It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

Kristy: Yeah. Though, and I’m not positive why I think this, I think coffee would probably be a quiet affair. He always sort of struck me as the strong silent one out of the Mexican Revolutionary generation. Maybe it’s all those images of him sitting soberly next to a laughing Pancho Villa. He also seems to be one of the revolutionary leaders least tainted by corruption–possibly because he died so early. So I’d like to have coffee with him just to see if my mythologized version is remotely close to the actual thing. I’d also like to ask him a few questions: what does he think of the end result of the Revolution? Is he satisfied with the reforms they instituted or does he think they failed? How does he feel about the problems currently facing Mexico?

Cammy: I’m not entirely sure yet…on the one hand, it’s coffee with a revolutionary, and, well, that in and of itself is interesting.  On the other hand, it’s coffee with a revolutionary, and that’s also kind of intimidating (and I’m not totally convinced it would be a quiet affair myself).  Like Kristy, I really want to hear what he’d have to say about Mexico’s current situation (I’m half expecting that we’d hear something to the tune of, “Well, no duh they have problems.  They STILL haven’t ever completely enacted my plan for land reforms!”).  I might have a better idea of what else to quiz him on once I watch one of the movies about him (procured mostly because it’s a chance to watch a costume drama in Spanish and partly because it has someone from the telenovela I’ve been watching), although I guess that alone begs the question of how he feels being mythologized….

Would we drink coffee with Sandra Cisneros?

Kristy:  Sure.  I kind of feel like I owe her at least a cup since Cammy and I met the third Reina Protestante, Mary, in a class where one of our big assignments was reading The House on Mango Street.  I also wrote one of my first grad school papers on “Woman Hollering Creek.”  I enjoy her writing because she’s one of too few (IMO) contemporary writers who write stories you can enjoy as casual reading that also have a rich deeper layer waiting to be explored if you so wish.  That balancing act isn’t easy and I think she does it well.  She’s also spent a lot of her life teaching and I’m curious to know whether that was a deliberate choice or just something to pay the bills.  Regardless, I’m interested in her views on education and a whole host of other issues.

Cammy:  Sure thing.  Anyone who chooses to live in San Antonio, Texas already stands a fairly good chance of being worth talking to.  And, as Kristy said, we totally met Mary in a class where we had to read The House On Mango Street.  Only it was La Casa en Mango Street for that class, and it was the first full book I ever read in Spanish (prior to that, the longest thing I’d read was a play).  For my part, I’d love to talk to her about her life going back and forth from Chicago to Mexico.  Nothing like a nomadic back-and-forth-between-worlds life to give a writer fodder for life.  I’m not sure I’d be able to hold up my end of the conversation as well as Kristy, but I’d be delighted to share a cup of coffee and listen in.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that US run television stations are not interested in even trying to keep daytime dramas alive.  Prime time is full of soap opera-y shows but if I may say so, many of them are… what’s the word… appallingly bad.  Which means that the one place left for us to turn is the delicious world of telenovelas.  Fortunately, it is an extremely delicious world.  As I once explained to a friend–Latin cheese is spicier.  And doesn’t mess around with any of that low-fat crap.

But even though the word “telenovela” is generally translated “soap opera” they aren’t exactly the same.  If you’re going to dive into this strange new world there are some things you should know.  Don’t worry, It’s My TV, It’s My Peanut Butter is here to help.

Before we go further let me admit upfront some of this information is dated.  I live in a horrible, horrible place where the only Spanish language channel you can get without paying exorbitant extra monthly fees is Gol TV.  So I haven’t been able to watch telenovelas in several years.  Fortunately Telemundo is apparently looking at increasing their online offerings, so there may be hope for me.

“But wait, Kristy!” you say, “Grande problemo!  I don’t speak Spanish!”  First of all, it’s “problema.”  Second of all, you should learn Spanish.  If for no other reason than being able to act superior and say, “You know, Shakira’s Spanish language stuff was soooo much better.”  Third of all, no hay problema.  You don’t really need to know Spanish.  You can figure out the gist of things without it.    And you can still enjoy the hot shirtless men.  Did I mention the hot shirtless men?  Why are you not watching these already?  But to help you out, here are a few key Spanish words and phrases that they might not have taught you in high school Spanish, but which are important for understanding telenovelas:

“engañar” “to deceive” In telenovelas a lot of people get engañado.  It’s usually key to the plot.  This word may often be used as a euphemism for “cheated on.”

“cualquiera”  One of my favorites though it sadly seems to be falling out of favor.  Literally it means “whatever” but in this form it’s usually used to refer to a woman.  A woman who is something so low you don’t even want to say it.  Because the word probably wouldn’t get past the censors.  Example:  Me engañaste con esa… cualquiera! (You deceived me with that… whatever!)

“amante” “Lover”  Don’t think I need to explain why this one is important.

“La SIDA” “AIDS”  Back in 2000 every Peruvian telenovela I saw had at least one character who contracted AIDS.  That plotline seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because it interferes too much with the sexypants times.

“de época” This is a term used to describe a certain variety of novelas that take place in a different historical era.  They are their own brand of scrumptious.

“mujer decente” A woman of upstanding moral character.  Often our heroine is una mujer decente, but this is less of an absolute than it once was.

“Un trago fácil” Literally “an easy drink.”  Here it means metaphorically the opposite of “Una mujer decente.”

“casa chica”  The place where a man keeps his mistress and her kids.  Keep in mind that last time I checked a man in Mexico could put his mistress and her kids on his health insurance policy.  Casa chicas are an institution.

Okay… other things you need to know.

1.  Telenovelas tell one story.  One horribly convoluted story, but like a novel, they have a beginning, middle and an end.  They are by design finite and rarely last more than a year.

2.  Because telenovelas tell only one story, sometimes it’s expedient to skip ahead twenty years.  They do not recast the adult characters with older versions, so don’t question why said characters have aged remarkably well.  Usually shows are kind enough to give you some visual cue that the characters have aged:  men may grow or lose facial hair, women may straighten their hair or start wearing it up.

3.  Sometimes one character in the middle of a large family will be obviously Eastern European.  No, this is not a sign that she (it’s usually a she) is the child of a Russian milkman.  You are simply meant to accept this.  I’m quite certain this is somehow Trotsky’s fault.

4.  The maid generally knows everything.  For this reason the “nice” characters are usually smart enough to befriend said maids.  The “bad” characters are usually dismissive of them.  Fools.

5.  Do NOT over think the costuming in novelas de época. You’re supposed to be having fun not commenting that a certain style of petticoat didn’t become fashionable till twenty years later.  The most amusing thing about the costuming is that characters only wear period style undergarments when that is all they’re wearing.  So get used to seeing our heroine wearing some 19^th century gown, clearly not wearing a corset, then suddenly wearing nothing but a corset.

6.  Telenovela theme songs are frequently earworms.  Sometimes they are better than the novela itself.  (See:  Vias del amor)

7.  The same telenovelas are frequently remade between different countries.  The first telenovela I really followed, Cuando seas mía was a Mexican remake of a Columbian telenovela Café con el olor de mujer.  (Best title ever!)

8.  It was not so long ago that the “good” girl on telenovelas did not have sex before marriage.  That’s less and less the case, but it’s still considered “bad” for a girl to have premarital sex.  Said rule doesn’t apply so much to the menfolk.  But more and more we seem to be getting the “bad girl” heroines who start off skanky then become one man women.

9.  You can wear a micro-mini skirt and still be a good girl.  You can sometimes show cleavage without sacrificing your virtue.  But if a woman wears shorts she is clearly a slut.

10.  If you watch American soaps you’re familiar with the powerful, rich, patriarch stock character.  The Asa Buchanans, the Palmer Courtlands, the Adam Chandlers (let’s have a moment of silence for them).  These guys still exist in telenovelas, but they have a stock female counterpart.  The power/money hungry matriarch.  She usually has an emasculated husband.  She is frequently evil.

11.  All women want babies.  If a woman does not want babies it is either because she is bad or because she is confused and doesn’t realize she desperately wants babies.

12.  Mexican men always have sex with their secretaries.  Clearly this statement is not entirely true, but keep that in mind when the woman constantly gives her husband’s secretary the stink eye.

13.  American or English men are almost always somewhat effeminate.  Live with it.

14.  Telenovelas make more of an effort to appeal to men than American soaps.   The downside of this is fewer women with an achievable, girl-next-door look.  The upside is they still have plenty of super hot shirtless men.

15.  Ranching in Mexico seems to consist of men riding around shirtless on horseback a lot.  I would totally live on a ranch in Mexico if I lived in a telenovela.

16.  Death is slightly more permanent in telenovelas than it is in soap operas or comic books, but only slightly.  And keep in mind, even if the hot guy dies in the first episode, he can still come back as his ambiguously evil secret agent identical twin.  When he does he will probably have a goatee so you know about his moral ambiguity.

17.  In the end, things will almost always end up the way they should.  Evil will be punished, good will be rewarded, and the girl will get the boy.

Welcome, gentle and not-so-gentle readers, to a new, highly irregular series here at It’s My TV, It’s My Peanut Butter.  I like to call it “People who got screwed by history.”  Tonight we explore the life and times of La Malinche (aka Malintzin Tenepal).

Facts about la Malinche are hard to come by, and those that we have are basically all contested in one way or another, but the basic story of her life, as best we can put it together is as follows:

She was born into an aristocratic family in a Nahautl (that’s Aztec to you gringos) speaking tribe, but was sold into slavery to a Maya group.  Then she was given with a bunch of other girls as a gift to Hernán Cortés when he invaded.  If you’re keeping track, she was fifteen years old and had already been traded as property twice.  She was also bilingual.  Cortés found this to be helpful being as he had someone with his group who spoke Spanish and Maya, but no one who spoke Nahuatl.  He was plotting to conquer the Aztecs, and it’s always helpful to have someone who can translate, just so people know they’re being conquered.  Clearly Malinche (that’s the name that got written down.  We’re pretty sure that’s not actually her name, but we have no clue what said actual name was.) fit well into said evil plans.

She wound up acting as Cortés’s translator during the conquest of Mexico, and if you’re thinking “translator” is some kind of euphemism, you have good instincts.  She also had a son with Cortés named Martín.  Eventually, Cortés had her married off to one of his lieutenants, Juan Jaramillo.  They had a daughter and she disappeared from history but is believed to have died young.  All round the poor girl had a fairly lousy life.

So you’d think history would show her a little sympathy.

Yeah… not so much.

Instead she gets called “La Chingada” (vaguely “a woman who’s been raped and liked it”).  To be Malinchista is to be a Mexican woman who is trying to be a gringa.  She’s accused of betraying her people to the Europeans (clearly this fifteen year old girl should have gone up against the Spanish army).  Strangely the warriors from other tribes who actually took up arms to help the Spanish fight the Aztecs don’t get blamed at all.  Nope.  Let’s pin it all on the chick.

Long story short, girl had a crappy life and then had the hell beaten out of her by history.

There’s some hope.  Mexican feminists have been calling “Bullshit” for the last half century or so and have made some progress in redeeming her memory.  But they have a lot of work left to be done.

If there’s a lesson to take away from her story it’s this:  History prefers martyrs to survivors.  And as long as most history books are written by men, everything that can will be pinned on a woman.

Like Water for Chocolate (1992)

Director: Alfonso Arau

Writer: Laura Esquivel (writer and screenplay)

Summary: Tita is cursed by family tradition to never marry and to spend her life caring for her mother.  Unable to marry her her true love Pedro marries her older sister so that he can be close to her.  Spending most of her life in the kitchen, Tita learns the power that food has to impact the emotions.

Things I liked: I’ll confess the novel is something of a guilty pleasure ever since I read it in and undergraduate Spanish class.  I love food and I love soap opera, so this movie was kind of made for me.  Lumi Cavazos who plays Tita is delightful—she has a wonderfully expressive face, and I like the fact that she’s beautiful, but not typically so.  I didn’t love Marco Leonardi as Pedro, but this could just be that I don’t love Pedro.  The movie gives a clearer picture of Gertrudis’s character than the book did and the actress who played her (Claudette Maillé) was fantastic.  Mama Elena may be a super bitch from hell, but you get why she became this way.  She had to raise a family and run a ranch all alone under very harsh conditions.  It’s no wonder she would become harsh herself.  The portrayal of Dr. Brown (Mario Iván Martínez) as the nerdy American makes me giggle a little at first, and yet, I still wind up wanting Tita to end up with him.  His American accent is far from flawless, but I’ll let it pass.  I’m not sure why American men in Mexican cinema tend to come off as slightly gay, but Dr. Brown definitely does.  Honestly the movie is a little prudish by Mexican standards.  A couple of booby shots, but that’s it.  I love the very end.  It’s all about women and tradition and food—three of my favorite things!

