More Than I Thought

When I first told my family I was taking a class on Telenovelas, we tried to pinpoint the reason for their widespread success in Latin America. We compared them to American soap operas, which seem to be far less popular. My older sister lived in Guatemala for a year in a shack-like house with a family of seven, and she experienced first hand the attachment these Hispanic people have to telenovelas. One conclusion we came to was that Latin America is stuck behind the times, less developed than the U.S. -- they probably watch their soap operas the way American women in the 1950s watched theirs. Many women were stuck at home with nothing to do but cook and clean, and no better form of entertainment than afternoon soaps.

Now I am learning that this is not the case at all for present day Latin America, and their history goes back even further than that of the American soap opera. Even the Venezuelan president restricted his public television announcement because he recognized how important one episode of a telenovela was. This is big. This is a stable part of their culture. It reminds me more closely of the American romance novel, to which female readers have been attached for decades, though the plots remain generally predictable; the readership, it seems, will never die out.

In discussion of the great writer, Leonardo Padron, I learned that telenovelas can be an intricate art, more so than I have ever appreciated from watching an American soap opera. Padron incorporated new elements in plot and design to expand the creative possibilities of a telenovela his shows had humor, mystery and even poetry. His telenovelas were an outpouring of his artwork. Professional poetry revealed itself in the language spoken by his characters. Perhaps American soap operas should be held to such high standards as this.