Telenovelas
Fall 2017 | Volume XVII, Number 1
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
The Best of ReVista
First Take: Our Telenovela, Ourselves
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…
Women and Sexuality
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…
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…
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…
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…
From Narcos to Turks
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)…
A Tale of Two Transnational Telenovelas
Almost a decade ago now, I was working as project manager at an MIT research lab called the Convergence Culture Consortium. The project focused on understanding the myriad changes to…
New Audiences, New Forms
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…
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…
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…
Blending Dry Facts with Emotion
The evening news comes on, and on the screen there’s a woman crying, telling of her close escape from a derailed Harlem subway train or from the gruesome Manchester concert…
Vignettes
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…
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…
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…
Mother and Son
My mother, Lilia de la Carrera (1921-2012), was a fan of telenovelas. In fact, she began to listen to such programs on radio well before they became common fare on Cuban television in the…
María la del Barrio
Growing up in Virginia in the ’80s, I didn’t have a lot of access to telenovelas. If asked, my parents would probably joke that they had emigrated from Argentina to escape high drama. After years…
Building Bridges
Looking Back on Ten Years of Collaboration and Respect
We are three among the seven coauthors of Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel, a recently published book that revisits one…
Book Talk
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…
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…
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…
Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution
At various points in Peter Andreas’ extraordinary childhood, he was kidnapped by his own mother, lived as a squatter in a commune in Chile during the tumultuous months leading up to the coup d’état in 1973, and traveled throughout Peru performing revolutionary street…
Inka History in Knots
Some years ago I went to the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, in Italy’s Alto Adige, to gaze upon Ötzi. Better known as the Iceman, Ötzi was an early Bronze Age traveler and homicide victim whose well-preserved body was accidentally discovered in 1991 as it…