Tomorrow, February 5, is Super Tuesday here in the U.S. This is the day in which 24 states, plus American Samoa, will hold caucuses or primary elections for one or both political parties. Fifty-two percent of the Democratic delegates and 41% of their Republican counterparts will be elected tomorrow. To say that it's a key date in the decision process to elect the next U.S. President is an understatement.
In several of these states the vote of Hispanic/Latinos/Latinas will play a crucial role. Therefore, some candidates (especially Democrats) have been courting their vote. It's fascinating to take a tour through the candidates websites and see how (and if) they assume the Latino vote as important:
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John McCain
Mitt Romney
Mike Huckabee.
Back in November I published a post about the intersections between telenovelas, politics and society in which I mentioned the three-episode pro-Barack Obama mini-telenovela prepared by Vote Hope targeting the Latino vote in California, a state that is Super Tuesday's juiciest prize.
This mini-telenovela has caught the attention of journalists, bloggers and immigration groups:
La Política
Comunidad
The Border Line
Hispanic Tips
The Huffington Post
But, this isn't the only telenovela related to the U.S. Presidential race. Voto Latino, an organization that seeks to empower the Latino community by encouraging its participation in all aspects of U.S. life, has an online spoof of a telenovela enticing Latinos to register and vote. Starring La Pasión de la Decisión are Rosario Dawson (co-founder of Voto Latino) and Wilmer Valderrama. So far, it has two episodes:
The question of whether these "telenovelas" will achieve their goals will take some time to be answered. Meanwhile, I'm very interested in finding out if these melodramas "feel" like telenovelas to those who have made of this TV genre a part of their everyday life.
2 comments:
Hi, so far the the Voto Latino spoof has received great comments on the MySpace page -sure there are those in the general market that don't quite get them but those who grew up watching telenovelas with their parents and/or grandparents say we've nailed it....
But more importantly, we've had more tan 670 people sign up as new friends on our site and registered over 7232 in four weeks. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=27055527
HI greenjelloo,
Thanks for the info. It's interesting to me because the spoof being in English, and using Dawson and Valderrama, seems to target younger Latinos, who probably try to distance themselves from telenovelas, so they "get it." I wonder if their parents would like it.
Again, many thanks.
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