Much-maligned, the genre of melodrama remains ever popular globally, achieving late in the Twentieth Century a televisual and affective lingua franca of sorts in the form of the Latin American telenovela. Despite culturally specific storylines and conventions (aficionados easily can distinguish between Mexican, Brazilian, and Colombian productions), the telenovela reaches international audiences throughout Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. While some critics rightly point to the popularity of the telenovela to contradict inflated reports of the homogeneity of global media, the opposition homogeneous-heterogeneous also risks appealing to a discourse of diversity that may be too simplistic. In other words, the idea of diversity as a good-in-itself (and the index of a more democratic global media) elides more complex (and inherently transnational) histories of production and reception for the telenovela, especially in regard to the different marginalized identities that form a key congregation amongst its mass audience. The many Mexican adaptations of Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life provide a case in point, demonstrating how the racial melodrama resonates as a popular form throughout the Americas. Hurst's family drama about a tragic mulatto—most (in)famously adapted in 1959 by Douglas Sirk into the classic Hollywood melodrama starring Lana Turner—inspired multiple Mexican adaptations for both cinema and television, most recently a telenovela from 1997. The supposed incongruencies between the racial imaginaries of Latin America and the United States are challenged by the obvious cache of Hurst's and Sirk's texts in Mexico. The hemispheric popularity of the tragic mulatto trope requires race scholars to rethink long-held generalizations about racial formation in the Americas. I wish to explore the capacity of melodrama to open up a space for marginalized identities, and I will examine how the melodramatic mode both consolidates and exacerbates the logics of racial domination.

In Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, Linda Williams persuasively argues the salience of a melodramatic mode particular to the Unites States.[1] Jesús Martín-Barbero, on the other hand, explores the various Latin American registers for melodrama, including Brazilian cordel literature, Mexican corridos, and Colombian vallenatos, but most significantly within the form of the telenovela. His analysis attempts to account for the complex identifications stirred by melodrama:

Melodrama is the reason that the moving force behind the plot is always the ignorance of an identity, be it the child's ignorance of his parent's identity, one sibling of another's, or a mother of her child's. It is present in the struggle against evil spells and outward appearances, against that which hides and disguises, a struggle to be recognized by others. Might this not be the secret connection between melodrama and the cultural history of the Latin American 'sub'-continent?[2]

In other words—if I may borrow a favorite motif from Douglas Sirk, the mirror—melodrama's extravagant imitations (of everything and nothing in particular) hold up a mirror to the supple, contradictory realities of marginalized subjectivities. According to Martín-Barbero, the family relationships privileged in melodrama function as a metaphor for a "primordial sociality": "this sociality lives on culturally, and from its locus, the people, by 'melo-dramatizing' everything, take their own form of revenge on the abstraction imposed by cultural dispossession and the commercialization of life" (277). If, as Martín-Barbero contends, the "thick, censored plot of the tightly woven fabric of family relationships" serves as the metaphor for melodrama's primordiality, I would add that the family drama of the tragic mulatto represents a foundational trope enabling melodrama's integrations of national and hemispheric imaginations.

Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, long out of print and overshadowed by its lavish Hollywood adaptations, was only recently reissued from Duke University Press, with an introduction by Daniel Itzkovitz. In his helpful and comprehensive introduction, Itzkovitz discusses the adaptations of the novel, first by John Stahl (1934) and then by the master of cinematic melodrama, Douglas Sirk (1959). Reviewing the particularities of Sirk's film, including its casting history, Itzkovitz inserts a parenthetical aside in order to identify Susan Kohner as the "Jewish actress" playing the tragic mulatto Sarah Jane.[2] I do not bring this up to fault the author for his omission of Kohner's Mexican heritage (in fact, I am guilty elsewhere of the inverse omission). Instead, I wish to highlight melodrama's ability to mediate a range of identities, especially its capacity for opening a space for marginalized subjectivities to play on a national or even world stage (or screen). The space that Itzkovitz's sentence grammatically models functions as an appositive non-closure, a parenthetical fill-in-the-blank: Jewish, Mexican, mulatto, or even queer. In an interview with Cynthia Fuchs, Susan Kohner's sons, the screenwriting and directorial team of Chris and Paul Weitz, joke that the only people who know their mother's work are "gay men and cinephiles." Chris Weitz quips, "It is the gay litmus test" (20).[4]

