The Tangle of Politics and Passion: Revising Mexican History's Heroes and Villains in Neoliberal-Era Telenovelas

Estimates of the magnitude of telenovela audiences in Mexico range from 60 to 80 percent of the population.  Given this widespread popularity, it is not surprising that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party for much of the twentieth century, has used telenovelas as didactic tools to teach national history in order to forge a shared Mexican identity.  This paper focuses on two of the most popular historical telenovelas ever produced:  Senda de Gloria and El Vuelo del Aguila.  Senda de Gloria commences with the promulgation of the Constitution in 1917 and culminates with the nationalization of the petroleum industry by the Cardenas government in 1938.  It originally aired in March of 1987 and met with such enormous success that it was re-aired only months after the conclusion of its first run.  The second broadcast was abruptly terminated when the telenovela’s praise for President Lazaro Cardenas uncomfortably underscored the fraudulence of the 1988 elections, in which Cardenas’ son lost the presidency to Carlos Salinas de Gortari.  In 1994, the final year of Salinas’ presidency, and the year NAFTA went into effect, El Vuelo del Aguila aired.  It was one of the most sympathetic interpretations of Porfirio Diaz, the long-time villain of Mexican history, whose brutal rule was believed to be the cause of the Revolution of 1910.  Like Diaz, Salinas courted foreign investment and privatization.  Drawing on newspaper, magazine and television guide articles, as well as the telenovelas themselves, this paper argues that amidst the major political and economic shift toward neoliberalism, the narrative of the heroes and villains of the Revolution had to be altered.