On this page, we will study two case studies into the reception of telenovelas. Both studies conclude that through watching telenovelas, audiences become more compelled to carry out certain interests. What we will find from both studies is that telenovelas have educated audiences over health, education and family life. My hope to make these effects clear for the reader to understand the informational power telenovelas carry.

MIGUEL SABIDO AND EDUCATION-ENTERTAINMENT TELENOVELAS

Throughout this essay, my aim to is prove that the stereotypical triumvirate – la mujer vanidosa (the vain Spanish female), el hombre machista (the Spanish macho male), and el hombre homosexual (the Spanish gay male) reinforce stereotypes in the US. In this chapter, my goal is to educate how telenovelas impact their audiences. By doing so, we will be able to answer if the stereotypical triumvirate educates their audiences through discrimination. And so, the purpose of this chapter is to study reception theory to help understand if telenovelas can communicate discrimination. I will first begin by investigating how telenovelas have impacted audiences through their entertainment-educational[1] content to demonstrate the influence of the telenovela.

The first reception study we investigate is Heidi Nariman’s entertainment-education telenovelas. Heidi Nariman deconstructs the soap opera and explains how it can teach an audience about issues in her book, Soap Operas for Social Change. She studies the pioneering director of telenovelas in Mexico – Miguel Sabido – who was the first director to produce telenovelas about health, education and finance. Nariman states: “Miguel Sabido uses 5 theoretical tenets in soap operas -  communication theory, dramatic theory, archetypes/stereotypes, social learning theory and the concept of the triune brain” (Nariman 31). These 5 tenets are inserted to audiences during and after the soap opera through the medium of television. According to Sabido, if one uses all five tenets, a clear message will be communicated from the telenovela to the audience. Sabido wrote and directed three telenovelas in the 70s – Acompáñame, Ven Conmigo, and La Familia. Each telenovela headlines contemporary issues such as health, education and family life. Nariman concludes with statistical evidence that there is a rise of attendance in hospitals and an increase of literature receipts about higher education after the viewing of each of Sabido’s telenovelas.

According to Nariman, Sabido concluded that “television serials could do more than reinforce attitudes toward specific events and characters; they could also stimulate behavior through commercial revenues and propaganda” (Nariman 7). Sabido states that in order for an entertainment-education soap opera to be successful, “the target audience must perceive a reflection of itself and its own reality within the soap opera to learn and mold from” (Nariman 54). Therefore, by using the five theoretical tenets, one can communicate to audience information.

NUESTRO BARRIO

            I then moved to an article about an US-made telenovela shown to a control group in North Carolina. Jonathan Spader et al, confirm in their article, Bold and Bankable, how there is an increase in bank inquires and account openings after the soap, Nuestro Barrio ended. Barrio causes viewers without bank accounts to react emotionally when Javier loses his savings in a robbery, a reaction consistent with the dramatic relief process of change” states Spader in a test he conducts (Spader et al, 64, 67). The story of Barrio follows a middle class Latino family in the US as they encounter financial obstacles. Spader investigates how this storyline impacts the audience of the Raleigh/Durham region through testing. Spader conducts 101 interviews with people who saw the soap opera. For the control group, 2032 people are called.  Using a PSM[2] estimator, Spader states that the participants had more respect to both bank account use and homeownership.

TELENOVELA RECEPTION CONCLUSION

These two events, one in Mexico and the other in the US, illustrate how telenovelas reinforce information to educate about finance, health and politics.

TELENOVELAS REINFORCE STEREOTYPES IN THE US

Telenovelas produce three recurring stereotypes – La mujer vanidosa (The Vain Spanish Female); El hombre machista (The Macho Spanish Male); and El hombre homosexual (The Gay Spanish Male) through identity production on television. After investigating three disciplinary fields – television as a medium, gender and women’s studies and queer theory as well as history and classification of telenovelas in general, we have the adequate knowledge to categorize and scrutinize why and how this triumvirate seems to be perpetually placed in the majority of telenovelas from the late 90s to today. What we have found is the three stereotypes exist based on the existence of one another.

Second, based on previous evidence with entertainment-education soap operas, it is evident that telenovelas have the power to inform and educate the mass public. I believe it is possible after review that the telenovela can also discriminate against characters by their representation to other characters and their actions. Furthermore, this discrimination is educated and informed to the audience through the identity production of Barker, the psychological relativity of Brunsdon, and the character’s performance of Butler. Telenovelas reinforce stereotypes not only because they already exist in society, but they bring the stereotype to the TV of middle and working class families in America[3]. By inserting the stereotypical character, people who don’t have access to real representations of the three stereotypes in reality, see them within the telenovelas. This is how the telenovela reinforces stereotypes – by injecting them every day into the lives of less educated audiences, causing the audiences to react to the telenovela by treating any similar person in the real world as if they existed in the telenovela.

CONCLUSION

Did my grandmother actually believe that the characters in these soaps were actually real? After careful reading on how telenovelas communicate, I believe the answer is yes.
After conducting research into various Spanish soap operas and finding out if they had the same impact on other people like they had on my grandmother, I believe we can offer the conclusion that Telenovelas have a gargantuan effect on their demographic. 

What I have found is the Spanish[4] soap opera – the telenovela – reinforces stereotypes of Latinos in the US. When I say Latinos, I am talking about Spanish-speaking people who emigrated from Spanish-speaking countries or people of Spanish descent living in the US. I believe that these soap operas present three recurring stereotypes – La mujer vanidosa (The Vain Spanish Female); El hombre machista (The Macho Spanish Male); and El hombre homosexual (The Gay Spanish Male). We have studied and investigated how and why these stereotypes exit, starting in the late 90’s until now[5], and have investigated why they are portrayed as so. We have looked at the effect of telenovelas in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil and to compare the effect with the US. The stereotypical triumvirate exists in television because it exists in reality. After reading Barker, Butler, Brooks and Nariman, we can conclude that TV creates storylines from society – this is what makes television, and telenovelas in particular, so compelling to its audience.   

In order to explain and critique these stereotypical characters in the telenovelas, we looked at three separate disciplinary fields to understand how and why the stereotypical triumvirate exists: the study of television as a medium; gender and women’s studies; the study of queer theory; and finally the history of telenovelas. In doing so, we were able to investigate how Spanish males and females are portrayed in television using current scholarly debate surrounding each discipline. Ee looked into three separate telenovelas, explaining how each stereotype interacts with the world, and we provided academic sources to help justify the character’s actions. Then, we looked at how telenovelas have impacted audiences through their entertainment-educational content to demonstrate the influence of the telenovela. My aim was ultimately concluding that if telenovelas educate, they can also discriminate.

And so, it is apparent that the power of the telenovela is gargantuan; that telenovelas can influence college, health and financial decisions. But, ever deeper, the telenovela can connect with an audience and remind them of the social imbalance between males and females, queers and heterosexuals, beauty and the ugly, and the rich and the poor.