American cinema movement, I focused on two popular Mexican television comedies as alternate responses that emerged around the same time. The comedies presented the antithesis of the goals of the New Latin American cinema movement by literally presenting the figures of underdevelopment that they were battling against: infantilized adults and a dimwitted and clumsy super hero. The stories of Cinderella and of El Chavo del Ocho encourage us to think of theories of economic progress and development in relation to notions of human growth, development 231 and maturity. This is done in part through the way in which global and national politics are mapped onto the human body in these texts, but also in the ways in which the texts come to embody the resistance, contestation, and rejection of such theories of economic development. In fleshing out these ideas of human development in relation to notions of modernity and progress, I focus on a prominent psychologist who has not been much discussed in media studies in comparison to the popularity of Freud and Jacques Lacan for the field. 2 Lacan happened to begin his career by presenting a strong critique of Ego psychology; one of its originators was Erik Erikson, the psychologist whose theory I wish to focus on. Both Lacan and Erikson were popular around the same time, and they both revised Freud’s theories. Erikson is credited with coining the term “identity crisis” in his 1968 book Identity: Youth and Crisis, and for conceiving “the eight Ages of Man” in 1950 that later became known as “the eight stages of psychosocial development”. In his first study, Childhood and Society, Erikson described eight stages of human development, each stage articulating a binary that not only is similar to Freud but that also follows melodramatic 2 Just as Sigmund Freud developed his theory of human sexuality based on his five stages of psychosexual development, others followed with revisions to his arguments such as the notable example of Jacques Lacan whose concepts became more relevant to film and literary studies, as well as philosophy and other related fields. Not only did Lacan have the support of intellectuals such as Levi-Strauss and Althusser, but he became known for presenting a strong critique of Ego psychology through his “Return to Freud” where he argued that the unconscious is structured like language. Lacan’s emphasis on language, and the importance of the image (“mirror stage”, “the three orders”, etc) are just some of the reasons why he would be relevant to film studies. 232 conventions very closely. The eight stages are meant to account for different stages in human life, and how the completion of each stage would determine the mental health of an individual as well as their function in society: 1) “Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust”, 2) “Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt”, 3) “Initiative vs. Guilt”, 4) “Industry vs. Inferiority”, 5) “Identity vs. Role Confusion”, 6) “Intimacy vs. Isolation”, 7) “Generativity vs. Stagnation”, and 8) “Ego Integrity vs. Despair”. The binaries are clearly set up to outline a path as to what is and what is not desirable based on the fulfillment of each stage. For instance, “Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt” is a stage that attempts to account for the toddler stage of a child when s/he desires to explore his or her surroundings. If the stage is completed successfully, the child will have gained a sense of “will” as opposed to feelings of “shame and doubt” which would be the result of say, over disciplining or over protection. This is strikingly similar to the concept of a nation as an independent and sovereign state. But the most important connection between Erikson’s stages and US foreign policy can be seen in stage seven “Generativity vs. Stagnation” that is very similar to Klein’s notion of “sentimental modernization” as developed from modernization theories. This is the stage when an adult begins to measure his or her accomplishments and begins to feel the need to help the younger generation. What is relevant here is how both sets of discourses seem to validate one another through the implicit naturalization of childhood and human development and growth. 233 What the Cinderella narratives and El Chavo del Ocho suggest is that conceptions of economic modernization are also constituted by ideas of childhood and growth. Let us remember that the unconscious has been primarily associated with childhood, as Freud and Erikson suggest, prior to the necessary “stages of development” that guarantee that a child will turn into a mature and functional adult. Whether they are true or not, I’d like to consider their stages as theories of human transformation that served to naturalize and animate efforts of modernization either via dominant politics of capitalist development or socialist revolution, as both sets of theories (psychological, and economic) ascribed to these logics of human growth and development. As Saldaña-Portillo has argued, there are two modalities to Rostow’s economic development theory; the first is that it is “assumed that societies move through stages of development”. (6) The second modality assumes that the movement of these societies is only achieved if there is a change in the consciousness in the subjects of underdevelopment; that is, “the development of the members of these societies into