I’m certain that my love for the dramatic came from the endless afternoons that I spent in front of a television screen completely hypnotized by the telenovelas of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Novelas are LATINX soap operas and truthfully, my favorite kind of cheesy content. I discovered what love was from them, I got life lessons from them and they even kick-started my love for writing. I was always trying to create the next big novela and from that came countless notebooks full of scribbles that amounted to extremely dramatic storytelling.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am extremely behind in classic American content. I haven’t seen most classic movies (and am constantly being shamed for it), but that’s because my younger years and adolescence were defined by the novelas that I was consuming.
My mom and I struggled a lot in my younger years; there was a lot of fighting and yelling that could be heard at the end of the street. Yet, we always had novelas. There was always this small window of time, before the fighting started, where we would sit together and watch a novela in the afternoon. It was precious time that I looked forward to every day and with her by my side is how I experienced Soñadoras, Clase 406, La Ursupadora and so many more novelas that shaped my dramatic ways.
Not only were novelas extremely influential in my never-ending mission to find the kind of true love that brings the most outrageous of situations to fruition, but they also created the … BEST (I said it) Mexican villain to ever exist.
Soroya Montenegro from the Mexican telenovela, Maria la del Barrio.
She is the Queen of memes, the master of crying, an artist when she’s fighting and we are so much better for having grown up with her.
The point being, I’m sorry that I’ve never seen a Star Wars film but I was busy trying to make my school uniform inappropriately sexy.
