Who is the Sexy Spanish Woman?: a Critical Essay by Jay Belandres-Mendoza

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In their article “Sexualization in U.S. Latina and White Girls’ Preferred Children’s Television Programs,” Elizabeth McDade-Montez, Jan Wallander, and Linda Cameron discuss children’s television shows exoticizing female characters. Specifically, in the section “The Role of Ethnicity,” they highlight this happening to Hispanic or Latina women and describe how “Latina characters in mainstream media are often marginalized and sexualized in a centuries-old process of ‘exoticizing’ or ‘tropicalizing’ Latinas” (2, McDade-Montez et al.). Furthering this discussion, they consider the effects this representation has on the people watching it (1), such as lower self-esteem, body image issues, and mental health disorders. They discuss how “research based on cultivation theory has demonstrated that Latino/as who view English-language television are likely to accept the negative, stereotyped portrayals of Latino/a characters as real” (2). Since children seek role models, if networks hypesexualize and exoticize the only ones they make available (especially female minority characters), this could lead to damaged mental health which can manifest in body image issues and self-esteem struggles. In turn, children viewing these depictions begin to see such behaviors as “rules” rather than harmful stereotypes. 

Not only do these portrayals define “rules” for the impacted groups, but it also leads others to believe the assigned behaviors are relevant and accurate, whether it be a Latina’s sexual nature or an African’s wildness. In Iwona Anna and Bara Ndiayea’s article titled “Sociocultural Stereotypes in Media and Intercultural Communication (Africa in the Polish Media),” they discuss how the depiction of African people in Polish media influences Polish people into believing media-assigned stereotypes are true. In particular, the authors state “mass media exert a great deal of impact on social life and people's perception of reality. They also form opinions, and patterns of behavior, as well as language, and national culture. Because the media operation is accessible, widely distributed, and credible among audiences we may assume that they shape the vision of reality for their recipients” (72, Ndiayea and Ndiayea). The effects “media operations” have include xenophobia, discrimination, and racism. They conclude that “the media image of Africa leads to negative evaluation of Africans living in Poland, severely hindering conflict-free intercultural communication” (75). Therefore, this effect the media has is more outward than the impacts on Latinas discussed previously, but the harm on the “other” is still there. 

Dailihana E. Alfonseca’s story “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother” takes these stereotypical portrayals and how people internalize them and injects them into the character’s narrative. It demonstrateshow harmful and long-term these effects on self-image, views on their futures, and relationships with men (involving sexual assault and abuse) can be when placed into a real-world scenario. In addition to this, Alfornseca describes the main character’s struggle with her identity as a Latina and her self-perception because of the “sexy Spanish woman” in the soap operas she watched while growing up in the United States after moving from the Spanish Caribbean. The story does not only focus on the main character and how the media stereotypes affect her internally but also how she views the impacts the stereotypes have on her mother externally through changes in her behavior and health. Therefore, connecting these story elements—sexy Spanish women, soap operas, and real-world consequences like the mother’s death—highlights the cause-and-effect of stereotyping minority groups and how deep it can go. 

Exposing children in these minority groups to these stereotypes implants a confining lens through which they view themselves,  allowing only the stereotypical vision perpetuated by the media to be how they filter their actions in order to fit into society. The first time the narrator encounters the sexy Spanish woman is when her “[Abuela] places us in front of the telenovelas. We learn that Spanish women are sultry, and sexy, and dramatic, and loud, and crazy. [...] We learn that women behave like flies caught in the web of men and money. Wriggling in skirts, and heels, and eye shadow only to further fasten our fate and be devoured by phallic ruthlessness” (Alfonseca, 111-2). The word “fate” indicates that she believes the woman she is seeing on screen is her predetermined future. As the narrator grows up, and internalizes the “rules” the soap operas taught her so she can fit in, she claims to feel more American. Though, her concern about how men perceive her embeds itself in this. She claims, “Boys gave me the key to womanhood and I was now an Americana who rolled up her skirt when she got on the school bus and put on the lip gloss she hid in a pencil case and shaved her legs without permission” (114). The word “Americana” both distances the narrator from her Latin identity and pulls her further into it; describing herself as “Americana” instead of “American” shows that she needs to fit into the predetermined stereotype. In this case, stereotypical media representation leads the main character to close her mind to what she could have become; instead, she follows the “rules” she learned from the sexy Spanish woman. 

