By Deborah Van Hoewyk

When we first arrived in Huatulco, in the winter of 2004-05, we stayed in a long-gone B&B in La Bocana and ate in the next-door restaurant, Los Güeros, which is still there. It was a quiet, magical place – apparently, however, not magical enough for the family that ran Los Güeros, as they gathered every night to watch a TV suspended from the ceiling. Sparsely lit by circular fluorescents, the blue-painted restaurant seemed to pulsate to the flickering movement on the screen.

The family was devoted to telanovelas – prime time, melodramatic, soap operas. Immensely popular in practically all Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries, telenovelas are “maxi-mini-series”; unlike U.S. soap operas, they almost always complete their story arc in less than a year, often less than six months. The shorter duration doesn’t keep telenovelas from having complicated plots rife with reversals and revenge, drama and deceit, usually driven by love, be it forbidden or happy-ever-after, or maybe both.

Telenovelas also differ from U.S. soap operas in that they are set in a social, political, and economic framework; they acknowledge poverty, factory layoffs, class differences and conflicts. Indeed, doomed love between an honorable-but-struggling young woman and a wealthy man is a favorite theme, especially in earlier telenovelas. (Don’t worry, they usually get together in the end – think Cinderella!)

How Did Telenovelas Come To Be?

The direct ancestor of the telenovela is the radio-novela, and the ancestor of the radio-novela was born in Cuba, in a 19th-century cigar factory. El lector de tabaco, the tobacco reader, read many things to the cigar-makers, but among them were novels, presented chapter by chapter, day after day. It was thought to entertain the workers, to relieve the tedium of factory work and ensure they would show up to hear more.

Cuba made its first attempt to win its independence from Spain in the unsuccessful Ten Years’ War (1868-78); cigar makers and workers who fled the war moved to Mexico, specifically the state of Veracruz, ideal for growing tobacco, and Florida in the U.S. The tobacco reader came along. Soon there were readers in textile and other factories as well.

Once the lectores began to include labor issues in their readings – seen by some historians as leading to the labor movement (a story for another time), they were on their way out. Factory owners did not like having their workers educated on what they saw as socialist, communist, or anarchist themes. Mexico banned lectores in its factories, although whether that was a total ban is unclear. In the US, the tobacco factories in Ybor City, part of Tampa, staged multiple strikes – the live readings ended with the strike of 1931 – but there are still lectores in Cuba today.

Radios Replace the Readers

As soon as radio became available, it, too, was put to work in factories to entertain workers. In her doctoral work at the Free University of Berlin, researcher Hanna Müssemann studies “every-day media,” and has confirmed that radio broadcasts, and then radio-novelas, were intended to entertain factory workers, among other audiences, and to keep workers coming back for “the rest of the story.”

Radio arrived in Mexico at 8 pm on September 18, 1930, when station XEW began broadcasting from the Olimpia Cinema on Calle 16 de Septiembre, right off the zócalo (main square) in Mexico City. Intended for broadcasting music, XEW also produced theatrical works on the weekend; when XEW put out its first radio-novela in 1932, they followed in the steps of the tobacco readers, and broke up the French novel The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas, 1844) into 15-minute segments.

That there was a cliff-hanger element to the radio-novela was made quite clear when XEW writer Vicente Leñero put together guidelines for creating radio-novelas: the plot should have “mild suspense” (suspensos suaves) before commercials, “disturbing suspense” (suspensos inquietantes) for the end of the episode, and “frightful suspense” (suspensos tremebundos) at the end of the week.

