Contemporary Hi(stories) of Mexico: Fictional Re-Creation of Collective Past on Television

Abstract

The term historical soap opera can be defined as a regular domestic soap opera in the sense of a television melodrama with the basic elements of a fictional narrative created through language and mimesis: story, characters, discourse and theme. A historical soap opera, however, is primarily characterized by the representation of a specific period of collective history and its main heroes in plots that depict wars, conspiracy, heroic feats, the public deeds of the heroes and national unification. As a complement to that essential historical component, non-historical characters enact interconnected subplots of passion, love, jealousy, betrayal, and intrigue.1 With variations and specifications, historical soap operas blend historical characters with common people, and historical events with scenes of everyday community life. Historical soap operas emphasize the integration of the ordinary citizen as an anonymous but active and loyal companion of the historic figures in order to advance the idea of equality of heroes and common people as coexistent protagonists in the making of the nation. These are the fundamentals of historical soap operas, or, as 1 have suggested elsewhere, historical kinetic murals.2 Kinetic murals portray the interaction of the past in contemporary issues and illustrate the diversity of versions of the collective history created with a variety of resources that appeal to mass audiences. The nature of these expressions is rooted in the awareness that narrating the past constitutes a discursive form, an arbitrary interpretation mainly from documental sources and exemplifies a process that embraces the craft of fiction, language, education, politics, imagination and representation. There is an extensive bibliography of critical studies about soap operas in Latin America that investigate them from a variety of perspectives.' However, the historical soap opera remains unexplored in these studies. This is mainly due to the fact that historical soap operas are produced in considerably fewer numbers, more sporadically, and tend to be shorter than the domestic soap operas; they are not regularly in the mind and in the eyes of the audiences. The constant and multiple presences of the domestic type and their effects in the market and on their audiences call for a larger number of studies and a variety of approaches. The three most recent historical kinetic murals, La antorcha encendida ( 1996), El vuelo del aguila ( 1994), and Senda de gloria (1988), were produced and distributed by Televisa, the largest telecommunications company in Mexico and Latin America and aired during prime time on weekdays. These productions incorporated the collective past into the daily routines of their audiences. Historical kinetic murals contain a pedagogical profile of collective participation intended to perform the binary education-entertainment by appealing to the basic concepts of national history instilled in the social imagination. The pedagogical enterprise can be viewed as utilization of the media as effective instrument to convey the ideological messages of hegemonic groups. The kinetic murals however, even if considered as advocates of the groups in power, also present a contesting feature to the traditional version of the official history, especially in the re-creation of the traditional heroes, such as Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos in La antorcha encendida, and Porfirio Diaz in El vuelo del aguila. Considered by their producers as valuable cultural commodities and meant to last, La antorcha encendida, El vuelo del aguila and Senda de gloria were created with a specific purpose in mind: to be treasured and sold as collectibles. La antorcha encendida, El vuelo del aguila, and Senda de gloria have been sold as a series of videotape collections in a chain of luxury stores throughout Mexico. The collections have been very limited in number and expensive relative to the buying power of the average Mexican. …