Telenovelas are seen as a genre – a soap-opera style of television with wild theatrics, colorful sets, and a romance-oriented storyline. However, telenovelas are much more inclusive and can be considered a format, rather than a genre, due to the fact that there have been telenovelas that have been mysteries, horror shows, and action-oriented, rather than the traditionally recognized “romance”. A question that I will attempt to answer in this essay is: why did telenovelas become so popular in Mexico when they emerged in the late 1950s? My argument is that it was because of social pulls, with Telesistema-Televisa, through collaboration with the Mexican government and the United States media empire, that caused this success due to a need of maintaining order in a post-World War I socio-political climate.
Although they attempted to appear to not be in collaboration, the Mexican government was working closely with Telesistema-Televisa. The Mexican government itself allowed the formation of Telesistema-Televisa, and allowed for it to have a monopoly over television networks. Having only one television network to control was easier than having multiple outlets, so it was in the government’s interest to have a system that was made up of one entity and that would not appear to be connected to it. “The PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) needed to communicate its ideological agenda to the mass of people, and Telesistema-Televisa needed more audiences to ensure the highest possible profit through economies of scale” (Lopez 76). According to an article printed on October 4, 1975 from the New York Times, Emilio Azcarraga, the president and owner of Telesistema-Televisa, said, “’My boss […] is the President of the Republic. Mexico isn’t re...
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...repreneurs accessed to the Spanish-language television. Therefore, it is clear to see that the U.S. collaborated with Mexico in order to create stations that would appeal to Mexican-Americans, particularly in the southwest region, such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
An example of this collaboration is the telenovela Senda prohibida. Senda prohibida was the first telenovela, released in 1958, and it was first introduced to Mexico as something that was of resemblance of a pre-packaged product (citation). Presented as “Your Colgate Telenovela,” Senda prohibida was a creation of Colgate-Palmolive, who was heavily involved in the production of radio and television for many years, expanding from the United States into Mexico. Jesús Gómez Obregón, the head producer of Colgate and of Senda prohibida, contracted Fernanda Villeli to write the show (Paxman 7).
This essay will discuss how national attitudes towards the working-class and the impoverished are represented in American Television. The purpose of this paper is to comprehend that television shows are not solely designed to entertain consumers but also contain a hidden agenda whose task is to protect certain ideological perspectives and therefore constant framing strategies take place. The paper will commence the analysis by discussing how males and females are represented in the television show Friday Night Lights, secondly it will look at the
Television has always been an industry whose profit has always been gained through ads. But in chapter 2 of Jason Mittell’s book, Television and American Culture, Mittell argues that the rise of the profit-driven advertising television model can be traced back through American television history, and that the rise of the profit-driven advertising model of television actually helped to mold American culture both from a historical standpoint and from a social standpoint.
Alfredo Corchado — is the author of the book named " Midnight in Mexico:A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness”. We are, probably, all interested in finding out the facts, news, and gossips about Mexico. This country was always associated with something mysterious. For me personally, the title of the book seemed to be very gripping, I was interested in revealing the secrets of life in Mexico, thus I decided to read this book. I was really curious, what can Alfredo Corchado tell me about the life in this country, the country, where the constant massacre is the picture, people used to see. In his book, the author tells the reader about the real situations, which took place in Mexico, reveals the secrets of the people’s lives and tells the story from the “inside”. He describes the way he lives his life, and does his work. The " Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness” is a memoir. Author tries to transform his own experience into the story line. Corchado shows the reader the darkest episodes of Mexican society, while relying on his own experience.
Nevertheless, the movie undoubtedly mirrors many of the current socio-political time in which the film was made. The title itself refers to a famous quotation from the Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, who once referred to Mexico's ruling party, the PRI, as a "camouflaged dictatorship," thereby making it "the perfect dictatorship." In this way, the movie is directly acknowledging its relevance to modern Mexico and its politics and is clearly very self-aware. The plot itself was based on the real life perceived Televisa controversy during the 2012 Mexican presidential election, in which Mexican citizens believe that the media was unfairly showing a preference for the PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. While it could be argued that the movie takes this idea of favoring one candidate over another to extreme lengths (although perhaps it isn’t showing anything unduly unrealistic – there’s no real way to know) and hyperbolizes the effect of the media in Mexican politics, there is clearly a strong element of truth and reality there. The movie would not have had nearly the same effect if it was not at least somewhat grounded in reality. And I think that, while the media does not have absolute and final control over politics, they do to a very large and important extent and this extends far beyond the movie alone, especially in today’s age of fake
In his essay "Selena’s Good Buy: Texas Mexicans, History, and Selena Meet Transnational Capitalism,” Coronado (2001) argues that Selena embodies displaced desires that need to be situated in their historical content. By looking at how Texans and marketers reacted to Selena’s death, Coronado was able to show us how Selena’s death can be looked at form a psychoanalytic lens. The working class’ obsession with Selena can be seen as a fetish of sorts. A fetish is caused by trauma and can be applied socially to a irritable social construct. In other words, Selena could be a social fetish; the Latinx working class abruptly lost someone who was representing them in mainstream media, leading to the trauma. In this theory, Selena is no longer seen as a person who contributed hugely to the rise of colored people in mainstream media, but as
Oles, James, and Karen Cordero. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Print.
