Share
For many fans of the genre, telenovelas conjure images of star-crossed lovers, cartoonishly evil villains, and at least one gasp-worthy slap. For Elizabeth Lozano, PhD, Loyola School of Communication associate professor and program director of communication studies, telenovelas were the intellectual spark of her academic career and an important path to understanding her native Colombia.
As an undergraduate in the ’80s, Lozano studied the cultural significance of telenovelas across the region. The genre is usually understood as a Latin American serialized drama, similar to a soap opera, but with a limited run and a love story at its center. Though extremely popular, telenovelas are often criticized for being formulaic and reinforcing traditional gender values. But Lozano noticed a shift. “You had the emergence of a type of telenovela with Colombian accents, Colombian geography, Colombian history, and an understanding of class as a social construction,” she explains. “It was interesting to see the emergence of a Colombian voice. The genre became more political.”
For Lozano, the new crop of Colombian telenovelas could not be divorced from the tumultuous period of internal violence the country experienced during the last half of the twentieth century. Since the ’60s, Colombia’s government and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) had been embroiled in a bloody conflict, worsened by the appearance of right-wing paramilitary groups, the rise of drug cartels, and the United States’s war on drugs.
The main goal of my work is to contribute to a deeper understanding of our social and cultural lives, using an intercultural communication lens. I want to contribute to a conversation that helps us understand, critique, change, and transform our assumptions about stories and representations.
— Elizabeth Lozano, School of Communication associate professor and program director of communication studies
Telenovelas do not shy away from incorporating political tensions into their stories. The conflict even gave birth to a subgenre: the narco-melodrama, whose protagonist was often a morally ambiguous male leader of a drug cartel. While some argue the genre glorifies criminals, Lozano views the medium as a way to understand systemic violence in Colombia. “It’s an attempt to narrate something extraordinarily important to us, but that also tries to make comprehensible the incomprehensible,” she says. Lozano notes that telenovelas question a social contract that allows widespread government corruption, attacks on freedom of the press, and human rights violations.
Lozano also studied how the government used mainstream media for its own political purposes. For example, large swaths of the Colombian population were distrustful of the government’s armed forces during the internal conflict, and several public relations campaigns were used between 2006 and 2011 to clean up the military’s image. Ads showcased heroic soldiers fighting a faceless enemy and returning home to their families in the countryside. In a nod to Colombia’s ethnic diversity, they included indigenous populations of different regions and depicted soldiers of mixed ancestry. It changed public perception. “Even though I am aware that this is propaganda, I found it incredibly successful,” she says. “It sanitizes the violence completely.”
Though telenovelas and government campaigns may promote competing visions of Colombia, Lozano’s research emphasizes storytelling as a conduit for knowledge. Her current project continues that thread. She is completing a series of autoethnographies—writings in which a researcher uses personal experiences and narratives to make sense of culture and social constructs that may otherwise remain unacknowledged—about “violence as experienced firsthand, not through melodrama or propaganda,” she says.
She also uses personal narratives as a pedagogical tool in her classroom, where she frequently invites guests to share their stories and be interviewed by the students. “They need to ask, What are these representations made of? How is that related to power? How is that related to history?”
“The main goal of my work is to contribute to a deeper understanding of our social and cultural lives, using an intercultural communication lens,” she explains. “I want to contribute to a conversation that helps us understand, critique, change, and transform our assumptions about stories and representations.”
