ABSTRACT
As far as television is concerned, the Latin American region has some unique characteristics. First, whereas most countries of the world began their television systems on the state-owned, usually public-service model exemplified by the BBC, almost all Latin American countries adopted the privately owned, commercial model of their influential northern neighbour. Second, Latin America was the first world region to experience colonialism on a continental scale, the legacy of which is that Spanish is the language of nearly all countries in that region, with a significant exception: Portuguese is the language of what is by far its largest and most populous nation, Brazil. This common linguistic, and to a large extent cultural, heritage from the colonial past has allowed programme exchange to flourish throughout the continent. Indeed, Latin America forms the greater part of the geo-linguistic regions of both Spanish and Portuguese, which include Spain and Portugal as well as the Spanishspeaking United States and Portugal’s former colonies respectively. A geolinguistic region, therefore, is defined not necessarily by geographical connectedness, but virtually: by commonalities of language and culture. Such regions have been a crucial touchstone for the internationalization of the media, particularly of television programmes and services (Sinclair et al. 1996). Just as in the geo-linguistic region of English, where the United States, as
the one-time colony, now harbours a much larger number of speakers (304 million) than the erstwhile colonial power (61 million), and indeed challenges its hegemony over the language, so it is in Latin America where Mexico, with its 110 million, is nearly three times Spain’s 40.5 million, while Brazil’s 192 million swamp Portugal’s 10.7 million (World Factbook 2008). In terms of television production, having the world’s largest domestic market in English has been one major factor in allowing the United States to come to dominate the television trade in the Anglosphere (and beyond), and this is correspondingly true also for Mexico and Brazil in their respective geo-linguistic regions. In other words, Mexico and Brazil stand in the same relation to the rest of
the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking worlds as the United States does to the English-speaking world. The economics are such that a large domestic market allows television producers to recoup all or most of their
costs in the home market, so that programme exports can earn relatively costfree profits. In addition to the economies of scale and scope that large domestic producers enjoy, the key Latin American producers have the additional advantage of being able to integrate production and distribution – that is, the dominant networks produce their own programming, which minimizes costs even further. Language is the vehicle of culture, so it is not similarities of language alone
that give access to foreign markets, but culture more broadly. This has been conceived as ‘cultural proximity’, which includes, as Joseph Straubhaar (2007) has formulated it most recently, ‘cultural elements – dress, ethnic types, gestures, body language, definitions of humour, ideas about story pacing, music traditions, religious elements – that are often shared across national borders’ (2007: 237). Straubhaar argues that these factors incline audiences to prefer programmes from their own culture – or, when these are not available, from cultures similar to their own, not necessarily with the same language. This would suggest that, in addition to language, there are ‘pan-Latin’
characteristics of successfully exported programming. Taken in conjunction with the economics of large markets, similarities of language and culture certainly seem to account for the success of Mexican and Brazilian programmes. This is most evident in the case of the telenovela genre, the melodramatic serials that still form the bulk of programme exports from these countries. However, as we shall see, the fact that such programmes have also found eager audiences in linguistically and culturally remote countries like Russia and China makes it clear that the geo-linguistic regions and cultural proximity explanations only go so far in explaining the success of telenovela exports. This is the major issue to be addressed in this chapter, but first it is appro-
priate to outline the major exporters of the region and note how they have built their markets, and then to provide some understanding of the telenovela as a genre. To follow Rafael Roncagliolo’s (1995) classification, Mexico and Brazil are pre-eminent as ‘net exporters’ within the region, for the reasons indicated, but Venezuela and Argentina must be acknowledged as ‘new exporters’, with Colombia, Chile and Peru seeking to join them, but coming from far behind. The rest of the nations in the region – mainly the smaller nations of Central America and the Caribbean – are ‘net importers’ (ibid. 1995: 337).
