Late
Friday night I posted an entry about the Final Episode of La Madrastra and
since then a few hundred people have entered Clemenseando via search
engines.
Well,
actually I don't know that for a fact. It could be the same person typing out several dozen queries in English and Spanish through ninge different search
engines over the course of a month. But that doesn't seem likely, either. I
don´t mention this out of vanity (after all, we are talking about a
pathetically low number) rather out of curiosity as to the identity of these
folks.
I
am particularly intrigued by those searches in English. The data set is tiny
but I'd like to hazard a guess. Namely, there is a population of
English-dominant viewers out there watching telenovelas. (By the way, I hate the term English-dominant
it reeks of S&M.) Furthermore, I am willing to pile rampant speculation
atop my guess and suggest these English-language searchers might be Hispanics who
do not feel comfortable writing in Spanish. Of course, my theory is built on a
house of cards but I am attached to it. I have always thought if I were running
a small station in Iowa I would buy telenovelas and air them dubbed or with
subtitles.
Many
people understandably heap scorn on the genre for its melodrama and low
production values. Yet, you only have to watch a single episode of a popular
telenovela to understand its stranglehold on people around the world.
Telenovelas
are like crack cocaine and a whole lot of people are addicted.
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