XEW’s radio-novelas didn’t really take off until March of 1941, when they put on Ave sin nido, la vida apasionante de Anita de Montemar (Bird without a Nest, the Passionate Life of Anita de Montemar). Anita de Montemar is a student at a nunnery who falls in love with Carlos Miranda, an engineer who handles the mechanical needs of the nunnery. Carlos and Anita marry, only to discover that Anita cannot have children. Carlos’s old friend Carlota is experiencing hard times, and gives her daughter to Anita and Carlos to raise. It turns out, of course, that Alicia is actually Carlos’s daughter with Carlota, and Anita, destroyed, leaves her family. There you have it – the first radio-novela and all the themes that will become the telenovela: obstacles to love, love realized, poverty, deceit, illegitimate kid, and love in ruins.

with the success of Bird without a Nest, XEW began broadcasting five radio-novelas a day; enormously popular, they were the mainstay of Mexican broadcasting through the 1950s. Radio-novela casts included major stars from the big screen (the 1950s was the “Golden Age” of Mexican filmmaking). As in the US, they were sponsored by domestic products, mostly soap. The sponsors were particularly happy when a soap opera delivered a moral ending that listeners could apply to their own lives.

From the Radio-Novela to the Telenovela

Radio-novelas continued to be produced up until 1983, even though a more congenial medium – television – had arrived. Television actually started in Mexico on August 19, 1946, a mere 16 years after the country’s first radio broadcast. Not that it was an auspicious start – Guillermo González Camerano, an electrical engineer, broadcast the first television signal from his Mexico City bathroom. Nonetheless, on September 7, an experimental television station had started broadcasting artistic programming and interviews. In 1950, XHTV, Channel 4 in Mexcio City, became the first commercial station in Latin America. As other stations formed, they joined together as Telesistema Mexicano; in 1973, Telesistema joined with Television Independiente de México to create Televisa, which became the world’s largest producer of Spanish-language television content, including, of course telenovelas. (Televisa is now 45% of TelevisaUnivision, the largest U.S. producer of Spanish-language content.)

The very first telenovela was created in Brazil in Portuguese in 1951. Sua vida me pertence (Your Life Belongs to Me) contains the first on-screen kiss seen in Brazil. Relatively simple by current telenovela standards, it offered fifteen episodes, broadcast twice a week, and followed the story of a developing love affair between a young woman and an older man. In 1952, Cuba’s initial offering was Senderos de Amor (Paths of Love), which involved a repressed spinster who was in love, did bad things, and represented the evils of urban life as opposed to the morality of the countryside. The next year, Cuba and Mexico collaborated on Ángeles de la calle (Angels of the Street), in which a kindly grandma helps out street urchins (said urchins apparently were a popular theme at the time).

The Mexican Telanovela Industry

Mexico finally got going on its own when, on June 12, 1958, Telesistema started broadcasting Senda Prohibida (Forbidden Path), sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Mexico. There were no poor-but-innocent heroines in this one – the great Silvia Derbez played Nora, who had been small-town poor and suffered for it, but was now an ambitious secretary who falls for her married boss, and despite his very nice wife and cutie-pie son, suckers him out of big gifts and fancy jewelry, which leads to his financial ruin. The 30-episode telenovela ends with Nora in her wedding dress, crying before a full-length mirror, her plotting unrewarded in the end. Silvia Derbez received hate mail, threats, and people waited outside the studio to curse at her and even attack her for being so evil. (Senda Prohibida was remade [refriteado] in 2023, with an emphasis on Nora’s creating conflict between boss father and now-grown son.)

Televisa went full-on into telenovela production, with 3 more productions in 1958, 8 in 1959, 239 titles in the 1960s, and another 550 through 2019. During and following the 1970s, the melodrama increased, sex (and sometimes nudity) appeared on screen, and crises like murder, incest and drug addiction began to appear. On the other hand, the Cinderella-type stories also appeared with increasing regularity.

One that’s got it all? Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Also Cry) tells the story of Marina, thought to be poor but swindled of her inheritance, who is asked to live with a wealthy family. She falls in love with the spoiled son of the family, and he with her, but he marries someone else; there’s a hit man, a fake pregnancy, a gangster, robberies and murders, a psych ward, real adultery, adultery misunderstood, a lost child, an adopted child – it just goes on and on through 248 episodes, all crammed into the four-plus months between October 16, 1979, and February 29, 1980. There is, of course, a happy ending. Los ricos is considered the first “global telenovela,” dubbed into 25 languages and sent off to Russia, Poland, Greece, Serbia, Japan, as well as English, French, and Portuguese.