Things I didn’t love: A very minor thing, but I find it somewhat strange that there were no subtitles on the credits (I’m more or less fluent in Spanish, but I don’t necessarily know film terminology, so this was mildly vexing).  I almost felt like the food looked too realistic which at times makes it look unappetizing.  Given the magical quality of Tita’s cooking, I think they could have gotten away with making it a little more pretty.  It seems as though in period films and telenovelas in Mexico they only use period style undergarments when they know they’re going to be seen.  This drives me nuts, but this film is definitely no exception.  I’m fairly certain the only corset in the whole damn movie is the one Gertrudis hangs over the side of the shower.  The moment in which Tita finds out the truth about Gertrudis’s parentage might be a little confusing for anyone who hadn’t read the book—it might be too subtle.  The transition from talk of Tita and John’s wedding to Esperanza and Alex’s was clever, but perhaps the sort of thing that’s over done.  Granted, it’s been eighteen years since this movie came out, so maybe it was a little less trite then.  The part where Tita and Pedro die was also a little confusing, though it’s one of those scenes that is inherently hard to make visual.  I think it might have helped to have our female narrator come in and read the sequence out of the book.

Rating: Though it looks like there are more things I dislike about the movie than like, that’s not true.  3 ¾/5 jars of peanut butter

Nuke your coffee and get ready to subtly text under the desk, kiddos, this is one of those moments in which we here at It’s My TV, It’s My Peanut Butter attempt to be informative.  About something that’s generally pointless that you will almost certainly not ever need to know.  It’s time for one of my favorite historical conspiracy theories…

Quetzalcoatl was a Viking!

You’ve probably heard of Quetzalcoatl at some point, most likely in the very early stages of American history when they told you the cute little story about how when Hernán Cortés first arrived in Mexico the Aztecs thought he was their god Quetzalcoatl.  I mean, “cute” in the sense that the story ends with several indigenous cultures being essentially wiped from the earth, but it makes a nice narrative.

It’s not that this narrative isn’t true so much as it’s been overly simplified like a lot of the history you learned in school.  And it’s based on imperfect and incomplete sources.  So the actual facts are a little fuzzy.

What we know for certain is that Quetzalcoatl is Nahuatl (Aztec for you gringos) for “plumed serpent.”  Images of serpents with rings of feathers around their necks appear all over Mesoamerica for the last millennium at least.  For simplicity’s sake we refer to them all as Quetzalcoatl though we have no idea what some of them were called.  I have a picture of me petting Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan.  The Mexica (also Aztec, just go with it) had a mythohistoric story about a Toltec king named One Reed Topiltzin (that’s a perfectly normal Toltec name) who was allied with Queztalcoatl to the point he came to be perceived as Quetzalcoatl’s avatar.  He reigned in peace and prosperity as figures in such stories always do, and things were going swimmingly until he started rethinking that whole human sacrifice.  (Oh yeah, in Toltec society you could totally have peace and prosperity while sacrificing large numbers of people).  This is when the god Huitzilopochtli (god of war and human sacrifice) got his feelings hurt.  It’s never a good idea to offend a god.  Because Huitzilopochtli tricked him in to committing incest, which was a major taboo, causing One Reed to send himself into exile.  He and his followers got on a raft and sailed out into the Gulf of Mexico, vowing to return again in the year One Reed.  Said year cycles around every 52 years.  Sure enough, one of those years was 1519—the year Cortés arrived in Mexico.

Supposedly part of what caused the Mexica to mistake Cortés for Quetzalcoatl was his fair skin and red beard which sorta-kinda-maybe-in-a-roundabout-way-but-not-quite looked like the wreath of feathers around Quetzalcoatl’s head.  Remember that most Native Americans can’t grow facial hair.  So a beard was really weird (and rhymes).

This is around where things get interesting.  It turns out that the same year the Toltecs record the departure of One Reed Topilzin, the Mayas down in the Yucatan record the arrival of some dude named Kulkulkan.  What does “Kulkulkan” mean?  Rochester.

No, seriously, it means “feathered serpent.”  This has led many scholars to think there’s a chance that this One Reed fellow was a real person, not just a legend.

Hmm… and if there really was a One Reed Topilzin, who was also known as the “plumed serpent” and if the Mesoamericans thought a pasty dude with red hair looked like a plumed serpent… maybe there’s a little bit of ancestral memory going on here.  Maybe One Reed Topilzin was not only real, he was European.  Now obviously, the Spanish navy around the Tenth Century was nowhere near skilled enough to have made it to Mexico.

But you know who could have?  Vikings.

Yes, people have evidently done experiments (because there are people out there with even less of a life than I have) and it turns out that if you hug the coastline it is actually possible to get a Viking longboat from Scandinavia to Mexico.

So maybe, just maybe, One Reed Topilzin was not so much semi-divine as he was Nordic.  Clearly the Vikings didn’t stick around long enough to leave any evidence, which is not surprising at all when you consider there was no such thing as sunscreen back then and they were likely roasting in Mexico.

