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It's all just a typical week on "La Vida en el Espejo" ("Life in the Mirror"), a prime-time soap on the Spanish-language Telemundo network.

Also Today All in la familia! A week in the life of "La Vida en el Espejo," one of the hottest prime-time telenovelas. By Andrés Martínez

What would Tita make of all this? My grandmother, who passed away the year the Berlin Wall came down, was a devoted fan of Mexico's notoriously overwrought yet prudish soaps, known as telenovelas. I hadn't watched one since the last time I visited her apartment more than a decade ago. I was in for a shock when I tuned in "La Vida en el Espejo" recently. These are clearly not my grandma's telenovelas.

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Poetic soccer and melodramatic telenovelas have long been Latin America's prime contributions to global pop culture. In the early 1990s, Russians' first mass infatuation as capitalist consumers, much to the horror of the nation's intelligentsia, was with a syrupy Mexican telenovela from the late 1970s, "Los Ricos Tambien Lloran" ("The Rich Also Cry"). Moscow-based Western journalists marveled at the power of this dated Mexican series to bring the Russian nation to a standstill. Warring factions in the Caucasus reportedly arranged cease-fires around the show, which had babushkas swooning over the chivalrous Latin males and Russian men worshiping the dewy-eyed star, Veronica Castro.

One of Tita's all-time favorites, "Los Ricos Tambien Lloran" was the archetype of telenovelas churned out by powerful Mexican broadcaster Televisa. It was a Cinderella tale, with Castro playing a pure-hearted maid who works for a rich family. She falls in love with the family's son, they have a child, he cheats on her, she loses the child and must fight to regain it -- you get the picture.

The purity of the long-suffering lower classes and the hope of redemption in the form of social mobility were constants in traditional Mexican telenovelas, which in turn mirrored the national government's ideology. For decades Mexico was run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called it "the perfect dictatorship." Televisa was the state's most effective agitprop vehicle.

Emilio "El Tigre" Azcarraga, the since-deceased billionaire who ran Televisa in those years, famously said that he only answered to the president of the republic, and his telenovelas reflected the nation's reality as little as his newscasts did. Characters never discussed politics or what things cost; women were portrayed as incapable of leading fulfilling lives until and unless they walked down the aisle.

Azcarraga was also fond of saying that telenovelas should distract people from the dreariness of their everyday lives, declaring that most Mexicans were fregados, or "screwed." And perhaps this explains why, despite their decidedly simple production values, telenovelas have captivated audiences in more than 100 nations. People feel screwed in much of today's world, after all. Certainly the vast majority of suddenly "freed" Russians in the early 1990s didn't feel elated -- they felt left out.

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That was then. Now Mauricio is struggling with his sexual orientation on "La Vida en el Espejo," which aired in Mexico last year on Televisa's scrappy competitor, TV Azteca. The rivalry between the two networks is mirrored in the United States, where Los Angeles-based Univision has the exclusive rights to Televisa's fare and Miami-based Telemundo gladly picks up TV Azteca's more sophisticated telenovelas.

"'La Vida' is the most realistic telenovela I have seen," Elizabeth Mendoza tells me. I've invited myself over for dinner to get the scoop from some Colombian friends who live in my building. The Mendozas have been following "La Vida" since it began last month. Incidentally, that's part of telenovelas' allure: Running for only a few months, they have a beginning, a middle and an end, making them more like long miniseries than typical U.S. soaps, which can run for decades.

Next page | Bouncing stereotypical Latin gender roles on their head