Reflecting Culture, Shaping Culture

Recently, the academic community has turned its attention to telenovelas, which had generally been dismissed as “simply another example of the ‘mind-numbing’ mass-media programming” driven by copying American capitalistic and consumerist tendencies. That notion didn’t last too long, and now we have detailed analyses like Mexican Screen Melodrama: Unraveling Mexico’s Sociocultural Expectations and Ambiguities by Sofia Rios Miranda (2020), which looks at social change in Mexico and “Mexico’s ambivalence around socioeconomic background, race and religion, gender and worth, family and duty.”

Telenovelas are used, both indirectly by shaping the way people look at the world, and directly by imparting “public service” messages, as educational tools. A good example of indirect “education” would be how they shape the audience’s ideas about gender (telenovela heroines generally have light complexions, and their dress and makeup reflect upper-middle-class European standards). Health agencies have promoted more direct messages: Encrujiada: Sin salud no hay nada (Crossroads: Without Health, There Is Nothing), a telenovela about Alicia, a psychiatrist who dies of colon cancer. The series, created in 2012 for the Hispanic population in California, emphasizes the importance of early detection of cancer. There have been telenovelas designed to change attitudes toward homophobia, drug addiction, and domestic violence.

Romancing the Narcos

And then there’s the narco-novela. The 1970s were not just the time when telenovelas reached their height, it was when drug cartels became part of the fabric of everyday Mexican life. Popular music, with its narcocorridas (drug ballads), and narco-dramas in film and novels began to show people caught up – willingly or not – in the social and political violence brought by drug production and distribution.

The first narco-novela was a 2006 Colombian production, Sin tetas no hay paraiso (No Boobs, No Paradise). Catalina has a very small bust, which she believes is keeping her from marrying a rich drug lord, so she becomes a call-girl to pay for the breast implants that she sees as her path out of poverty. Needless to say, things do not go well – after participating in all manner of corrupt and murderous narco activities, Catalina arranges her own assassination to escape her misery.

Narco-novelas show drug lords with some admiration, and government and law enforcement as corrupt, inept, and underhanded. Like Sin Tetas, most narco-novelas have made some effort to portray the drug trade in a negative way. That gets a bit lost in the shuffle by the time we get to La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South).

La Reina del Sur and El Chapo

Based on the 2002 Spanish novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, La Reina del Sur is the story of Teresa Mendoza, a Mexican woman who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in southern Spain. Season 1 was produced by Telemundo, NBC Universal’s Spanish-language TV network, with other partners. Seasons 2 and 3 have been made by a Telemundo Global Studios – Netflix partnership. To date, there have been 183 35-minute episodes; there’s no indication there will be a Season 4. Teresa is played by Kate del Castillo, who started out in telenovelas, notably Muchachitas (Young Girls), a 1991 Televisa hit.

Yes, that Kate del Castillo, who arranged an interview for the American actor Sean Penn with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera – El Chapo – the former head of the Sinaloa cartel. In 2012, del Castillo tweeted “Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than I do in the governments that hide truths from me … Mr. Chapo, wouldn’t it be cool if you started trafficking with the good? Let’s traffic with love, you know how.” Two years later, El Chapo’s lawyers contacted del Castillo to explore putting the drug lord’s life up there on the big screen. They gave her a special phone that could text El Chapo.

So … she texts El Chapo to set up a meeting with Penn, El Chapo checks out Penn, and by October 2015, everyone is good to go. Except … the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had already tapped all of El Chapo’s communications, including Castillo’s “special phone,” and the Mexican marines were going to take out El Chapo at the same time as the meeting.

Bad weather stopped the marines, Kate del Castillo thinks Sean Penn took advantage of her, Mexican authorities investigated del Castillo to a fare-thee-well, Sean Penn planned to write an article for Rolling Stone, not make a film about El Chapo, the Mexican government was humiliated when the story came out – sounds like a narco-novela, ¿no?