w w w . m e d i a c i o n e s .

n e t

Memory and Form in the Latin

American Soap Opera

Jesús Martín-Barbero

Translated by Marina Elias

(In: R.C. Allen, To be Continued: Soap Operas

Around the Wold, Routledge, London, 1995)

« (…) the public's complicity with the genre is in part due

to the soap opera's permeability to the transformations of
modern life. Of course, the modernization of customs is
disguised by perennial values and strait-jacketed by
multiple rituals. Changes make their appearance
sheltered ideologically by their links to the myth of
progress and development. However, what is important is
that a certain kind of soap opera has made room for
itself: a soap opera in which social hierarchies lose their
rigidity and in which the social fabric of loyalties and
submissions is more complex. The distances between the
poor and the rich, men and women, adults and young
people are both exposed and turned topsy-turvy by the
introduction of mediations and movements which show
the other side of the tangled web of humiliations and
revenges. Even in the "lowest" social sectors, the struggle
for survival is shown to be also a struggle to be someone,
for neither dignity nor opportunism, are found on only one
side. »
 2

Both in and outside of Latin America, the soap opera has

met with enormous success among television viewers. It is a
genre which has catalyzed the development of the Latin
American television industry, and, at the same time "cross-
bred" new audiovisual technologies with the narrative ana-
chronisms that form an integral part of the cultural life of
the peoples of that continent.

The soap opera is first of all an industrial event. One exam-

ple is Roque Santeiro, a soap opera whose production mobi-
lized 800 people. Its script occupied two playwrights, a
scriptwriter, and a researcher, and an average 10 hours of
editing work and was required per 50-minute episode (Mar-
quez de Melo 1989). TV-Globo, the Brazilian network
which produced it, has set up the "Casa de Creación Janette
Clair," which is at once a dramaturgical laboratory, a center
for audience research, and a training school for script- writ-
ers. With a total production of 100 episodes and an average
of 300 minutes of fiction per week – the equivalent of more
than two full-length feature films – the total cost of a soap
opera is between US$1-1.5 million. This places the ap-
proximate cost per episode at US$10,000-15,000. In 1985,
TV-Globo invested US$500 million, made a profit of a-
round US$120 million, and exported soap operas to 130
countries. That same year, Mexico's Televisa made a profit
of around US$150 million.

However, industrial development, the pillar of the business,

cannot alone account for the soap opera's drawing power.

Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera

 3

In order to better understand this phenomenon, it is neces-

sary to locate the soap opera within the field of transfor-
mations which make it possible for the urban masses to
appropriate modernity without abandoning their oral cul-
ture. The soap opera thus proves to be the expression of a
"secondary orality" (W. Ong) in which the long length of
primitive stories is blended with the fragmentation of im-
ages propounded by film, advertising, and television. The
connection of the soap opera to oral culture allows it to
"exploit" the universe of legends, scary stories, and tales of
mystery, which have traveled from the countryside to the
cities (cities which have become ruralized at the same time
as these nations have become urbanized) in the form of
Brazilian cordel literature, Mexican corridos, or Colombian
vallenatos.1

[276]

Within these genres, melodrama is at work. 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 dis-
guises, 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? Could this
not be the reason that among all popular genres, no other –
neither adventure stories nor even comedies – has been able
1
These are forms of folk-song which recount a story and previ-
ously served the function of communicating information ahout
events. In addition to being sung or recited, the cordel literature
and the corrido were also sold in public places in pamphlet form
(thus, the name of the Brazilian form, for the pamphlets were
strung from a cordel, or cord). The vallenato, in addition to heing a
recital of events, is dance music (Trans. N.).
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 4

to attain a development comparable in reach and intensity

to that of the melodrama? In Latin America, whether it be
the form of tango or bolero2. Mexican cinema, or soap opera,
the melodrama speaks of a primordial sociality, whose meta-
phor continues to be the thick, censored plot of the tightly
woven fabric of family relationships. In spite of its devalua-
tion by the economy and politics, this sociality lives on
culturally, and from its locus, the people, by "melodramatiz-
ing" everything, take their own form of revenge on the
abstraction imposed by cultural dispossession and the
commercialization of life.

Melodrama and newspaper serials in the radio and

cinema

Originating in the middle of the nineteenth century, the

newspaper serial brought the melodrama from the theater to
the press. Thus, it expanded the reading public and inaugu-
rated a new relationship between popular readers and wri-
ting: that established by a story written in episodes and
series. The "open structure" of a tale written day-by-day,
carried out according to a plan, but open to the influence of
its readers' reactions, propitiated the (con)fusion of fiction
and life. It endowed the newspaper serial with a permeabil-
ity to contemporary life that continues to constitute one of
the key elements in today's soap opera, both in its configu-
ration as a genre and in its widespread success.