The casting of Susan Kohner, the daughter of Mexican actress Lupita Tovar, as Sarah Jane, draws attention also to a remarkable transnational career for the tragic mulatto. The Mexican film Angelitos negros, directed by Joselito Rodriguez and produced in 1948, during the Mexican golden age of cinema, was inspired by Stahl's Imitation of Life. Beginning in the 1920s, Afro Cuban culture became popular in Mexico. According to Robert McKee Irwin, the Afro Cuban is "deployed in Mexican film as a means of reinforcing Mexican national identity as mestizo, i.e. a mix of white and indigenous, by representing Afro Latin American culture as its exotic other."[5] The exoticized Afro Cuban of this period not only reinforces mestizo identity but also whitens that identity by othering blackness. Angelitos negros is set in a Mexican nightclub, but blackness (exotic, sensual, and primitive) is projected onto Cuba.[6] The Cuban actress Rita Montaner plays the role of Mercé, the black nanny, and, as the narrative ultimately reveals, the true mother of the film's blonde protagonist, Ana Luisa de la Fuente. Irwin points out that "appearing in blackface . . . Cuban actress Rita Montaner . . . despite actually being mixed race, the real-life daughter of a mulata needs to mark her difference by cosmetically accentuating her blackness." The ambivalence stirred by racialized desire is palpable. Blackface ironically also functions to whiten Rita Montaner, making miscegenous desire safe, whether that be the miscegenous desire implied in the narrative or the desire for Montaner's body. She is whitened, achieving a kind of provisional, default whiteness, by the film's racial spectacle that requires her blackness to be achieved cosmetically. Similar, but not quite identical, to the complex of disowned desire instanced in the casting of German Mexican Susan Kohner in Sirk's U.S. production of Imitation of Life, Angelitos negros presents Montaner as brown playing black—or perhaps white playing black, or is it black playing blacker? Her symbolic significance for Mexican (as well as pan-Latin American) audiences is complicated by the transnational context.

Mercé's mulatta daughter, Ana Luisa de la Fuenta, is played by the Spanish actress Emilia Guiu, who immigrated to Mexico with her family as a child, fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Joselito Rodriguez remade the film in 1969, and, in homage to Douglas Sirk, cast Juanita Moore (an Academy Award nominee for her portrayal of Annie in Sirk's adaptation) as the black nanny Mercé. In the remarkable hemispheric circulation of black blood as symbolic, Mexico has exchanged Susan Kohner for Juanita Moore, and in both Sirk's and Rodríguez's productions, Moore plays mother to a Mexican—or Mexican American—actress playing black. Martha Rangel, Rodríguez's daughter, portrays the blonde Ana Luisa. Another daughter, Titina Romay, originated the role of Belén, the black "throwback" child, in the 1948 original, and she returns in 1969 as Isabel, a black friend of protagonist Juan Carlos Flores. She reprises the role in a third adaptation of Angelitos Negros (dir. Antulio Jiménez Pons, Mexico, 1970) as a telenovela. Romay appears in blackface in all three productions. Also in blackface, Mexican actress Silvia Derbez resurrects "La Nana Mercé" for the telenovela, and once again a Spanish-born actress (Alicia Rodríguez) stars as Ana Luisa. Apparently inexhaustible, the story is adapted once again in 1997 into a popular Mexican telenovela, El Alma No Tiene Color (dir. Otto Sirgo, Mexico, 1997), distributed across Latin America and the U.S., with legendary Cuban singer Celia Cruz as the black nanny, Macaria, and white Mexican actress Laura Flores as the tragic mulatto figure, Guadalupe Roldan, who, "unable to save herself . . . is branded by the stigma of a secret, a truth that no one should ever hide."[7]

By focusing on a U.S. source—Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life and its Hollywood adaptations—I do not wish to imply a unidirectional, gendered model of global influence, whereby U.S. culture, maintaining an inviolable ontological integrity even amidst transnational models of cultural contact and exchange, imposes its worldview on a passive, feminized Mexico. I want to shift the focus to what Linda Williams terms the mode of melodrama, to think about Imitation (and its repeated imitations) as part of a larger history of popular performance linked to uneven processes of modernization in the Americas. Melodrama then represents not only a dominant national form in the U.S. (as Williams contends) but also a hemispheric—regional, transnational, extranational—mode or symbolic structure that in the excesses and peregrinations of its performances may indeed reinforce nation-state racial formations but also subverts, or at least recodes, those formations. I use "performance" here to identify the particularities of both cultural production and consumption—not only the performances of film and television actors but also those of oppositional spectators. The melodramatic mode both consolidates and exacerbates the logics of racial domination.