Mexican American struggles in the United States date back to the Spanish discovery of the New World in 1492. For over five hundred years, Mexicans have endured social injustices and inequalities at the hands of their superiors. The mistreatment of the native people of this land is constantly overlooked for "…the main goals shaping Spanish colonial policy were to maintain and expand political control and to convert Indians to Christianity." (Vargas p.30) With this mindset, the basic nature of relations between the dominant Anglos and the inferior Mexicans was that of suppression, rejection, ignorance and separation as opposed to establishment of ideals that would foster cultural relations and produce the true definition of a "melting pot" society.
Valle’s most significant contribution to the Spanish theatre is his invention of the literary style of esperpento, which is best represented in one of his most famous plays, Luces de Bohemia. Valle created esperpento with the aim of representing the harsh realities of Spanish twentieth century society through the concave lens of grotesque deformation, so that he could present the lives of the Spaniards in the light of mockery and absurdity. During his writing of Luces de Bohemia, the Spanish society has been brought to a halt, along with the lack of political progress and social improvement, therefore this concerning political situation has influenced and steered Valle towards his literary evolution, the exaggerated grotesque, which he though was the only suitable way to represent the shocking reality and problems of Spain. In this way, he could alarm the people to terminate their complacent acceptance of this reality and he could also produce a distancing effect which renders the reader immune to the play’s purpose, thus making the artistic experience more tolerable. His experience in the killing fields was what made him t...
Nonetheless, she is mostly remembered for her marriage to Diego Rivera, her accident, consequently her pain, and her bisexuality. Anyhow her work is much more than that: it has been forgotten her political role within Mexican post-revolution, and it is this side of her work that I want to analyse.
The Mexican Revolution looked like changed scenes in agrarian social requests encountering disruptive modernization. All had acknowledged considerable theories of remote capital and got subject to world cash related markets. The world dealing with a record crisis of 1907-1908 then achieved wretchedness and engaged defiance. An alternate constitution of 1917 ensured territory change, confinement of remote proprietorship, masters' rights, control of the piece of the gathering, and informational change.
Middle-class protest against the long-standing dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Established a radical system in which elections were controlled while a handful of dominant families and their clients monopolized financial and political power in the provinces.1
Mexican American history began in the16th century under Spanish colonialism. The Spanish had a goal of conquest and colonization. Evidently, that goal was successfully accomplished because when the Spanish first arrived in 1492 Mexico’s population was fourteen million, but by the end of the 16th century it had drastically declined to one million. Numbers decreased because of the cruel treatment, forced labor, and disease brought by the Spanish. The Spanish eventually controlled most of the territory in the Southwest and over three hundred towns had been established for the purpose of control and conversion. The Spanish imposed conditions on the natives of Mexico that would belittle them. They aimed to convert them in order to make them re...
Martinez, Ibsen. "Chaos, Chavismo and Telenovelas." The New York Times. The New York Times, 8 Apr. 2014. Web. 26 May 2014. .
...ave satirized the Boom, defining it as the most exclusive club that the cultural history of Latin America has known." ) Clearly, modern Latin American writers live in the shadow of these men and their prodigious work. However Latin Americans may feel about the Boom and the legacy which it left, there can be no doubt that it also paved the way for Latin American writers in many ways by making them visible to the rest of the world.
“A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory” argues that the application of film and literary genre theory do not fully translate when analyzing television, because of “the specific industry and audience practices unique to television, or for the mixture of fictional and nonfictional programming that constitutes the lineup on nearly every TV channel. 2” The goal of media genre studies, Mittell asserts, is to understand how media is arranged within the contexts of production and reception, and how media work to create our vision of the world.