[Newsday/Quinones] Mexican Soaps Meet Social Realism

[Mauricio Banda]

Newsday, April 20, 1997

TV

IDEAS / Mexican Soaps Meet Social Realism

Sam Quinones. Sam Quinones is a freelance writer living in Mexico
City.

AMID FEVERISH expectations that NAFTA will churn Mexico into a world
economic power, a curious factoid has emerged about the Mexican
economy: One of its leading exports is its burgeoning stable of TV
soap operas.

"Telenovelas," as they are called here, are now distributed to some
125 countries across the globe and have have emerged as one of the
most popular genres on Russian television.

It's tempting to speculate about the appeal of escapist TV in
countries negotiating rocky transitions to market economies and
political pluralism. You'd expect people to embrace warm and cozy
entertainment - overwrought romance, gallant characters, formulaic
plots - while their world goes topsy-turvy.

But Mexico isn't fitting neatly into this template. Indeed, the
telenovela has taken a distinctly social realist turn - changing right
along with the country.

No one doubts that the love story will forever be the core of the
telenovela. But a new generation of telenovelas has begun to question
most everything else about the 40-year-old genre.

Consider "Tijuana," slated to begin filming this August. Not long ago,
Raul Araiza, a television producer, came to Tijuana public officials
with a script for a telenovela about the city.

Araiza is a well-known producer who works for the Televisa network,
the world's largest producer of telenovelas. So Tijuana officials
might have been forgiven a giddy moment pondering how the show might
help the city's image. But the moment faded.

As they read the script, Tijuana officials blanched. "Tijuana" the
telenovela, as it turned out, was going to be a lot like Tijuana the
city. The show is a love story set against a backdrop of immigrant
smuggling, drug trafficking, discrimation against Indians, life in the
maquiladora assembly plants, gun running, violence and xenophobic U.S.
politicians wanting to build walls between the two countries.

In what is likely a first, Tijuana officials have since tried,
unsuccessfully, to stop a telenovela from filming in their town. City
fathers have even tried (also unsuccessfully) to copyright the city's
name.

Araiza said he doesn't want to hurt Tijuana. "But [city leaders] want
me to make a film about a city that doesn't exist," he said. "When I
show Tijuana with no prostitutes, no crime ... people will die of
laughter."

The forces stoking the recent changes in the telenovela's format are
complex and hard to chart precisely. But the new shows seem, at the
least, to reflect a much wider pattern of social awareness in Mexico.
In the last few years, Mexicans have awakened out of a paternalistic
political slumber induced by 68 years of rule by the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), the world's oldest authoritarian regime.
They are becoming more politically mature, more critical and
demanding, less willing to settle for the same old fare in politics,
the supermarket - or on television.

Televisa's "Los Hijos de Nadie" ("No One's Children") deals with
homeless street kids. "Al Norte del Corazon" ("North of the Heart"),
now airing on the new Television Azteca network, is a love story about
undocumented immigrants and shows them beaten by the U.S. Border
Patrol. Azteca's "Lagunilla" is about street peddlers.

You can see the new sensibility in the shows' smaller touches, as
well. Telenovelas are seeking to achieve more faithful representations
of personal mores. Even on the more established shows, women now
smoke. There's nudity. Characters have jobs, drink alcohol and live in
unglamourous locales like Tijuana.

No genre dominates the Mexican arts as completely as the telenovela.
It has become the country's cultural sponge, soaking up talented
actors, singers, writers, directors and producers who can't raise a
family pursuing their art elsewhere.

In recent years it has become Mexico's great contribution to world pop
culture. Among the 125 countries that now comprise the world market
for telenovelas are such unlikely places as Qatar, Korea, Luxembourg,
Australia, China, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Uganda and Moldavia. The top
telenovela stars are mobbed when they arrive in other countries.

The typical Televisa telenovela follows a well-worn formula: Poor,
virtuous girl, often named Maria, meets rich young man. They fall in
and out of love as wicked relatives get in the way. Finally, rich and
childless old man proves to be Maria's long-lost uncle. Young folks
marry, and live happily ever after.

In Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil, the other countries now producing
telenovelas, the genre took more risks, occasionally employing great
literary and acting talents who were encouraged to use them.

But the Televisa monopoly was like a 1930s Hollywood studio, with
exclusive contracts and rigid content control. "Las Marias," as the
traditional telenovelas are sometimes known, served as the industry
standard, as dictated by Televisa's legenday chief, Emilio Azcarraga.
Writers couldn't deviate from it. Nor could they find work elsewhere.

Today, though, Televisa's grip on pop culture is not as firm as it
used to be. The sale of two state-owned stations in 1993 to the new
Television Azteca has made the medium a tad more feisty. The networks'
news shows go head to head and they recently traded barbed newspaper
ads disputing each other's audience share.

The competition had to spill over to telenovelas. Indeed, most of
what's new in the genre was sparked when Azteca chose to air a daring
telenovela produced by Argos Television, a young, independent
production company.

"Nada Personal" (Nothing Personal) was a love story that evolved
against themes of high-level government corruption and political
assasination. It followed the headlines. One character used the phrase
"Demons are on the loose"; the quote was taken from a famous 1994
press conference in which then-Assistant Attorney General Mario Ruiz
Massieu resigned and accused his superiors of complicity in the murder
of his brother, Jose Francisco, a PRI leader.

In real life, two days after the show ended in February, Gen. Jesus
Gutierrez, director of Mexico's drug-intelligence agency, was arrested
and accused of being in the pay of a drug-cartel leader.

Televisa producers like to downplay the impact of "Nada Personal." But
the changes in the tried-and-true telenovela format seen today date
from the show's airing.

Still, not everyone sees those changes lasting. Televisa has on
occasion tried telenovelas with heavier themes, with no success.
Azcarraga, who died last week in Miami after his recent retirement,
had pronounced that Televisa will always make television for the
masses. Most observers interpreted the comment to mean that a lot more
of "Las Marias" were on the way. "When the shows turn to reality, the
ratings go down," argues Alvaro Cueva, a newspaper columnist and
telenovela writer. "People don't watch telenovelas to immerse
themselves in reality, but rather to escape from it."

One test will likely come when "Lagunilla," another Argos production,
airs sometime late this year. The show is a rare telenovela in which
central characters are all poor or working-class.

Will Mexicans' new flirtation with television reality extend to
watching poverty when so much of it surrounds them daily? "We don't
know," says Epigmenio Ibarra, an Argos partner. "A lot of people say
television is aspirational, that the public wants to see wealth, not
misery. But if we do a good job presenting the working classes and the
architectural beauty of the downtown area, it could be a pretty
attractive show."

No one, meanwhile, is predicting the demise of pure Maria from the
poor side of town. But it may not be long before she's still
considered virtuous while insisting her lover wear a condom.

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