In Latin America, the newspaper serial was the place where

the osmosis between urban writing and oral stories took
place. Beginning in 1870, Eduardo Gutiérrez published
Juan Moreira and Hormiga negra (Black Ant) in instalments in
the newspaper La patria argentina. These serialized gaucho-

2
A bolero is a slow, romantic ballad (Trans. N.).
Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera
 5

novels, which fused the rural and the urban, constituted

keys to the national imaginary. Their characters were taken
not only from the verses of the payadores (traveling min-
strels), which circulated in loose-leaf pamphlets and gazettes
but also from judicial archives. The result was the configu-
ration of a new dramatic universe, of a "frontier world" in
which the changes introduced by modernization in turn of
the century Latin America were expressed (Rivera 1982: 9).
But even more than in the press, the real development of the
serial in Latin America took place in radio. Regarded al-
most with disdain by leading figures [277] of literate culture,
from its beginnings radio incorporated the oral world of
songs and legends.

Melodrama came to the radio through two intermediaries:

the circus in Argentina and reading aloud to groups in to-
bacco factories in Cuba. The criollo circus was the result of
bringing together circus ring and theatrical stage, acrobatics
and dramatic representation under the same tent. It was
here that the tradition of the newspaper serials based on
gaucho myths and the comic stage of traveling comedians
merged. This comic stage is where the origin of the radio
soap is to be found. In Argentina, companies of radio actors
toured the provinces presenting the same dramas they had
performed on the radio so that people could "see what they
listened to!" It was for precisely this reason that radio soaps
were called "radio theater" in that country. From the end of
the nineteenth century on, tobacco factories in Cuba pro-
vided the setting for the reading out loud of books on
politics and of serialized stories, genres which contributed
themes and forms to the serialized radio play.

Fernando Ortiz (l973) has outlined key features of this prac-

tice which, originating in convents and European prisons,
was introduced in the work- shops of El Arsenal in Havana
where the prisoners worked rolling cigars and cigarettes.

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From the jails, it spread to the tobacco factories of Azcárate

and Partagas. Beginning in 1936, the reader and the radio
existed side by side in the tobacco factories until the radio
finally took the place of readings. This radio incorporated
popular forms of listening into sound expressivity and
added a corporal dimension to the narration of the radio
soaps. In addition, it introduced the exploration of the sto-
ries' sensory effects – tones and rhythms – which incorpora-
ted popular ways of listening to stories into the language of
the radio. The genre of the radio soap opera inaugurated by
El derecho de nacer (The Right to be Born) would be the great
intermediary step between the substratum of the European
serialized novel and the soap opera. This latter genre incor-
porates, in addition, the Latin American tradition of scary
stories and songs with the world of the advice column.

The cinema also inherited the melodrama which, in its

Hollywood version, worked out the visual grammar the
television soap opera was to draw on. Whether it was in
order to adopt it or to combat it – from Griffith to King
Vidor, Douglas Sirk, or Elia Kazan – the cinema reinvented
the melodrama, once again transforming it into a popular
show which mobilized the great masses.

When the spectator cheered or booed, it was not to express

his judgment of the quality of the performance, but rather
to demonstrate his identification with the fate of the heroes
he saw on the screen. Without judging them, he made his
own the adventures of characters endowed with a kind of
reality which transcended the idea of performance.
(García Riera 1974: 16)

This is the same kind of identification which now underlies

the passion inspired by the soap opera. [278]

For the Latin American public did not perceive the cinema
as a specifically artistic or cultural phenomenon. The real

Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera

 7

reason for its success was its relation to life. This public saw
the cinema as an opportunity to experiment: to adopt new
habits and to see cultural codes – iterated (and dramatized
with the voices that they would have liked) have and to
hear –. They did not go to the movies to dream; they went)
learn.
(Monsiváis 1980: 16)

Cinema which was largely melodramatic, like that of Mex-

ico, played a ritual role in the formation of popular urban
experience and culture. According o Carlos Monsiváis, this
took place through three devices which shape the structure
of the television melodrama. One is theatricalization, that is,
the staging and legitimization of gestures, peculiarities of
speech, and sentimental paradigms. Another is degradation,
which identifies the popular as "lower class," characterizing
it as "filial love, laziness, sentimentality, the programmed
humiliation of women, religious fanaticism and a fetishist
aspect for private property" (Monsiváis 1976: 86). The last is
modernization: myths are brought up to date, and access is
given to new ways of speaking. The soap opera learned
from the movies to use the melodrama to articulate any
subject, no matter what it was: the connection of the na-
tional spic with private dramas, the displaying of eroticism
under the pretext of condemning incest, the tearful dilution
of tragic impulses, and the depoliticization of the contradic-
tions of daily life.

