Television is taking a turn for the brown. