Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere’s Racial Melodramas

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”). ¹ 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.” ² Malinche’s union with Cortes, officially remembered as consensual, ³ 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. ⁴ 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.” ⁵ 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.” ⁶ 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.

1. 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.[↑]
2. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove Press, 1961, 76-77.[↑]
3. 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) [↑]
4. Ana M. López, “Our welcomed guests: Telenovelas in Latin America,” in To Be Continued … Soap Operas Around the World, Allen, ed., 256-275.[↑]
5. 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.[↑]
6. 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.[↑]