When I was a kid, weeknights were mommy and me time and telenovelas were our gateway to adventure. Living in South Central, LA as undocumented immigrants, we weren’t exactly worldly. The most exotic location we braved was driving 45 minutes to Beverly Hills to trick-or-treat in the rich people neighborhood every Halloween.
Early in the night, there were the super campy ones on Univision, like Rubi and Luz Clarita. After 9 pm came the racy ones, the ones on Telemundo that were often Brazilian imports dubbed in Spanish and featuring actual sex scenes and boobs. Boobs! My mom would kick me and my sisters out when those came on so that she and my grandmother could watch with abandon. I was never one for rules, so I would army crawl through the doorway, under the cover of her bed frame, and watch from the floor at the foot of the bed.
My favorite was El Clon. Set between Morocco and Brazil, it told the story of Jade, the rebellious daughter of a strict, Muslim family, and her fight to follow her heart. Jade gets caught in a love triangle with Lucas, a wealthy Brazilian businessman, and his 20-year-old clone Leo (who is actually the clone of Lucas’ deceased twin Diego). Watching El Clon was the closest we could get to seeing a world beyond our own.
El Clon also opened up discussions between my mother and me about women’s rights around the world. About a woman’s right to choose her own destiny—a choice that my mother felt had been robbed from her. She was 15 when she became pregnant with my oldest sister, a result of losing her virginity to my father. By the time she was 20, she had three kids and the equivalent of an 8th-grade education. She told me that if she had had the choice, she would have liked to own a flower shop.
The telenovelas of my childhood are what inspired Princess of South Beach, the telenovela podcast I launched last fall with Sonoro and I-Heart Media. From its inception, the project was meant to be popcorn—with the pandemic raging, I thought we all deserved something campy and silly to enjoy. The show opens with a ridiculous boat crash and a mistaken identity twin swap, and it only gets crazier from there. It is equal parts real-telenovela and self-aware telenovela parody. Through its 36-episode run, it gleefully dances between the two. There are fake pregnancies, blackmail schemes, and a loan shark subplot that may or may not be inspired by Uncut Gems.
For me in New York City and for my character Gloria (the daughter of “the wealthiest couple in Florida,”) the choice to have an abortion was as simple as an afternoon off from work. For millions of women around the world, it is a choice they still cannot freely make for themselves.
In episode 8, our protagonist, Gloria Calderon, is revealed to have had an abortion in a throwaway plot twist. The abortion is never really mentioned again. There is no long monologue about how she felt about it or a scene where she grapples with the choice. It is simply a thing that she did, and the plot moves forward.
In the summer of 2019, a year before I started writing this show, I had an abortion. It was three months before my wedding, and I found out I was pregnant after peeing on a stick at a pool party on a rooftop in Manhattan. My then-fiance and I went to a Chipotle, talked it over, and both agreed that it wasn’t the right time. Within a week, the incident was behind us. We got married, had our honeymoon, and haven’t thought about it much since. The plot moved forward.
When I later talked to my mom about it, she reminded me that in El Salvador, the country where my family is from, abortion is illegal. The only reason I even had the choice was because they had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980’s, fleeing a bloody civil war that claimed members of my family as victims.
El Salvador is one of many nations in Latin America that bans abortion under all circumstances, including rape, incest, and to save the mother’s life. Since 1998, more than 140 women have been jailed under the accusation of having ended their pregnancy. Doctors have been known to report women suspected of having an abortion. Women have suffered miscarriages and stillbirths at home, avoiding the hospital for fear that a trip to the doctor could land them in jail.
The fact that a character in my story could have an abortion and it not be a big deal is a luxury that is not lost on me.
The fact that my mother, who is now living out her retirement in El Salvador, can listen to the show freely on its open RSS feed, is also not lost on me. She and my father chose to retire to El Salvador after living out the last 20 years in Texas—a state that recently passed one of the most stringent abortion laws in the U.S., a law that is currently being debated in the Supreme Court.
I had an abortion. It was three months before my wedding, and I found out I was pregnant after peeing on a stick at a pool party on a rooftop in Manhattan. My then-fiance and I went to a Chipotle, talked it over, and both agreed that it wasn’t the right time.
For me in New York City and for my character Gloria (the daughter of “the wealthiest couple in Florida,”) the choice to have an abortion was as simple as an afternoon off from work. For millions of women around the world, it is a choice they still cannot freely make for themselves.
When I set out to write a fun, fluffy telenovela, I used the classics as inspiration. I wanted to pay homage to the stories we all loved growing up, but also do something new with a genre that desperately needed to be brought into the 21st century. Historically, telenovelas have only featured light-skinned Latines (See this wonderful interview with Amara la Negra on how this trend still continues today), are full of toxic masculinity, and emphasize tired gender norms (see this hilarious and slightly disturbing plot summary of beloved telenovela Maria la del Barrio).
For decades, telenovelas have been the singular piece of media that has brought together generations of women. Through larger-than-life plot twists and silly stock characters, these stories have given women a chance to explore a world beyond their front doors—a world that has often been unreachable. So yeah, they needed to be better.
With Princess of South Beach, I knew that this podcast was an opportunity to reach Latine audiences around the world, and give them some familiar comfort food amidst a pandemic that has disproportionately affected our communities. It was also my chance to normalize things that I’ve never seen in a telenovela before. And while it has moments of absolute frivolity (like calling a gynecologist the “vaginacologist”), it also touches issues that are new frontiers for the format. Issues like gay conversion, a subject that is almost non-existent in the U.S. media landscape and is an even harsher reality for LGBTQ youth in Mexico.
I hope that Princess of South Beach rights some of the wrongs of telenovelas past, and gives women everywhere a window into a world beyond their own. A world where we normalize a woman’s right to choose and decide our own destinies. That is the world my mother dreamt of for me, and the one I hope to leave for future young women army crawling at the foot of the bed.