The genre and its forms in television

The site of osmosis between memory and form, the soap

opera bears witness to the long experience of the market in
converting the business of culture into a negotiation be-
tween the logic of the system of production – standardiza-
tion and profitability – and the dynamics of cultural hetero-
geneity. To understand the soap opera, it is necessary to

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 8

take its plural identity into account. This plurality must be

understood not only in terms of the difference introduced by
the diversity of the conditions of production in different
countries,3 but also in terms of the variations of the genre
itself. There are two extremely different and widely recog-
nized "variations" as well as different versions of these two
"models."

The first model, based on the Cuban radio soap (Bermúdez

1979), has given form to a serious genre, in which heart-
rending, tragic suffering predominates. This format depicts
exclusively primordial feelings and passions, excluding all
ambiguity or complexity from the dramatic space. That is to
say, references to places and times are blurred or neutral-
ized. In 1968, the Brazilian soap opera Beto Rockefeller
initiated the construction of another model. This model,
without completely breaking with the melodramatic one,
incorporates a realism which permits the "situating of the
narrative in [279] everyday life" (Pignatari 1984: 60), as well
as within a specifically national reality. The first model
constitutes the secret of the success of the Mexican soap
opera from Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Aiso Weep) to
Cuna de lobos (Cradle of Wolves) as well as of the Venezuelan
soap opera from Lucecita to Cristal. The second model has
earned recognition for the Brazilian soap opera, from La
Esclava Isaura (Isaura, the Slave) to Roque Santeiro, and for the
Colombian, from Pero sigo siendo el Rey (But I am Still King)
to Caballo Viejo (Old Horse).

3
Concerning this point see the following: R. Ortiz, S. H. Borelli,
and I. Ortiz Ramos, Telenovela: história e produção (Sao Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1989); M. Coccato, "Apuntes para una historia de la
telenovela venezolana," Videoforum (1-3) (Caracas, 1979); I. Gon-
zález, Las vetas del encanto: por los veneros de la producción mexicana
de telenovelas, mimeograph (Colima, Mexico, 1990).
Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera
 9

In the first model, the central conflicts have to do with kin-

ship. The structure of social roles is crudely Manichean and
the characters are purely signs. But in the Mexican soap
opera, this simplicity of characterization is adorned with a
baroque density of mise-en-scene, and a sophistication of
wardrobe and make-up. In recent years, the modernization
of the staging and the quickening of the visual rhythm have
been added to the above elements. The Venezuelan soap
opera, on the other hand, translates its schematicism into
scenographic and visual austerity, carrying primary orality
to an extreme. We find out what is happening in the story
not because of what the characters do, but rather because of
what they say and tell each other. This dramatic elemental-
ity and narrative austerity, expertly wielded, have met with
enormous success and commanded great loyalty from view-
ers.

In the second model, the rigidity of models and ritualiza-

tions is perforated by imaginaries of class and territory, of
sex and age. At the same time, the expressive possibilities
opened up by film, advertising, and videos are explored.
The characters are liberated from the weight of destiny. No
longer solely great symbols, they come closer to the routines
of everyday life and the ambiguities of history, to the speech
patterns and customs of different regions. In the Brazilian
soap opera, the reference to different areas of the country, to
moments in its history and industrial transformation is
depicted through a story which utilizes two different con-
cepts of time. The sweeping time frame of the newspaper
serial – in which the history of various generations unfolds –
is connected with the fragmented visual discourse of adver-
tising (Mattelart and Mattelart 1987). In the Colombian
soap opera, the references to the nation are shot through
with an ironic vein which incorporates a national tradition
of the satiric literature of manners. In this way, it becomes
possible to make fun of melodrama and to revisit the re-

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 10

gions of the country as a recognizable and shared dimen-

sion of national plurality.

