Distorting the picture: Gender, ethnicity, and desire in a Mexican telenovela (el vuelo del águila)

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2008, Pages

  Chassen López, Francie R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 66349103776     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0003     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Telenovelas are similar to soap operas, but they are shown on primetime TV, have major stars as actors, and have definitive endings; see Ibsen Mart "Romancing the Globe," Foreign Policy 151 (November-December 2005): 50-52,
2. and Robert C. Allen, ed., To Be Continued . . . Soap Operas around the World (London: Routledge, 1995).
3. César Rojas Pétriz, "Una tehuana de historia y leyenda," Dáani Béedxe Cerro del Tigre 7 (September-October 1993): 7. In Tehuantepec, everyone shares his or her anecdotes about Juana Cata.
4. Miguel Covarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946), 149.
5. See Francie R. Chassen, "Juana Catarina Romero, Cacica Porfiriana: La mujer y el mito," Acervos 7 (1998): 10-16;
6. "Juana Cata: empresaria y benefactora," Acervos 16 (2000): 16-23;
7. and "Juana Catarina Romero: Cacica de Tehuantepec," Acervos 19 (2000): 35-44.
8. For an updated study, see Chassen-López, "A Patron of Progress, Juana Catarina Romero, the Nineteenth-Century Cacica of Tehuantepec," Hispanic American Historical Review 88, no. 3 (2008): 393-426.
9. Graciela Iturbide and Elena Poniatowska, Juchitán de las mujeres (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1989);
10. Clarissa Pinkola-Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves (New York: Ballantine, 1992);
11. and Howard Campbell and Susanne Green, "A History of Representation of Isthmus Zapotec Women," Identities 3, nos. 1-2 (1996): 156-58.
12. Patricia Hill Collins, "Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images" and "Knowledge, Politics, and the Consciousness of Empowerment," in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), 67-75, 221-38.
13. Anne McClintock, "'No Longer in a Future Heaven': Gender, Race and Nationalism," in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 105.
14. The little-studied historical telenovela combines elements of the melodramatic telenovela with the characterization of a particular period of history. The plot and characters are complemented with nonhistorical characters who "enact interconnected subplots of passion, love, jealousy, betrayal, and intrigue"; see Mar "Contemporary Hi(stories) of Mexico: Fictional Re-Creation of Collective Past on Television," Film and History 34, no. 1 (2004): 49.
15. El vuelo's 155 episodes ran from July 1994 to February 1995; see José Alberto Castro, "Zerón Medina: ha permitido el acceso a la historia en forma amena," Proceso, 10 March 1997, 56-63.
16. Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 64-65;
17. McClintock, "'No Longer in a Future Heaven,'" 89-105;
18. Elizabeth Dore, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gender and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century," in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 7-8.
19. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 5-29.
20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991);
21. Adriana Estill, "The Mexican Telenovela and its Foundational Fictions," in Latin American Literature and Mass Media, ed. Edmundo Paz Soldán and Debra A. Castillo (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 168-89;
22. Ana López, "'Our Welcomed Guests': Telenovelas in Latin America," in Allen, To Be Continued, 256-75;
23. Divya C. McMillin, International Media Studies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 91-95.
24. For example, Jorge Fernando Iturribarr Oaxaca en la historia, de la época precolumbina a los tiempos actuales (Mexico City: Editorial Stylo, 1955);
25. and Angel Taracena, Porfirio Díaz, Su vida, su obra, su época (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1983).
26. Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004);
27. Marianne Marchand, "Engendering Globalization in an Era of Transnational Capital," in Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism, and Representation, ed. Kriemild Saunders (London: Zed Books, 2003), 105-19;
28. Helen Safa, "Economic Restructuring and Gender Subordination," Latin American Perspectives 22, no. 2 (1995): 32-50;
29. and Francie R. Chassen-López, "From Casa to Calle: Latin American Women Transforming Patriarchal Spaces," Journal of Women's History 9, no. 1 (1997): 174-91. In reality, D protected Mexico's nascent industrial sector.
30. Claudio Lomnitz, "An Intellectual's Stock in the Factory of Mexico's Ruins: Enrique Krauze's Mexico: Biography of Power," in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 214-15. Full disclosure: I was a young professor in Mexico in the 1980s, adversely affected by neoliberalism's impact on universities.
31. and Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).
32. Lomnitz, "An Intellectual's Stock," 220; José Agust Tragicomedia mexicana 3 La vida en México de 1982 a 1994 (Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, 1998), 264-66;
33. Lomnitz, "An Intellectual's Stock," 226-27;
34. and Gavin O'Toole, "A New Nationalism for a New Era: The Political Ideology of Mexican Neoliberalism," Bulletin of Latin American Research 22, no. 3 (2003): 274-86.
35. See Estill, "The Mexican Telenovela," 169;
36. Christine Gledhill, "Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera," in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 337-84;
37. Laura Podalsky, "Disjointed Frames: Melodrama, Nationalism, and Representation in 1940s Mexico," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 12 (1993): 57-74;
38. Laura J. Beard, "Whose Life in the Mirror? Examining Three Mexican Telenovelas as Cultural and Commercial Products," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 22 (2003): 73-88;
39. and Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, "'I'm Not a Feminist . . . I Only Defend Women as Human Beings': The Production, Representation, and Consumption of Feminism in a Telenovela," Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 3 (2003): 269-94.
40. Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 165.
41. Covarrubias, Mexico South, 225;
42. César Rojas Pétriz, "La joven Juana Cata en la Guerra de la Reforma," in Dáani Béedxe, 7:12-13;
43. Rojas Pétriz, "La joven Juana Cata," 12-13;
44. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 5-29;
45. Margarita Saona, "Do We Still Need the Family to Imagine the Nation? National Family Romances by Latin American Women Writers," in Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American and U.S. Latina Women, ed. Anne J. Cruz, Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro, and Joyce Tolliver (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003), 207-31;
46. and Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
47. Arrom quotes a nineteenth-century legal commentator who stated, "Would not a society ruled by the wife be liable to the continual mutiny of the subjects against the established authority?": The Women of Mexico City, 95-96.
48. See Francie R. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, 1867-1911 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), chaps. 6, 7, and 9;
49. Thomas A. Abercrombie, "Mothers and Mistresses of the Urban Bolivian Public Sphere: Postcolonial Predicament and National Imaginary in Oruro's Carnival," in After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 177-83.
50. For the deconstruction of this image by Zapotec women, see Obdulia Ruiz Campbell, "Representations of Isthmus Women: A Zapotec Women's Point of View," in Zapotec Struggles: Histories, Politics, and Representation from Juchitán, Oaxaca, ed. Howard Campbell, Leigh Binford, Miguel Bartolomé, and Alicia Barabas (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 137-42;
51. and Edaena Saynes - Vázquez, "Galán Pa dxand on their role in Society," Identities 3, nos. 1-2 (1996): 183-204.
52. Campbell and Green, "A History," 165-70.
53. See Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, "'Where the Sun Set Crimson and the Moon Rose Red': Writing Appalachia and the Kentucky Mountain Feuds," Southern Cultures 2, nos. 3-4 (1996): 338.
54. In the sixteenth century, Juan Ximénez denounced "feuding" and "cannibalistic" peasants; cited in Ronald Spores, The Mixtec Kings and Their People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 220,
55. Rodolfo Pastor, Campesinos y reforma: La Mixteca 1700-1856 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987), 189-90;
56. Angeles Romero Frizzi, "Epoca Colonial (1519-1785)," in Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana: Estado de Oaxaca, ed. Leticia Reina (Mexico City: Juan Pablos Editor, 1988), 1:173-78;
57. Philip Dennis, Intervillage Conflict in Oaxaca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987);
58. and Mario Mecott Francisco, "¿Por qué los revolucionarios adoptaron el color verde y los reaccionarios el rojo?" Dáani Béedxe 23 (January-February 1997): 13. On the eve of the Revolution, red had become the Porfirian color and green was revolutionary.
59. "La historia no debe distorsionarse," in Dáani Béedxe 13 (September-October 1994): 18-20,
60. and Venustiano Gutiérrez and Alfredo Rodas, "Distorsiones de Televisa," letter to Proceso, 5 December 1994, 78-79.
61. See "Enrique Krauze se disculpa ante el pueblo de Tehuantepec: Entrevista en el Noticiero '24 Horas' de Televisa" in Dáani Béedxe 14 (November-December 1994): 16-17.
62. Gallegos, Doña Bárbara (Barcelona: Araluce, 1937);
63. and Julie Skurski, "The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Dona Barbara and the Construction of National Identity," Poetics Today 15, no. 4 (1994): 605-42.
64. The triple shift includes not only factory work and reproductive work in the home, but also local organizing to bring basic services to the community that have been cut by the reduction of government spending. See Marianne Marchand, "Engendering Globalization," 106-117;
65. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1990);
66. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 174-77;
67. Leslie Salzinger "Making Fantasies Real: Producing Women and Men on the Maquila Shop Floor," NACLA Report on the Amerkas 34, no. 5 (March-April 2001);
68. See Omar Hernández and Emile McAnany "Cultural Industries in the Free Trade Age: A Look at Mexican Television," in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubinstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 392-400.
69. TV Azteca tried to produce more realistic telenovelas than Televisa; see Reginald Clifford, "Engaging the Audience: The Social Imaginary of the Novela," Television and New Media 6, no. 4 (2005): 360-69.
70. Gledhill, "Genre and Gender," 358;
71. See especially Anthony DePalma's "Soap Opera from Past With Fears From Present," New York Times, 16 July 1994.
72. See also Mar "Cultural Identity: Between Reality and Fiction," in Television and New Media 6, no. 4 (2005): 407-14. This whole issue is devoted to the analysis of telenovelas.
73. Ramirez Berg, "Stereotyping in Films," 111.
74. Deborah Poole, "An Image of 'Our Indian': Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920-1940," Hispanic American Historical Review 84, no. 1 (2004): 37-82.
75. According to K. Lynn Stoner, Cuba has recognized its heroines, yet this still serves the patriarchal state; see "Militant Heroines and the Consecration of the Patriarchal State: The Glorification of Loyalty, Combat, and National Suicide in the Making of Cuban National Identity," Cuban Studies 34 (2003): 71-96. Silvia Arrom contends that Josef a Ortiz de Dom able recognition, since they are well known to Mexican elementary schoolchildren; Silvia Arrom, e-mail message to author, 27 September 2005.
76. Hall, "The Spectacle of the 'Other,'" in Hall, Representation, 260, emphasis in original source.