Content Control as Audience Engineering

“Less obvious was that the casting of light-skinned women for the roles of heroines, whose characters were based on the mestizo majority—maids or chambermaids, for example—created a tension at the beginning of the telenovela. The poor blonde, often played by a well-known actress from an affluent class, looked out of place in a situation of poverty. That tension helped give the telenovela an initial impetus and to arouse interest in the story: how would the heroine find happiness in the white-skinned world of the upper class, to which she so clearly belonged? The final integration of the white woman into that society offered viewers the assurance that the world not only possessed a natural justice but a natural racial hierarchy.”

“The earliest telenovelas were not revolutionary; they had already been presented on radio and were, after all, melodramas, a kind of fantasy. However, the government was concerned about the influence of that fiction and the potential threat to social stability. So was the Catholic Church. The concerns grew when it became evident that television would very soon become the principal mass entertainment medium, as was already happening in the United States. With television sets being manufactured in Mexico, prices were falling and sales increasing. The growing popularity of television also led the ailing film industry to join the attack against the new medium.”