PhD Candidate in the American Studies and Ethnicity program at the University of Southern California
Rocío León is a Doctoral Candidate in the American Studies and Ethnicity program at the University of Southern California, where her training has focused on Latinx media studies, globalization, visual culture, and humor studies. Her dissertation, “Latinidad Goes Global: Digital Television Cultures in the US and Mexico” analyzes the dialogical and cultural strategies within tropes, myths, social structures, and discourses prevalent within Latinx digital culture and their genealogy within global television industries in the US and Mexico. She pays specific attention to how social discourses and ideologies in the programming of networks and companies like HBO, Mexico’s Televisa, and Netflix Latin America transfer and transform across mediums by social media users. Her work has appeared in Spectator and Information, Communication, & Society. Rocío has also presented her research at the American Studies Association, American Association of Geographers, American Sociological Association, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies. In 2022, she received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Humor and Comedy Studies Special Interest Group Graduate Student Paper Award for her dissertation chapter, “Immortal in Spanish: The Digital Afterlife of Soraya Montenegro.”
In a 2016 Vanity Fair México YouTube video, the Mexican actress Itati Cantoral trains viewers on how to be the villana perfecta [perfect f. villain]. She performs the transgressive behaviors she enacted as Soraya Montenegro in María la del Barrio (1995-6). Like all telenovela villanas from Grupo [Group] Televisa, the mass media company that created her, Soraya experiences a gruesome death at the end of the melodrama. In the mid-2010s, US Latinx social media users revived her through memes, video bits, and gifs that continue to circulate on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Soraya’s “Cries in Spanish” meme travels across the internet because of the same scripts that Televisa used to mark her as a villain: revealing clothes, uncontrollable emotions, and relentless ambition. Today, this translates to fashionable, rebellious, and unstoppable. My dissertation “Latinidad Goes Global: Digital Television Cultures in the US and Mexico,” analyzes the cultural strategies that transnational television companies and networks use to ascribe affinities, myths, and identities to Latinidad. In the US, Grupo Televisa influences programming through the leading Spanish-language network, Univision. In Mexico, US programming has been available through cable, satellite, and now digital streaming subscriptions. In 2011, Netflix Latin America began its initiative to expand its services to international audiences in Mexico. My research questions are: How does the dominance of companies like Televisa and HBO in both countries influence expectations for the representation of contemporary social experiences on digital television? How do social media platforms such as TikTok facilitate cultural exchanges and dialogue between audiences separated by nation? I analyze the dialogical relationship between English and Spanish legacy television, specifically the social structures that characterize how companies like Televisa and HBO have branded themselves across the American hemisphere. Televisa’s archaic programming is reflective of its gender binaries, lack of diversity, and oligarchic business practices. In contrast, networks such as HBO are imbued in discourses of realistic and progressive representations of LGBTQ+, feminist, and creative storylines that in turn are reflective of contemporary social experiences. I make two key findings that contribute to Latinx media studies, cultural studies, and digital studies. First, recent literature highlights the bilingual and bicultural influences of US Latinx millennials’ social media use (Avilés-Santiago 2022; Gutiérrez 2021; Casillas, Hinojos and Zarate 2022). Through an audiovisual analysis of memes, TikTok challenges, and other social media user-generated content, I argue that Latinx digital culture includes Mexican social media users and their creative exchanges with US Latinx as they circulate and transform content such as the “Cries in Spanish” meme. Second, recent scholarship on Netflix Latin America (NLA) emphasizes how the streaming platform and praise for its Spanish-language series continue the Eurocentrism of Mexican television and classed spectatorship dynamics (Llámas-Rodriguez 2020; Straubhaar 2021). Based on my review of online interviews with directors and cast members, and thematic analysis of NLA series, I argue that the historical presence of American cable television has an equal if not more powerful ideological basis for the narratives of these series as well as critics’ and audiences’ positive reception.