Cry For Me, Argentina!: Taiwanese Soap Opera Diplomacy in Latin America

• Main Author: Lifshey, Adam
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: soap operas; soft power; Spanish; Taiwan; telenovelas
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss43/6; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2077/viewcontent/KK_2043_2C_202024_206_20Regular_20section_20__20Lifshey.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This essay examines the intersections of Taiwanese soap operas and foreign policy in Latin America, the one area of the world where Taiwan has retained some degree of formal diplomatic recognition despite the pressures of China. Yet has the decline in official Taiwanese power even in this region been compensated by a new kind of cultural power? The distribution of Taiwanese soap operas dubbed into Spanish from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s marks the first time that Taiwan tried to cultivate favor among Latin American publics at large. This was an explicitly diplomatic maneuver. But was it perceived as such by soap opera viewers in the Spanish-speaking Americas? When and how did Taiwanese soap opera diplomacy begin in Latin America, why did it apparently end, and did it ultimately work? Approximately eighty newspaper articles in Spanish from a wide range of countries across the Americas, plus corresponding visual and audiovisual materials online, furnish the basis of this study. The totality of media reports suggests that the pop culture strategy of Taiwanese foreign policy that was carried out in Latin America, though diplomatically unproductive in a material sense, was worth undertaking all the same.