Telenovela Heroines
I first became interested in telenovelas as an academic subject when, more than thirty years ago, I heard my then two-year-old daughter sing a song for the first time. It was the opening…
Category: Telenovelas
Sharing Latin Loves in Lithuania
When I was growing up in Lithuania, at the time the country transitioned from the Soviet rule to independence, my grandmother and I used to watch Mexican and Venezuelan telenovelas…
Narconovelas
n May 2017, the acclaimed band Los Tigres del Norte was fined $25,000 for singing a couple of narcocorridos (traditional Mexican ballads with lyrics that tell of the exploits of drug traffickers)…
Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin, a current television series, makes a compelling case for the U.S. mainstream television and the presence that Latina/os have within that market. The show represents a…
The Colombia Reader: History, Culture, Politics
Fifteen-plus years ago, historian David Bushnell argued in his widely read textbook that Colombia was the least studied and probably the least understood major country in Latin America…
First Take: Our Telenovela, Ourselves
English + Español
that has shaped identities and enacted a multiplicity of roles for Latin Americans in their daily lives. Diverse and ambiguous ways of being and belonging to the world’s popular cultures are…
The Best of ReVista
The Best of ReVista 2016-17 is a prize for the best photograph published in ReVista in the previous academic year sponsored by DRCLAS publications and ARTS@DRCLAS.
Telenovelas: Editor’s Letter
As I think back on our conversation, I hear myself babbling about telenovelas. First it was reminiscing about how Sandinista Nicaragua had come to a total standstill every night during La Esclava Isaura (the Slave Isaura). And then about how the telenovela Cafe con Aroma de…
Sensual Women, Lush Wetlands and Cool Caimans
As a child growing up in Brazil, I’d settle down with my family every evening after dinner to watch the national news on TV. And after the news, it was time for the telenovela. I wasn’t…
A Letter: Narciso Esparragosa and other Tales From Guatemala
You are not going to believe the telenovela I’ve been watching—I’m sitting here at home on Boston’s North Shore but streaming it from Guatemala. The historical plot is supposed to take…
Loving Escobar, Hating Narcos
Stumbling across the Colombian narconovela Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal on Netflix was a minor highlight of my recent sabbatical at DRCLAS. For one, it provided the perfect antidote for…
Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence and the Making of Contemporary Colombia
On June 30, 2017, a liaison officer with the United Nations peace keeping mission in Colombia wrote, from Arauca, about the prospects for long-term peace in that South American nation…
Learning from Telenovelas
Like most people, some of my fondest childhood memories are from times spent in the kitchen. Yet few recollections are as vivid as racing back from preschool to turn on the kitchen TV in time…
Jane, Rogelio and Me
One thing I love about telenovelas is that the characters live in between the real world and a fantasy world where anything can happen at any time. Telenovela characters do some stupid…
Hybrid Fiction in Latin America
The father of a friend of mine became hooked on Avenida Brasil, a Brazilian telenovela that was a hit in several Latin American countries. Every night, as he sat down to watch the telenovela, he…
Homosexuality, Naturalization and Fluidity
English + Español
Claudio loves Leonardo. He also loves his wife, Beatriz. It’s not your ordinary clandestine love triangle: Beatriz knows about the relationship and supports her husband in his bisexuality. The…
Brazilian Telenovelas and Social Merchandising
If only watching TV shows were as simple as it seems. Rather than just “unplugging” from the world and enjoying some mental distractions from life’s stresses, television audiences…
Kill the Ampaya! The Best Latin American Baseball Fiction
In December 1999, President Hugo Chávez took to the balcony of the Miraflores Palace in Caracas to announce that a nationwide referendum had overwhelmingly approved a new constitution that, among other things, transformed Venezuela into a Bolivarian…
Women in Peruvian Melodrama
The meteoric rise of a soft-spoken agronomist of Japanese ancestry to the presidency of Peru, followed by his spectacular descent into dictatorship and corruption, coupled with the…
You Teach a Class about Telenovelas? (gasp!)
There is a place where everything comes together: research, learning and teaching; telenovela, culture and society; industry, art and academia; Latin America and the rest of the world. It is the…
