"La Reina del Sur:" A Universal Story of Struggle

“La Reina del Sur”sets itself apart from traditional telenovelas as it is a story built across different countries like Mexico, Morocco, and Spain. This variety is setting, language, and culture demonstrates the influence of globalization on the genre of telenovelas. Universally appealing storylines of a reversal of fate targeted at a female audience are what keep telenovelas like “La Reina del Sur” competitive. 

While most telenovelas are filmed in one country and generally have actors of the same nationality throughout the storyline, “La Reina del Sur,” produced by Telemundo (an American television network), has a very diverse cast. For example, Kate del Castillo, who plays Teresa, is from Mexico, while Ivan Sanchez, who plays Santiago Fistera, Teresa’s new love, is Spanish. The languages used in the telenovela also add to its international feel. While the majority of the characters speak Spanish, there are still noticeable differences in the word choice of each character. Teresa uses Mexican colloquialisms, Santiago uses Spanish slang, and Teresa’s prison mate, Makoki, uses Colombian vernacular, creating three different subdivisions of the same language within the show. In addition, Arabic and Russian languages establish the foreign nature of the villainous cartels that Teresa has to face. Throughout the telenovela, language is used as a storytelling device that helps signal to the viewer when changes are happening in Teresa’s life and helps to partition the telenovela into de facto chapters. The first chapter takes place in Mexico, with the auditory cues the accent and Mexican slang of Teresa’s first love, el Güero. After the death of el Güero, Teresa’s new life is marked by a mixture of the bar owner Dris’ Arabic accent and Santiago’s Spanish accent, which helps the viewer understand the transition that Teresa is experiencing. With the death of Santiago, Teresa is once again in a new auditory environment, this time illustrated by Russian from the new cartel introduced into the story and Makoki’s Colombian accent.

These different languages signal something even more profound: the universality of the message of a telenovela. Ramón Escobar, an executive at Telemundo, explains that telenovelas set themselves apart from soap operas because of messages that are able to be applied and understood anywhere in the world because they “have a historical, political, or social framework” to which viewers can easily relate (Martínez, 2009). In particular, the trope of a struggling or poor woman who, through a reversal of fate, achieves a better life and socioeconomic status is something that is widely appealing to viewers (Martínez, 2009). This storyline especially targets women, the main audience for telenovelas, as “[women] are more likely than men to fall on hard times” as in “urban areas, 48 percent of women lack their own income,” (Martínez, 2009).

In each auditory environment and country in which Teresa finds herself, she is surrounded by women in poverty who struggle to make better lives for themselves, demonstrating the universal nature of this storyline. In Mexico, Teresa starts out as a relatively poor working woman who has to survive on her own, but when she meets el Güero, her fate changes, and she finally has someone who provides and cares for her until fate leaves her on her own once more. In Melilla, Teresa’s best friend, Fatima, works as a prostitute for Dris in the hope of someday reuniting with her son. In the end, with the help of Santiago and Teresa, Fatima is able to bring her son from Morocco to live with her, and they start to have a better life together. In the jail where Teresa is imprisoned in Spain, each of the women from various countries and statuses fight together and sometimes against each other to increase their power and level of respect within the prison so that they can survive. 

Seeing these stories in so many countries within the telenovela emphasizes the idea that this is a struggle that women all around the world face. Viewing the development of each of these characters highlights the idea of telenovelas being a “coping mechanism” for their audiences (Esther, 2009). It is this powerful and necessary escape that “La Reina del Sur” provides through the diverse environment that Teresa faces that makes it such an important telenovela when studying the influence of globalization on this media and its ability to connect to people across the world.        

Work Cited

Hamburger, Esther. “Drugs, Thugs and Divas by Oswald Hugo Benavides.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 1, 2009, pp. 4–6., doi:10.1111/j.1935-4940.2009.01045_13.x.

Martínez, Ibsen. “Romancing the Globe.” Foreign Policy, 20 Oct. 2009, foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/romancing-the-globe/.