Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture
by Masha Salazkina
University of California Press, £25

WHY would a mother in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s as it clawed its way out of the darkness of Stalinism into a new dawn name her daughter Lolita — and not Audrey, Marilyn, Lucille or Debbie?

After all, the latter were setting aflame the passions of the Western world as Hollywood starlets became the face of a new form of cinema extending US cultural imperialism and the “American way of life” across the globe.

Surely the Russian mother could not be naming her daughter after the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita.

The answer resides in phenomena that reflected an early globalisation of popular culture that was occurring outside the predictable centres of the United States and Europe.

The name belonged to the Argentinian film actor and singer Lolita Torres who, while in the 1950s enjoyed only modest celebrity during her own country’s cinematic golden age, was in the 1960s received with adulation in Russia.

Torres became such a celebrity in the Soviet Union that many local singers and actors began to imitate her. Masha Salazkina points out that she was so popular, her name was bestowed upon many girls born in the population boom of that decade.

The success of this actor offers a template for the subsequent Soviet appetite for Latin American popular media, its antecedents being post-Stalinist liberalisation.

This limited opening to outside influences set in motion subsequent cultural dynamics marked, among other things, by popular enthusiasm for all things foreign, not least Latin American cinema and music.

Nonetheless, Lolita’s impact would be surpassed beyond measure by a fascination for Mexican, and later Brazilian, popular cinema that ultimately had consequences for the emergence of a truly globalised culture.

Romancing Yesenia chronicles and seeks to explain the unexpected popularity of the Mexican film Yesenia (Alfredo Crevenna, 1971) in the Soviet Union.

Set during the French intervention in Mexico (1861-67) this mostly unremarkable melodrama was based on a successful television series, itself an adaptation of a women’s romantic graphic novel, a genre common in Mexico.

Screened in the USSR in 1975, Yesenia became the highest-grossing film in the history of Soviet cinema, unsurpassed by any movie, foreign or domestic, watched by an astounding 91.4 million viewers in only the first year of its release.

Moreover, this popularity in the Socialist bloc went largely unnoticed by the film’s Mexican producers, even as it migrated from cinemas to television screens and video — and thence with gusto to a similarly fascinated China in the late 1970s.

Salazkina argues that Yesenia’s popularity shaped a crucial new development in the globalisation of culture by enabling Latin American media’s transcontinental reach for the first time. This arguably culminated in the astonishing international success of the Brazilian telenovela The Slave Isaura (Globo, 1976) in the 1980s.

Isaura was sold to an astounding 104 countries and is often considered to have been the most dubbed show in the history of television, clocking up a worldwide audience in their billions.

The success of Yesenia and Isaura underscored the expanding transnational reach of the Mexican and Brazilian television conglomerates Televisa and Globo, and opened the floodgates to the Latin American telenovelas that proliferated in the 1990s.

Salazkina studies the reception of Mexican melodrama within the USSR in the 1970s as a crucial transitional moment that would inform the later notion of the “global-popular,” explored in cinematic culture by, among others, Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar.

This term alludes today to an essentially neoliberal global culture, often fitting far too neatly into a deterministic post-cold war historiography in which the revolutionary societies of Mexico and the USSR both gave way to a triumphant Washington consensus.

But as Salazkina notes, the meeting of minds between the Mexican and Soviet audiences in the 1970s through cultural phenomena such as Yesenia predated this neoliberal nightmare, challenging scholarly assumptions about globalisation.

She writes: “Could longer genealogies of the global-popular be constructed to challenge this reified conventional historiographic understanding? How would it alter our conceptualisation of global media circuits and their origins? And could such earlier histories change how we think of the continuities and ruptures, as well as the politics and ideologies, of the global-popular today?”

She seeks answers to these question in a fascinating comparison of the cultural contexts in both Mexico and the USSR in this period, finding many points of convergence.

In the author’s analysis, Yesenia puts into relief key social, cultural and political developments that reflected the transition beginning in the 1970s from versions of state socialist, nationalist and internationalist formations to the early emergence of neoliberal ideologies on a global scale.

While in both cases, as history has shown, the impending collapse of the system was ultimately inseparable from the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, “in its transitional nature the 1970s was a period not yet overdetermined by the impending neoliberal globalisation, containing instead multiple possibilities for political and cultural development, however unrealised.”

This book is a welcome and refreshing antidote to the history of cinema that we are so commonly force-fed in which US movie stars took the message of postwar optimism to a welcoming and grateful world. In fact, Mexico was doing so as well.

Thus, in 1991 in the dying days of the Soviet Union, viewers were tuning into the Mexican telenovela Los Ricos Tambien Lloran, The Rich Also Cry (Televisa, 1979-80) in numbers that greatly surpassed those of the contemporaneous US soap opera Dallas (1978-91).

As such, Salazkina’s scholarship alludes to an optimistic internationalism that both challenged and subverted Western cultural domination, a process that has arguably begun to repeat itself in the contemporary era as neoliberalism, ironically, enters its death throes.  

As she notes, one reason why the history of Latin American popular media consumption in the Socialist bloc has been largely ignored is that it disrupts established scholarly narratives around transnational circulation and affective communities, by which the historical audiences of Latin American cultural production have been presumed to be primarily regional.

This book seeks to reconstruct a specific historical transnational circuit — in this case spanning from Latin America to the Soviet Union — as another possible “prehistory of contemporary global media circulation.”

Salazkina writes: “With all its distinctiveness, its Soviet-Latin American iteration, I argue, should not be thought of as either a historical anomaly or a cultural curiosity. The phenomenon of transnational film and popular media circulations bypassing the global North is historically anything but exceptional.”