free, mature, fully conscious, and self- determining individual subjects.” (6) The problem with developmental politics and subsequent reactions to them, according to Saldaña-Portillo, is that they render as “natural” certain notions of growth and progress that were to lead to modernity (5-6). This generates, according to her, a discursive binary between pre-modern and modern that is not limited to 234 capitalist developmental ideology but it is also prominent in leftist revolutionary discourse (33). This binary consists of “normative theory of human transformation and agency,” one that seeks to transcend a primitive or pre-modern past in favor of a modern existence, either via capitalist development or socialist revolution. (7) Returning to psychological notions of human development, Curtis Márez has argued for the connection between Freud’s conception of the unconscious (Id) and slavery and rebellion in Latin America: “Freud translates an Imperial map into a psychic map that relocates Indian resistance within the shifting boundaries of a polymorphously perverse and ‘primitive’ unconscious”. (228) This adds an important geopolitical dimension to our understanding of the concept of the “unconscious”. Therefore, the unconscious has not only been historically linked to a notion of the “pre-modern” but can be specifically traced and located in Central and South America. These theories of transformation (economic and human) formulate a concept of time and temporality that places nations and their peoples in hierarchical relation, often based on intergenerational relations. Though not explicitly described as “intergenerational”, as presented in Chapter 3, Claudio Lomnitz argues for the emergence of communitarian ideology—the precursor to Benedict Anderson’s argument of nationalism as an “imagined community”--, out of a feeling of inferiority of the Spanish in relation to the other European 235 powers which eventually lead to the “conquest of America” (22). This formulation brings a whole new dimension to Erikson’s fourth stage “Industry vs. Inferiority” where from around age six to puberty, the child begins to compare himself to others and starts to recognize disparities between the abilities of himself compared to others. If a child successfully completes this stage then s/he achieves a sense of “competence”; otherwise s/he will feel inferior. Such inferiority is assumed in several historiographies of the New Latin American cinema discussed in Chapter 3 that frame Latin American cinema in a state of cultural inferiority in relation to the West, a state of cultural inferiority that these artists were struggling to transcend. If one takes into account economic and human development theories, one can begin to denaturalize such theories of human transformation and change and consider “age” as a category of identity that is potentially charged with geopolitical implications such as the cases discussed in this dissertation. Age as a category of identity has to be seen as one that is constantly changing and in flux, and it is those changes (or lack of changes) that will carry with them important ideological implications. Changes in age are commonly referred to in terms of development, progress or lack thereof. Just as Erikson’s stages suggest, there is a value judgment applied to changes in human behavior throughout its lifetime (from infancy to old age). When it comes to narrating the changes in the human body, the concepts of growth and development imply a linear narrative that takes us through the different stages. It 236 is therefore, not surprising that any deviance from this narrative is considered to be some sort of anomaly or in some cases, an aberration. It is this linear narrative that the cultural texts in this dissertation engage with, either through the telenovela format, Cinderella myths, infantilized adults, or deficient or hyper masculinities. 237 Works Cited Baldwin, Kate. “Montezuma’s Revenge.” Ed. Allen, Robert C. To be Continued… Soap Operas Around the World. London and New York: Routledge, 1995 Barbero-Martin, Jesús y Sonia Muñoz, eds. Televisión y Melodrama. Bogota: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992 Brooks, Peter. 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Creator Nasser, Jaime Javier (author)

Core Title Exporting tears and fantasies of (under) development: popular television genres, globalization and nationalism in Mexico after World War II

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/22/2008

Defense Date 06/17/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chapulin Colorado,Chespirito,El Chavo del Ocho,Latin American broadcasting,Latin American development,Latin American melodrama,Mexican broadcasting,Mexican television,Mexican television comedy,OAI-PMH Harvest,telenovela,televisa

Place Name Mexico (countries)

Language English

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Marez, Curtis (committee member)

Creator Email nasser@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1383

Unique identifier UC161064

Identifier etd-Nasser-20080722 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-201251 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1383 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Nasser-20080722.pdf

Dmrecord 201251

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Nasser, Jaime Javier

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu