Rebel love: transnational teen TV vs. Mexican telenovela tradition

Abstract

The Mexican telenovela's romantic love story has been a staple of the nation's TV landscape for over 50 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, these love stories boomed as an export commodity, with viewers across the world finding resonances in universal themes, melodramatic emotion and endings of happily ever after, despite the localized cultural references and nationalism at their heart. Now, just as local audiences are waning, international audiences searching for cultural proximity are also decreasing, as foreign markets produce their own versions of serial melodrama, with their own cultural references. Within this climate, Mexican TV executives must search for new telenovela models to capture a decreasing local and international market share. The popularity of Rebelde (‘Rebel', Televisa, Mexico, 2004–2006), within the teen telenovela subgenre, indicates one telenovela that has successfully maintained the reach of the Mexican telenovela industry, within this new market context. It is argued that Rebelde's investment in developing a form of [sub]cultural proximity for the transnational youth market breathes new life into the classic Mexican telenovela by challenging its traditional and exclusionary narrative in unprecedented ways.