These rules only make the narrator’s life worse, putting her in dangerous, vulnerable situations in her adolescence, including a situation where she finds herself forced to agree to a sexual act. One day, the narrator surprises a boy with her “good” English. He thought she was not from the United States. This makes the narrator proclaim, “I no longer possess the tongue of mar y sol. I am now a real Americana just like the girls in the lifetime telenovelas who overcome and make it to Harvard. ‘That will be me one day,’ I say” (114). Since she feels like the boy does not see her as a sexy Spanish woman, she canopen her mind to more possibilities. However, they are still within the confines of what the soap operas have shown her. Even with this newfound resilience, she cannot hold onto it for long. The narrator gets into a car with a boy and feels trapped after she finds out he wants to have sex with her. She expresses, “I must follow through or else I know where I am or what I am going to do” (116). This confusion surrounding a sexual act that the narrator does not want to do is because of what the soap operas taught her—she only has value in society if she is provocative or sexy. After this, the narrator concludes “I am no longer the honored Ivy League hopeful. Instead I have begun to idolize the women in the screen just as my mother before me” (117). Tying in the fate discussion from earlier, this seems to be the resolution for the narrator. Ultimately, she feels that she has become what her predestined future was. The impacts of stereotypical media physically manifested in the narrator’s character and story through the ways it shaped her mind from a young age and how these lessons hurt her in the end, specifically feeling as though it was her fate to become what she grew up watching. 

The soap opera lesson did not just hurt the narrator, they inflicted similar pain on her mother who also fell into the sexy Spanish woman trap—or “fate.” When the narrator is still a child, she watches her mother “[dress] and [head] toward the places that make her feel like the women in the telenovelas. Our grandmother watches over us as the city of New York swallows Mami’s soul. Just like the characters she idolizes on the bright neon screen of possibilities” (112). Whether it be for money, pleasure, or any other reasons, the mother actively molds herself into the “sexy Spanish woman” mold. Though the reader never sees the mother’s interiority, it is safe to assume it is similar, if not the same, to the narrator’s because they were exposed to the same media stereotypes. The narrator confesses, “Mami cries all the time now. She yells all the time now. She’s sick all the time now. [...] But still she goes out. The men, they holler and they praise but they never stay. A product of ’90s disco and New York grime.” (112-113). The sexy Spanish woman facade is actively harming her mother. Yet, she does not give up her entryway into societal acceptance for the betterment of her health. This persistence begins to bleed over into the narrator’s life, affecting her more personally. Presumably, the mother meets a man out in the city and begins to form a relationship with him. However, it is not a good relationship because the narrator begs her mother “to leave him, to choose her children over this man, but her response is that I am not the master of her fate and destiny. [...] I did not understand the life of a single mother who puts up with men to feed her children. I did not see the bruises underneath the cellulose makeup of her skin, of her body” (115). Again, this brings up the topic of "fate." At this point, it connects the sexy Spanish woman's fate to this abusive relationship implying the mother's perception of her own fate is what made her vulnerable to this relationship. The close-minded, constricting world view that this stereotypical media causes also could have shut off the mother to any idea that she could have a life outside of the one she is living, making her reliant on an abusive man. The impacts both these women face from the elusive sexy Spanish woman’s “rules” in their lives has manifested in different, but painful, ways. 

And yet, the sexy Spanish woman’s impact does not stop there, but goes all the way to put the narrator’s mother in her grave because of the way the soap operas affected her sense of self-worth. The narrator asserts, “The would-be truths that lay behind my eyes reflect the lies [my mother] lets inside: that she is both worthless and invisible” (116–7). These lies that exist within both the narrator and her mother revolve around the soap operas and how deeply affected the both of them. For the mother, they made her feel worthless and invisible. Using the phrase “would-be truths” and the mirroring effect between the narrator and her mother elicits the conversation surrounding fate once more. Except, this time the narrator’s fate is her mother’s reality. The narrator seems aware about how the lies her mother has internalized from the soap operas will be the same lies she will let inside of herself eventually. However, these lies seem to be what caused the mother’s death. At the end of the story, the narrator declares, “‘I think the soap operas killed Mami’” (118). But it wasn’t just the soap operas, it was the stereotypical depictions of women that influenced her mother’s decisions and that is what led to her death. The cause-and-effect relationship that the narrator sees between the soap operas, her mother’s behavior, the lies she internalizes, and her death shows the extent stereotyping can have on the caricatured community.

Ultimately, Alfonseca’s story focuses on the harm that media stereotypes have on communities through the way it causes people to be self-critical, self-conscious, and self-limiting if they do not fit into these stereotypes. At large, people know the consequences of creating and perpetuating stereotypes in the media, so why is it still prevalent today? Oftentimes, these stereotypes are creative shortcuts for character, story, and plot development due to a myriad of reasons. If not that, then they came from personal biases that people hold and project onto characters they create. Understanding how stereotypes perpetuated by the media can harm people, especially those who belong in minority groups, can help in getting proper representation of cultures, ethnicities, races, sexualities, and identities on the screen.

Works Cited 

Alfonseca, Dailihana E., “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother.” Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize. Edited by Summer Farah and Sarah Lyn Rogers, E-book ed., Catapult, 2023, pp. 110–118 

McDade-Montez, Elizabeth, et al. “Sexualization in U.S. Latina and White Girls’ Preferred Children’s Television Programs.” Sex Roles, vol. 77, no. 1–2, 2017, pp. 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0692-0. 

Ndiayea, Iwona Anna, and Bara Ndiayea. “Sociocultural Stereotypes in Media and Intercultural Communication (Africa in the Polish Media).” Procedia, Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 154, 2014, pp. 72–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.10.114.