The popularity of Angelitos negros suggests that the structure of the race secret holds considerable cachet in Mexico as well as the U.S. This contradicts the common generalizations made about Latin American racial discourse, understood to homogenously privilege class and color over the logic of hypo-descent, perceived as idiosyncratic to the U.S. The plot of Angelitos negros diverges significantly from Imitation of Life, focusing on the trope of the "throwback" child absent from Hurst's novel and both U.S. film adaptations. The recourse to this trope indicates the bearing of hypo-descent in a Mexican racial imaginary. As in the U.S., racial difference is gendered, cast onto the black mother. Mercé is martyred, like Delilah and Annie, but in her case the martyrdom serves also to punish her for the sexual indiscretion that sets the melodrama in motion. Likewise, the tragic figure of the black progeny, light enough to "pass," is gendered female. The prospect of a black man able to pass for white presents too great a threat as a potential contaminant of both the nation and white women (symbolically collapsed). Angelitos negros thus exhibits the ideological contradictions typical of melodrama. Ana Luisa's comeuppance teaches a lesson against racism, confirming the Mexican national character—mobilized around hybridity, after all—as fundamentally antiracist, yet it reinforces the structures of the racial secret, which, consistent with notions of hypo-descent, inevitably betrays the black body. The narrative also invokes the legacy of race shame, an instrument of self-betrayal basic to the operation of the racial secret. Although Mexico, like other Latin American countries, consolidates national identity around the figure of the hybrid body (the mestizo), the anxieties suggested by the ideological contradictions of Angelitos negros indicate that the hybridity celebrated by the nation is more metaphoric than literal. In other words, while agents of nationalist rhetoric might claim hybrid identities, their pronouncements enact ceremonious expressions of national identity that are spared the brush of racialization. Whiteness (akin to purity) remains the privileged category for reputation, even as a symbolic hybridity consolidates the nation. The negotiation of that symbolic, however, creates different stakes for spectators, depending on how their identities align with or disrupt nationalist practices. Tracking the mulatta's hemispheric career introduces singularities that do not entirely cohere with the racial formations of the nation-state.

As a case in point, consider the testimony of an anonymous respondent on Alma Latina, a web site dedicated to fans of the Mexican telenovela:

This movie [Angelitos negros] always makes me cry every time I see it. Well not this one the 1948 one with Pedro Infante. This movie is so sad cause I think of it as if I was Belen and I feel bad because Im the same color as her. Im puerto rican but my mom is a white skined puerto rican and my dad is a black skined puerto rican and I would feel really bad if my own mother rejected me because of the color of my skin (Im trigueñita—right in the middle of black and white skin). This movie is great!!! [sic]

The respondent sets down some of the complicated cross-racializations actualized by the transnational interface of identity discourses. She introduces the category trigueña as distinct from black or mulatto. Within the Spanish Caribbean, categories such as trigueña, morena, and prieta (and in the Dominican Republic, india) can function to identify a phenotypical construct of blackness that simultaneously distances the subject from black group identity. The character of Belén, played by director Joselito Rodriguez's white daughter in blackface, occasions for the subject both an identification with and an alienation from blackness. Because of Puerto Rico's colonial relationship to the U.S., "Puerto Rican" may indicate either national or racial identifications. White and black may function as either ethnic or racial categories. For example, the respondent may be identifying her mother as an ethnically white Puerto Rican and her father as an ethnically black Puerto Rican. She identifies singularities specific to Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American identity formations but also suggests, with the implicit shame indicated by a fraught identification with Belén and the fantasied correspondence of her mother with Ana Luisa, the kind of black trauma also revisited by an African American spectatorship of either Stahl's or Sirk's Imitation of Life.

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.