The Latin American soap opera is varied in its narrative

methods, dramatic material, and visual scripts. Neverthe-
less, it owes a great part of its success – at least in terms of
the Latin American public – to its capacity to make an ar-
chaic narrative the repository for propositions to modernize
some dimensions of life. The evolution and diversification
of the genre has gradually introduced new themes and per-
spectives. It is true that the limits of the universe represented
in the soap opera are strongly defined by the absence of
social conflicts whose appearance would threaten the dra-
matic schema. Still, [280] despite this, the public's compli-
city with the genre is in part due to the soap opera's perme-
ability to the transformations of modern life. Of course, the
modernization of customs is disguised by perennial values
and strait-jacketed by multiple rituals. Changes make their
appearance sheltered ideologically by their links to the myth
of progress and development. However, what is important
is that a certain kind of soap opera has made room for itself:
a soap opera in which social hierarchies lose their rigidity
and in which the social fabric of loyalties and submissions is
more complex. The distances between the poor and the
rich, men and women, adults and young people are both
exposed and turned topsy-turvy by the introduction of me-
diations and movements which show the other side of the
tangled web of humiliations and revenges. Even in the
"lowest" social sectors, the struggle for survival is shown to
be also a struggle to be someone, for neither dignity nor
opportunism, are found on only one side.

New social actors and professions have been appearing,

widening the horizons of the "soap operaizable." They are
new in so far as they are seen as life-worlds that are present
in the story not to serve a function in the inevitable unfold-

Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera

 11

ing of the plot, but as figures which unveil new forms of

social relations, of cultural breaches, and moral conflicts.
Finally, these indicators of modernity, which in many cases
form part of the mechanisms of construction of the credibil-
ity of a story – and of the renovation required by the busi-
ness – tell us something else. They indicate how it is that the
identities present in the soap opera are not purely a decep-
tive nostalgia but rather a dimension of living and dreaming
with which Latin Americans construct their present.

Laden with heavy narrative schemas and complicitous,

deceptive ideological inertia, soap operas form part of the
recreational devices of the Latin American imaginary. The
formation of this imaginary points to the strategic place the
image-producing industries occupy today in the construc-
tion of identity. It indicates as well the marketplace's long
experience in condensing knowledge that both shapes hu-
man aspirations and social demands and makes them
motives of profit. This experience permits the cultural in-
dustry to use the repetitive structure of the serial to capture
the ritualized dimensions of everyday life.

The soap opera in the national and transnational

audiovisual space

What has made soap operas into a strategic enclave for the
Latin American audiovisual production is their weight in
the television market as well as the role that they play in the
production and reproduction of the images Latin American
peoples make of themselves, and by which others recognize
them. This fact makes it indispensable to analyze the differ-
ent meanings of the soap opera on the national, regional,
and transnational plane, as well as its importance within
these planes.

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 12

[281]

Not only in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela – the principal

exporting countries – but also in Argentina, Colombia,
Chile, and Peru, the soap opera is a determining factor in
the "national capacity for television" (Portales 1987: 8). It
influences the extension and consolidation of television
production, the industrialization of its processes, the mod-
ernization of its infrastructure – technical and financial –
and the specialization of its resources: scriptwriters, direc-
tors, cameramen, sound engineers, lighting technicians,
designers, and editors. Soap opera production has meant, in
turn, a certain appropriation of the genre by each country,
that is, its nationalization. On the one hand, it is true that the
soap opera implies rigid stereotypes in its dramatic outline
and strong conditioning elements in its visual grammar, as
required and reinforced by the logic of a market with in-
creasingly transnational tendencies. It is also true, however,
that each individual country has made the soap opera into a
special place for the cross-breeding between television and
other cultural fields: theater, cinema, and literature. In
many countries, production began by importing scripts, in
the same way that scripts for radio soaps used to be im-
ported from Cuba or Argentina. In the beginning, the
dependence on the radio format was strong, especially be-
cause of the transfer of radio script-writers to television and
because of the conception of the image as the mere illustra-
tion of a "spoken drama." However, this dependence was
gradually broken in the process of the industrialization of
television and of the production teams' "conquest" of the
medium, that is, their appropriation of its expressive quali-
ties. It was then that the soap opera became a conflictive
terrain of cultural redefinition. In countries like Brazil,
highly esteemed theatrical actors, film directors, and prestig-
ious left-wing writers were incorporated into the production
of soap operas. However, in other countries, television in

Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera

 13

general and the soap opera in particular were rejected by

managers and workers in legitimate culture as the most
dangerous of traps and the most degrading of professional
fields. In all Latin American countries, however, the crisis
in cinema and politics has driven many artists, writers, and
actors into television and the soap opera. In spite of the
commercial controls on the genre, these artists are introduc-
ing themes and styles into the soap opera which deal with
dimensions of national life and culture.

