Hiram Perez,
"Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere's Racial Melodramas"
(page 3 of 4)
The projection of racial difference onto the maternal body,
consistent throughout the various Mexican and U.S. adaptations of
Imitation of Life, directs us toward both singularities and
coherences in the hemispheric trope of the tragic mulatto. Angelitos
negros locates the threat of racial corruption on the female body,
cohering with the prevailing U.S. representations of the tragic mulatto
(and her imagined heritage). Mexico suggests a different mise-en-scène
for the tragic mulatto, one contextualized by the nationalist rhetoric
of mestizaje traceable to the nation-founding mythology of the union
between La Malinche and Hernando Cortes. Malintzin Tenepal, or La
Malinche, is commemorated in the rhetoric of Mexican nationalism as the
indigenous mistress of Cortes; both translator and traitor, she acquires
various poetic sobriquets, most infamously "La Chingada" ("the
fucked one").[8]
A mythical mother of the Mexican nation, the violation
of her body symbolizes a violation of the national body. Malinche's name
becomes synonymous with sexual violence. The verb "chingar,"
according to Octavio Paz, "denotes violence, an emergence from oneself
to penetrate another by force. It also means to injure, to lacerate, to
violate—bodies, souls, objects—and to destroy."[9]
Malinche's union with
Cortes, officially remembered as consensual,[10]
actually results after she is presented, at the age of 14, to the explorer as a gift from a
group of Mayan merchants. Malintzin was sold to those merchants by her
mother, Cimatl, in order to secure for her son from a second marriage
the inheritance left to Malintzin by her dead father, Cimatl's first
husband. The fiction of consent, suggested by the narrative of betrayal
attached to Malintzin, obscures a history of conquest as well as gender
subordination and exploitation. The name "Malinchista" designates
a traitor. Malintzin's "liaison" with Cortes constitutes the original
act of treason by which all other betrayal will be measured. Malintzin,
as the mythical mother, generates a bastard race, a nation of
chingados. The theme of bastardy, a defining quality of the
tragic mulatto trope, then resonates with a nation-founding mythology.
More significantly for a queer spectatorship, the identification of
the Mexican (male) as chingado, or the fucked one, collapses
passive homosexuality with miscegenation. Mexican nationalism inscribes
a complex of negation and desire rooted etiologically in a concurrence
of homosexuality and miscegenation. The invert and the hybrid turn out
to be the kissing cousins of a hemispheric family tree.
Although a work like Angelitos negros clearly takes
inspiration from Hollywood, Martín-Barbero carefully traces the
origins of the telenovela to multiple Latin American sources, including
newspaper serials, lectors reading to workers in Cuban tobacco factories
and prisons, and the comic performances of the Argentinian
criollo circus. The significance of these sources for the
telenovela, for Martín-Barbero, lies in their "open structure"—in
other words, their openness to the influence of audience responses. All
of these foundations contribute to the radio serials that are the
telenovela's most immediate predecessor, with Hollywood providing a
clear cinematic model. Hence, the telenovela's global circulation echoes
the international history of its development.
According to Ana López, the earliest scholarship on telenovelas
posited a passive underclass audience, intellectually and morally
anesthetized by mass-media productions serving the interests of U.S.
hegemony and global capitalism.[11]
Later studies in the 1980s reversed
this trend in too simplistic a manner, using the export of telenovelas
as evidence of the rise of Latin American nations, and the region,
against the media and economic imperialism of the North. Subsequent
interventions in media and television studies have complicated the
paradigms of media imperialism, in particular by introducing more
nuanced approaches to the study of spectatorship. Among these scholars,
the telenovela does not represent a monolithic practice of cultural
influence (imperial or postcolonial) but rather a complex site of
mediations, between production and reception (Martín-Barbero) and
"among the national, the pan-national, and the melodramatic" (257). The
telenovela not only responds to but participates in the production of
multiple and shifting imagined communities, including not only those of
the particular nation-state where it may originate (i.e. Mexico, Brazil,
Venezuela, Colombia) but also pan-Latin American, borderland, and
diasporic formations. In the context of a Latina/o market, López
understands the telenovela as "making 'nation' where there is no
coincidence between nation and state" (266). López elaborates: "It is
not simply that there is now a telenovela subgenre that addresses a
multinational audience, but that the telenovela genre itself (especially
in Mexico and in the U.S.) is undergoing a transformation where the
national is melodramatically articulated in relationship to other,
differently constituted, imagined communities of viewers."
Media scholarship on the telenovela, such as that by Jesús
Martín-Barbera and Ana López, has anticipated and modeled the
emergent field of Hemispheric American Studies. In an introduction to an
eponymous collection of work in the field, Caroline Levander and Robert
Levine describe Hemispheric American Studies as "a heuristic rather than
a content- or theory-driven method" that "seeks to excavate the complex
cultural history of texts, discourses, and bodies in motion and at rest
across the ever-shifting and multilayered geopolitical and cultural
fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere."[12]
As a heuristic, Hemispheric American Studies then seeks to "adopt new
perspectives that allow us to view the nation beyond the terms of its
own exceptionalist self-imaginings" (7). Texts such as the various
productions of Angelitos negros provide ideal opportunities to
demonstrate the "hemispheric dimensions of . . . racialized national
origins" not as static artifacts but in practice and in flux.
Daniel Mato points out that telenovelas "are consumed at an
increasingly planetary level."[13]
It is the telenovela, in fact, and
not Hollywood, that introduced me to the structures (and ideological
contradictions) of melodrama and the pleasures of queer spectatorship.
My earliest crush (at the age of 4) was on soap opera hunk Andrés
García, who starred opposite Mexican pop icon Angélica
María in the telenovela Ana del Aire (dir. Dimitri Sarras,
Mexico, 1974), which I watched with my parents on channel 23 in Miami.
The force of my desire for Andrés García, playing the
dreamy pilot Jorge, was matched only by the tenaciousness of my
identification with Angélica María, playing the lead role
of plucky "air hostess" Ana. Although sensually I remember these desires
as relatively amorphous (albeit delicious), they are significant for how
they set in motion a cross-wired inter-American racialization. While
audience identification with the fair-skinned Angélica
María situates whiteness as a transnational Latin American (or
Latina/o or Hispanic) identity, it obviously also forecloses that
identity and reinforces a racist hierarchy. Also at an interface, my
desire for Andrés García recruits the racialized and
eroticized image of the swarthy Latin lover. The bodies of María,
García, and my own, as spectator, are all inscribed within and
dislocated from nationally specific identity narratives that no longer
just compete but now also overlap and inflect one another, rendered
appositional by the grammar of melodrama. Mato points to the telenovela
in order to complicate assumptions about the homogenizing force of
globalization. He notes the production of transnational identities
consolidated by the telenovela's representations but emphasizes their
heterogeneity, their formulation of "uneven and sometimes conflicting
representations of 'Hispanic,' 'Latin,' and 'Latin American'
transnational identities" (433). In addition to this nuanced reading,
however, it is also important to trace how the telenovela's racial
representations deterritorialize whiteness and deploy it with
homogenizing force. A European standard of beauty predominates in the
casting of telenovelas, especially in regard to the female protagonists.
The negro and indio are caricatured or marginalized, the
chino is invisible. The tension between homogenizing and
heterogeneous forces in fact underlies the global circulation of the
telenovela.
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