Telenovela Dreams and Other Borrowed Fantasies
Screenshot from The University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus’s “Novelas de Puerto Rico” compilation video.
The debut of Telemundo in 1954 marked the birth of the television industry in Puerto Rico. It was so fundamental to our growth as an archipelago that El Nuevo Día likened it to the impact of the sugar or coffee plantations of the 19th century. In 1955, the first Puerto Rican telenovela to hit the airwaves was Ante la ley, shocking audiences with the first mouth-to-mouth kiss that aired on Puerto Rican television. By the time the genre peaked in the 1970s, local news stations were broadcasting as many as four telenovelas a day, at one point becoming the second-most prolific telenovela producer in Latin America.
Unlike Mexican novelas, our soaps aren’t readily available across streaming platforms, but we do have YouTube. The University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus’s YouTube channel is a treasure trove of archival footage from the nation’s audiovisual past. There is one video, clocking in at one hour and 22 minutes, that I’ve watched over a dozen times. “Novelas de Puerto Rico” combines sample footage of locally produced telenovelas from 1955 to 2006. The compilation is a dizzying supercut of more than 50 years of television history, one opening sequence after the other. The video offers a decade-by-decade evolution of our idealized self-perception: the version of life on these islands we find compelling enough to show on-screen.
“The video offers a decade-by-decade evolution of our idealized self-perception: the version of life on these islands we find compelling enough to show on-screen.”
It begins with the opening credits of Domingo de Amor Palmolive, named after the sponsoring soap brand. Set to orchestral high strings, the credits open with black-and-white footage of a manicured hand holding a title card in front of a bouquet of roses. We learn that a husband has been cheating on his wife. After the wife confronts the other woman, the man returns to his spouse’s arms. She is happy to forgive him. He’s holding her tightly, her arms are on his chest and their house is safe again.
Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, period dramas were popular, remaining loyal to traditional ideas of marriage, family, and the good morals of the upper classes; often starring a young, and dare I say even strapping, Walter Mercado. (Before he would go on to become our astrological guide, Mercado starred in almost a dozen telenovelas.) In these stories of plantation family drama or rural distress, white actors in blackface portrayed Black characters, roles that, even if they were ever handed over to Black actors, would only portray them as enslaved people or servants. Even today, Puerto Rico’s entertainment industry struggles to justify its bias toward white performers and stories, leaving little room for Black actors. The only Afro-Boricua performer to play a leading role in a telenovela is Jeimy Osorio, who played a young Celia Cruz in 2015 in Celia, a Colombian-American production that has since proven to be a flash in the pan instead of a catalyst of enduring change. As Puerto Rico established itself as a newly minted, free-associated state, the thickest migration waves spread out into cities like New York where Puerto Rican exports in music and entertainment simply did not register in the telenovelas on the islands’ screens. What was going on over there became separate from what was happening here.
“What was going on over there became separate from what was happening here.”
During this time of migration and nation-building, a fortunate handful of actors like New York City–born Sully Diaz, Nydia Caro, and Gisaelle Boldet moved to Puerto Rico and built careers as telenovela superstars. Meanwhile, Puerto Rican performers in the U.S. found niche opportunities—often in stereotypical roles like Chita Rivera’s Anita in Broaway’s West Side Story and Rita Moreno’s Anita in the 1961 film West Side Story. Even fewer performers, like Raúl Julía, of Addams Family movie franchise fame, were able to succeed in the ‘60s and ‘70s in everything from Shakespearean acting on stage to Emmy Award–winning television shows.
In the ‘80s, the telenovela theme songs got synthy-er, and the set designs settled into their wavy glass blocks, art deco accents, and glossy apartment towers that made twins of the newly developed parts of San Juan and Miami’s South Beach. We return to the country houses of the wealthy, but these shows also introduce us to the bustling lives of Puerto Rico’s newly urbanized youth with their sidewalk arguments and their nightclub outings like in the 1986 telenovela, Apartamentos de Solteras, which saw Giselle Blondette and Gladys Rodrigues living and loving in their beachfront high-rises.
Screenshot from The University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus’s “Novelas de Puerto Rico” compilation video.
These fantasies—brought to life by settings and storylines native to the lives of the uber-rich—remained foreign and dreamy to most of the folks watching at home. Countryside estates and beach houses with cooks, waitstaff, and chauffeurs; housewives scheming or praying their days away; the virtuous blondes always finding love; passionate fights breaking out in country clubs, tennis courts, or near some crystalline-blue pool; lovers on jet skis or horseback. These telenovelas exuded glamor in a way that only Iris Chacón could outdo. Few things shine like a diamond promise ring on film. Like the Korean dramas with Spanish dubs Telemundo is currently broadcasting, these soap operas depicted a world in which everything made sense, everything was beautiful, and no one felt the burden by the idiosyncrasies of life on a colony.
I did not grow up in a telenovela-watching house, but in watching this compilation, I could still feel the sting of nostalgia. I came of age in a Puerto Rico that was enjoying the spoils of the pharmaceutical manufacturing boom that crumbled as soon as the tax incentive bill expired in 1996. Money was good; we dressed up for dinner and wore special outfits to church. In reviewing this archive, I’m almost addicted to fishing out small details—the postmodern interiors, the tile in the country mansions, the bright-white skyline of Condado Beach—for that glimpse into the other Puerto Rico, the one that could’ve existed had things gone differently in 1996, or 1952, or 1868.
I say so embarrassingly because I don’t want Puerto Rico to become the 51st state or another capitalist country molded to imperialist interests. And yet, I’m still vulnerable to that feeling of inferiority, of wanting to be like the other kids in the Greater Antilles, or South America, or even the mainland. Sometimes, even if I know it’s not what’s best, I want the kind of homeland and family history that offers a palliative sense of normalcy. A life that isn’t weighed down by the bureaucratic irritations of moving back and forth between New York and San Juan and always having to explain why I have two last names when filling out paperwork stateside. One that isn’t so utterly helpless to the devastations of a hurricane or blackouts in the thick of a heatwave. One that fits into the world of these telenovelas.
“But as far as idealized reimaginings go, these telenovelas are, in truth, woefully unimaginative. ”
But as far as idealized reimaginings go, these telenovelas are, in truth, woefully unimaginative. They seek solace from Puerto Rico’s uniquely crippling reality in an equally limiting, although far more common, pipe dream. It imagines a Puerto Rico that blossomed into the kind of country the CIA was trying to create through the violence it enacted all over Latin America during the Banana Wars of the 1930s and the Chilean coup d’etat of 1973. The thing about fantasies, especially those on TV, is that they are seldom our own. In addition to their initial financial thrust from corporate sponsorship, the origins of television in Puerto Rico are connected to the American interest in the local sugar business that fueled our industrialization in the early 20th century. According to Víctor Federico Torres, writer of Yo Lo Que Quiero Es Amor, a history of Puerto Rican telenovelas that covers 1955–1975, over 80% of telenovela screenwriters were actually of Cuban origin.
Instead of being a boom for Puerto Rico’s very robust theater sector, the telenovela industry proved more welcoming to Cuban actors and screenwriters with very little interest in or connection to the history of local arts and politics. Some of Puerto Rico’s biggest telenovelas stars were Cuban, like Rolando Barral, Marilyn Pupo, Frank Moro, and Hector Travieso; or Argentinian, like Raquel Montero of Tanairí fame. If you’ve ever watched a Puerto Rican telenovela, especially those from the ‘60s and ‘70s, you now know why actors spoke in such confused and affected semi-trans-Atlantic accents that seemed not quite foreign but definitely not local—the cast was truly international.
To the extent that Puerto Rico’s telenovela boom dwelled on alternate versions of who or what we could’ve been, it diminished its creative potency by how little it did to stimulate our imaginations. Local filmmaker Roberto Ramos-Perea argues that the telenovela boom did little to advance Puerto Rico’s “idiosincracia dramática.” Instead of building on centuries-old theatrical and literary legacies, we funneled our time and energy as actors, writers, producers, and audiences—in an all-too-familiar way—toward advancing the interests of the usual gang of wealthy elites. Half the 20th century’s creative potential fell between the couch cushions as audiences tuned in to the numbing glimmer of telenovelas and their idealized worlds. When others dream our dreams for us, we forget how to imagine ourselves into a better future.