The development of the soap opera and its role in the de-
velopment of television in an appreciable number of Latin
American countries is tied to its capacity to displace North
American television series from prime-time spaces, a phe-
nomenon that is linked to cultural and commercial reasons.
The fact that the soap operas moved from the "housewives"
time slot, in the middle of the day, to prime-time family
hours, was because television viewers discovered something
in the soap operas which North American serials, despite
their visual attractiveness and narrative skill, did not offer: a
complicity with certain markers of cultural identity like
those pointed out previously. However, in the Latin Ameri-
can television industry, the soap opera's legitimization by its
occupation of the "noblest" time slots in daily [282] pro-
gramming also meant taking the step to audience manage-
ment (Mattelart 1989: 77 ff.); that is to say, not only in
terms of its quantitative measurement, but also in terms of
sounding its demands and changing tastes.

These processes imply transformations which go beyond

and remodel the soap opera's nation-specific dimension.
Two different but intimately connected dynamics are in-
volved: one which pushes for Latin American integration,
and another which mobilizes the world market. Within the
Latin American space, the soap opera uses to its advantage
the long process of massive, popular identification that was

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 14

put into motion in the 1940s and 1950s by the Mexican and
Argentinean cinema, and by the tango, the ranchera, and the
bolero. It is a process of sentimental integration of the differ-
ent Latin American countries – a standardization of ways of
feeling and expressing, of gestures and sounds, dance
rhythms, and narrative cadences – made possible by the
cultural industries of radio and cinema. The soap opera and
the logic of its production and consumption are a landmark
in the development of this dynamic of integration. That is to
say, they are the place where the references and motives of
Latin American integration – the countries in their national
plurality and cultural diversity – are influenced by the dy-
namic of transnational globalization of the world market.
The internationalization of the soap opera thus responds to
the movement of activation and recognition of that which is
specifically Latin American in a television genre which
began by exporting national hits. Contradictorily, this inter-
nationalization also responds to the movement of progre-
ssive neutralization of the characteristics of Latin Ameri-
can-ness in a genre which the logic of the world market
must convert into transnational from the time of its produc-
tion.

Brazil was the pioneer. TV-Globo internationalized the

soap opera by exporting its hits to Portugal beginning in
1975, and swept away geographical and political borders
when it introduced its soap operas in Spain, Denmark,
England, and Japan. La Esclava lsaura (lsaura the Slave) was
declared the best television program of the last ten years in
Poland and was seen by 450 million television viewers in
the People's Republic of China. Meanwhile, Televisa de
México concentrated first on Latin American and Hispanic
audiences in the United States. Beginning in the middle of
the 1980s, it restructured its international commercializa-
tion strategy, making its presence felt in Europe and North
Africa with such enormous hits as Los ricos también lloran

Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera

 15

(The Rich Also Weep) which are broadcast from Italy to pre-
sent-day Russia.

In recent years, the reordering of European national televi-

sion systems, the privatization and expansion of channels,
and the introduction of cable and satellite dishes have in-
creased programming hours, opening the market to the
internationalization of Venezuelan, Argentinean, Colom-
bian, and Peruvian soap operas. However, production for a
global market implies the generalization of narrative models
and the thinning out of cultural characteristics. Certainly,
Televisa and TV-Globo's entrance into the world audiovis-
ual [283] market shows the level of development that has
been attained by Latin American television businesses. It
also signifies, in some measure, the opening of cracks in the
hegemony of the United States and in the division between
North and South America, that is, between countries con-
sidered to be producers and those considered to be exclu-
sively consumers. It signifies as well, however, the tendency
for Latin American audiovisual businesses to mold the
image of their people in terms of audiences which are more
and more undifferentiated, the tendency to dissolve cultural
difference into cheap and profitable exo-ticism.

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 16

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Marques de Melo, J. (1989) Produção e exportaçao da ficção
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Mattelart, M. (1989) L' internationale publicitaire, Paris: La
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Mattelart, M. and Mattelart, A. (1987) Le carnaval des im-
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Monsiváis, C. (1976) "Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el
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–– (1980) "Cultura urbana y creación cultural," Casa de las
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Ong, W. J. (1987) Oralidad y escritura, México: FCE.
Ortiz, F. (1973) Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azucar,
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Rivera, J. B. (1982) El folletín, Buenos Aires: CEDAL.

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Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera