The centrality of telenovelas in Latin America 's everyday life: Past tendencies, current knowledge, and future research

Every evening, millions of viewers throughout Latin America tune in their television sets to watch telenovelas. For more than thirty years now telenovelas have dominated primetime programming on most of the region’s television. And here Latin America refers to more than a geographic area: it covers a culturally constructed region that goes from the southern tip of South America to the United States, where one can watch daily telenovelas on the two Hispanic networks, Univision and Telemundo,[i] and Canada. In the last few decades Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas, and to a lesser extent Venezuelan, Colombian, Argentineans and others, have been exported to more than a hundred nations around the world (Melo, 1988). In this increasingly international scenario, Latin American telenovelas have been aired in other Portuguese and Spanish speaking markets, and in dubbed and sometimes edited versions in many different national contexts (Allen, 1995; Page 1 of 15 The centrality of telenovelas in Latin America’s everyday life