Telenovela Spectres on U.S. Television: Constructing Latinidad on the Small Screen

For the last ten years or so, Latin American telenovelas have been haunting the edges of U.S. primetime television. From nods to melodrama as a “Mexican television” kind of thing on Caroline in the City (1998) to shout outs or “sight outs” (brief visuals) of telenovelas on contemporary dramedies such as Weeds, Private Practice, and The O.C., American television is demonstrating increasing awareness of the permeability of its cultural borders. This paper examines the politics of these telenovela “citations” in two sites. Ugly Betty’s first season (2006-07) features the small screen telenovela within the mise en scene of Betty Suárez’s living room, raising questions of how this citation serves to establish Latino identity as well as indicate the show’s indebtedness to the Colombian telenovela that served as its model: Yo Soy Betty La Fea (1997). Both of these moves are political, suggesting that Latinidad cannot be fully understood or expressed outside of a transnational framework that requires the audience to watch the characters watching a melodrama that is positioned as absolutely “foreign” generically and linguistically. Recognizing the role telenovelas play for Latino audiences, Rosario Dawson spearheaded the “Vote Latino” project in 2007, creating a series of English-language “telenovela” episodes distributed through youtube.com. The videos’ rather overt political and partisan intent is framed and amplified within the genre’s particular brand of melodrama; reading these videos alongside Ugly Betty introduces the question of how parody of the genre becomes legible, for which communities, and how, as a strategy, telenovela parody invites a complex political identification with a telenovela-informed idea of Latinidad.