ABSTRACT
‘In the first half of this century’, wrote Nestor Garcia Canclini, ‘Radio and cinema helped organize the narrative of identity and civic sense in nations’ societies. Visual imagery has always been decisive in the development of Latin American social and cultural identities. As Gruzinski writes, Our Lady of Guadalupe (a central moment in Mexican identity) has the rhythm and efficacy of a melodramatic serial. Good and evil are highlighted and generate a dramatic tension that maintains the suspense within the melodrama. Traditionally, the characters are placed on one or the other pole of the dichotomy, although there is a recent change in television melodrama that introduces nuances into what was Manichean. Telenovela is, then, the most important genre of Latin American television production and probably its most outstanding mass, popular, cultural object. The priest is an adviser, a mediator in conflicts, someone able to help interpret the difficulties endured by the characters in a melodrama.
