I confess. I watch Spanish language novelas with all their stereotypes and overacting. I hide my addiction by saying I’m taping the show for my mom, but really watching a novela is like having a secret love affair. It’s dirty, short-lived, and with a predictable ending. Last night,the finale of Telemundo’s Tierra de Pasiones, delivered on all fronts. If you didn’t get to watch the final episode don’t keep reading. There are spoilers ahead.Marcia, the slutty blonde gold-digger dies(or does she?) a fiery, bloody boat crash death and Valeria, played by the heavily siliconed Gabriela Spanic, ends up walking down the aisle in a red dress to marry Francisco, played by the very sexy Saul Lisazo. At the wedding Valeria’s gay son takes his lover’s hand, the most intimate two men are allowed to get on Spanish network television, and seems not to be bothered by the fact that he can’t get married because of his sexual orientation.

Don Chema was not at the wedding. The dirty old man who pretended to be Valeria’s father and kidnapped her real son, faked his own death to escape from prison and is last seen in a Paris bar with two younger women. Belinda, his daughter, who first thought she was Valeria’s daughter, then sister and ended up being none of the above, didn’t go to the wedding either. The reformed heroin addict and loose woman is slowly wasting away thanks to AIDS.

See what I mean about stereotypes. Sure the novela had gay characters, dealt with drug addiction and wrangled with the notion that pregnant women are ok to have sex with, but it did it while calling tall, slender, implanted women who threw punches “marimachos” and curly headed men “negrito”. The “putas” of the show ended up with bloody deaths or wilting from sexually/drug transmitted illnesses and the bad men, well they run off to Europe.

I grew up on novelas like I grew up with green tins of soda crackers, Walter Mercado and Menudo. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to let them go even when I know they are bad for me and for the world at large.

Image Via / Intra Communications