In part what is remarkable about the form's success is its ability to integrate specifically national contexts in appealing to a growing world market. The specificities of national and pan-regional life are constantly highlighted, flattened, recoded, and recuperated in the telenovela's cycles of production and reception. The celebrity of Angélica María and Andrés García each provides a case in point of transnational hemispheric circuits of media and bodies, both elided and recoded within the primordial mix of the telenovela's competing socialities. María, popularly known as "La Novia de Mexico" (Mexico's sweetheart), is the New Orleans-born daughter of German-American musician Arnold Federic Hartman and Mexican mother Angelíca de Jesús Ortiz Sandoval. María has enjoyed a varied career, starring, since childhood, across mediums and genre, including not only the telenovela but film and musical theater, proving as adept at romantic comedy as she is in melodrama. García, on the other hand, built his celebrity primarily on the strength of his telenovela performances as a macho playboy (an iconography supplemented by his off-screen exploits and history of scandals). However, like María, García is not native to Mexico, moving there as a child. Born in Santo Domingo, his Caribbean origin arguably haunts the evolution of his celebrity in Mexico, imbuing him (despite his Spanish heritage—both parents hail from Spain) with a hypersexuality typically mythologized onto the African body. This sexual mythology has manifested in typecasting as well as his extracurricular notoriety, whether it be gossip about the size of his penis or his role as a spokesperson for "La Bombita," an inflatable prosthetic implant promoted as a solution to impotence. Although publicizing his need for a sexual prosthetic would seem a risky career move, one that might impugn his famed virility, the notoriety that followed from his advertising of the Bombita served instead to fuse his personality and celebrity even further to a mythic penis.

The Africanist presence in Mexican melodrama, however, as made obvious from the various productions of Angelitos negros between 1948-1997, has a longer, often less metaphoric history. Toni Morrison describes the Africanist presence in U.S. American literature and culture: "Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological 'race' ever was."[14] The presence of black characters (whether portrayed by black actors or by white actors in blackface) functions ironically to elide the existence of an Afro Mexican population. The persistent exoticization of the black body within Mexican telenovelas expunges the Afro Mexican body from the nation. In other words, the Africanist presence in a Mexican telenovela like Angelitos negros is embodied by U.S. and Cuban black women (Rita Montaner, Juanita Moore, Celia Cruz) who simultaneously also function to metaphorically represent (and diminish) the threat of Mexico's internal racial heterogeneity, whether that be its minority Afro Mexican presence or even the mestizaje celebrated in nation-founding narratives.

National orders of racial and gender subordination are reinforced, challenged and recoded in the circulation of the telenovela hemisphircally and globally. As the poignant entry from the website Alma Latina attests, the telenovela stirs complex, even contradictory, identifications that may confound accepted theories of racial formation in the Americas. The anonymous response also reminds us that it is important for studies of melodrama to recall the popular roots of the genre (or mode) not only in Hollywood but throughout the American hemisphere, including its roots in folk traditions such as the corrido and the vallenato. Her struggle speaks to what Martín-Barbero suggests as "the secret connection between melodrama and the cultural history of the Latin American 'sub'-continent," what ultimately for both Martín-Barbero and the anonymous respondent amounts to a struggle for recognition.

Endnotes

1. See Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. [Return to text]

2. Jesús Martín-Barbero (trans. Marina Elias), "Memory and form in the Latin American soap opera," in To be Continued...: Soap Operas Around the World, Robert C. Allen, ed. New York: Routledge, 1995: 276-284, 276-277. [Return to text]

3. See Daniel Itzkovitz's introduction in Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, xxxvi. [Return to text]

4. Cynthia Fuchs, "Interview with Chris and Paul Weitz, director of The Cat's Meow," in PopMatters. Not coincidentally, I think, Itzkovitz is also the editor—with Ann Pellegrini and Daniel Boyarin—of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

5. Robert McKee Irwin, "Memín Pinguín, Rumba, and Racism: Afro-Mexicans in Classic Comics and Film," in Hemispheric American Studies, Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 249-265, 249-250. [Return to text]

6. This is in keeping with a tradition of representations of popular Cuban music and dance in golden age Mexican cinema, much of it co-produced between Mexico and Cuba. [Return to text]

7. "El Alma No Tiene Color," Alma Latina: The Biggest Mexican Telenovelas Database. [Return to text]

8. For an excellent review of the cultural significance of La Malinche, see Norma Alarcón, "Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism," Cultural Critique 13 (Fall 1989): 57-87. [Return to text]

9. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove Press, 1961, 76-77. [Return to text]

10. Paz, for example, writes: "It is true that she gave herself voluntarily to the conquistador, but he forgot her as soon as her usefulness was over." (86) [Return to text]

11. Ana M. López, "Our welcomed guests: Telenovelas in Latin America," in To Be Continued ... Soap Operas Around the World, Allen, ed., 256-275. [Return to text]

12. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, "Introduction: Essays Beyond the Nation," in Hemispheric American Studies. Levander and Levine, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008: 9. [Return to text]

13. Daniel Mato, "The Transnationalization of the Telenovela Industry, Territorial Reference, and the Production of Markets and Representations of Transnational Identities," in Television & New Media 6 (2005): 425. [Return to text]

14. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992: 63. [Return to text]