Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas in Latin America (review)

The telenovela, like its English language counterpart, the soap opera has become the object of scholarly attention from communications and media scholars and cultural critics alike. Anthropologist O. Hugo Benavides adds a complex meditation on the role of the telenovela and the narco-drama in contemporary Latin America to this body of literature. Mobilizing a methodology he terms “fierce participant observation and textual analysis” (p. 4), Benavides analyzes the telenovela as a space for staging issues of power that play out along the lines of race, gender, and class in Latin America. While offering a respite from poverty and the stinging effects of classism, the telenovela also, the author asserts, works to reinforce existing power relations. In contrast, the narco-drama is celebrated as a less compromised cultural form that allows viewers to identify with their narco protagonists.

Divided into two parts, the book’s first four chapters offer close readings of the telenovelas, Xica (Brazil), Betty la fea (Colombia), Adrian está de visita (Colombia), and Pasión de gavilanes (Colombia). In these close readings, including one chapter that reads the function of envy in Xica and Betty la fea through Frantz Fanon’s and James Baldwin’s theorization of postcolonial identity formation, the author unpacks the plot of each telenovela to explore the complex interplay of race, class, and sexual desire in Latin America, historically and today. The author’s close readings of the historical telenovela Xica and Adrian está de visita—loosely based on the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner starring Sidney Poitier—which focus on race, gender, and power are the most compelling and the most detailed. The second half of the book, in which Benavides proposes analyzing the Mexican b-movie genre, the narco-drama, turns toward the U.S.-Mexico border. Somewhat puzzlingly, the four chapters that constitute this section do not offer a single close reading of a narco-drama, but rather examine the cults that have grown up around two border saints, the Spanish novel La reina del sur (2002), and the action-thriller parody El Mariachi (Rodriguez, 1992). Throughout both parts of the book, the author draws on an impressive list of theorists in addition to Fanon and Baldwin: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall among others.

While the author asserts that both genres operate according to the general structure of melodrama—an excess of emotion, the establishment of moral polarities, and a focus on domestic settings and situations—the connection between the two parts of the book is somewhat elusive. Several specific points merit mention. First, the author’s close readings tend to marginalize the specifically televisual or cinematic elements of the texts under consideration, a lopsidedness underlined by the absence of even a single image in the book. Second, though the author advocates understanding these forms of cultural production in historical context, very little information is provided to the reader about their production or reception histories. For example, when discussing the popularity of telenovelas amongst Latinos in the U.S., differences between recent immigrants and their more established counterparts, whose viewing practices might be quite different, are left unexplored. Finally, while Mexican cinematic melodrama is raised as an important antecedent to the telenovela, the author makes no reference to the work of leading scholars on the topic, such as Ana M. López. A small but critical factual error about the careers of Dolores del Río, Anthony Quinn, and Rita Hayworth must also be noted; each began their careers not in Mexico but in Hollywood.

The transnational circulation of media between Latin American countries, both on a popular level and as an industrial strategy promises rich rewards as a field of research. The growing, shared narco-cultura that binds countries like Colombia and Mexico, in both material and representational registers likewise deserves further investigation. This study draws our attention to some of the possible...