I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: “Big Snakes on the Street and Never Ending Stories: The Case of Venezuelan Telenovelas” from Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture, by Nelson Hippolyte Ortega; and an extract from Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, by Alex Bellos.

Hippolyte Ortega’s text deals with the history of telenovelas, a form of Latin American TV shows reminiscent of North American soap operas but with its own codes. The ancestors of the genre were radionovelas in the 1940s but the first telenovelas appeared in the 70s and the 80s, produced by several Latin American countries for their own domestic market. Enjoyed by the whole family, telenovelas deal with love triangles, Manichean stories and their plot is artificially lengthened for the show to last longer. However, in 1992, a Venezuelan telenovela, Por estas calles, managed to introduce new elements in this old formula: instead of relying on the traditional plot, it mirrored the scandals and the social problems of the country at that time, allowing the audience to identify strongly with the struggle of the characters. With time however, the telenovela eventually returned to the stereotypical formula but Hippolyte Ortega states that nonetheless it has managed to illustrate the ability of Latin America culture to combine opposite elements, such as mass distribution and popular appraisal.

Bellos’s text deals with football in the Brazilian imaginary. The first third of the extract is dedicated to the defeat of Brazil to Uruguay in the World Cup of 1950. The writer meets with different personalities (players from both teams, the designer of the Brazilian shirt…) to collect testimony and analyse the importance of this sport event in the mind of the country. From the reader’s perspective, the overemphasize on this football game can at times appear extravagant (it is described as a national disaster, while the country just had been freed from dictatorship and that WWII ended five years earlier) but nonetheless the text allows to realize the prominence of this memory in Brazil culture. Then the extract explains how indigenous culture has contributed to the Brazilian culture, and how indigenous players are able to reconcile this sport with their own traditions. Then Bellos describes the life of Garrincha, one of Brazil’s iconic footballers. The final part of the extract describes the supporter group called “the Hawks of the Faithful”, an example of a group gathering football fans that progressively turned into infamous hooligans.