Long and the short of it is you can take all your Chariots of the Gods/Stargate Quetzalcoatl was an alien crap and flush it.  The truth is out there.  And by out there, I mean in Norway.  Quetzalcoatl was a Viking.

So today was one of those Americans-use-a-minor-holiday-in-another-country-as-an-excuse-to-drink days.  My first question is:  why does one need and excuse to drink tequila and eat Mexican food?  I do both on a regular basis.

I was initially going to channel my inner Latin American Studies Major/intellectual snob and give you the real low down on Cinco de Mayo.  But I think there’s plenty of that on the internets already and if you haven’t heard yet, it’s probably because on some level you don’t want to.  So instead, I thought I’d attempt to be amusing.

As mentioned, I was a Latin American Studies Major, so I had to take quite a few Latin American History classes.  Cammy even took one of them with me.  But like all college courses, when you learn that much that quickly, only some of it sticks in your mind.  So nine years after my last Latin American History course, here’s what I took away: (In the horrifying event that any of my Latin American History profs is reading this, this is not actually all I remember, just the high points)

–If you’re going to invade Mexico, don’t go through Veracruz.  You’ll just get yellow fever and die.

–Never try to start a popular uprising in Brazil.  It won’t work out.  At least not in your favor.

–The first president of Chile was named Bernardo O’Higgins.  Un nombre bien espanol!

–Never trust a Basque.

–Obedezco pero no cumplo!  Translation:  The king is too far away to know if I ignore his edicts.

–Why shoot your boyfriend when you can get your dad or your brother to do it for you?

–Killing yourself on the radio is one heck of a way to get yourself remembered.  Except I can’t remember the name of the guy who did it.  I’m reasonably certain it was in Cuba.

–Avoid putting your country near Chile is a bad idea.  They’ll just steal your coastline.

–Speaking of which:  donde estaban los ariquipenos cuando invadieron los chilenos?

–Sometimes the first experience with a corrupt dictator isn’t enough.  So you re-elect them.  Then overthrow them again.

–Where was the Monroe Doctrine when the French came to get their cream puffs back?

–Also, the French are the only people who will invade a country over pastries.

–Paraguay is full of badasses. Or it was.  And that’s why it took Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay five years to nearly wipe them out.

–Basing your entire economy on sugar is not a great idea.  Diversify and add rum.

So we’ve kind of exhausted the supply of Founding Fathers (John Adams declined our invitation on the grounds that coffee makes him jittery) so we had to move on to another category.  Nuns!

Would we drink coffee with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Kristy: Absolutely!  Sor Juana was, by all account, absolutely brilliant.  I like talking to smart people even though doing so often makes me feel incredibly bad about myself.  And she certainly knew the value of education, though that was the sort of thing that could get a woman burned at the stake by the inquisition in her day.  Gotta love a woman who isn’t afraid to go against the grain, but is smart enough to do so without winding up dead.  Sor Juana got out of that whole inquisition problem by becoming a nun, which made it harder to build a case she was a witch (didn’t prevent some serious scrutiny, but it made it possible or her to continue learning).  Modern scholars have wondered if the convent to dodge marriage strategy wasn’t more about being a lesbian than being a nerd.  I ask, can’t one be both?  Honestly, her sexuality is none of my business, but I tend to subscribe to the school of thought that says sexual orientation was not exactly the same back then as it is today.

Also, at the end of the day, I love her poetry.  I love how sassy it is, particularly for the 16th century and particularly for a nun.  Imagine how scandalous the lines “Pero cual es mas de culpar/aunque cualquiera malhaga/la que peca por la paga/o el que paga por pecar” (who is more to blame in whatever wrong doing:  she that sins for pay or he that pays for sin?)  Don’t you bet she would be awesome to sit with in a corner booth and mock people with?  I bet she could seriously fling some snark.

Cammy: Put me down as a tentative, but don’t expect me to say much A) because my Spanish is severely sub-par and B) because even though I do better with poetry in a language not my own, at the end of the day me and poetry?  Not so much.  But this gal sounds just a bit too intriguing not to meet–I applaud anyone who has the forethought to dodge the inquisition via a convent.  Although that does sound a bit like a “lesser of the evils” trade off.  And, of course, anyone who might be willing to sit around and mock people (and, possibly places and things–why limit ourselves to just humans?) over coffee is someone worth braving the language barrier to meet.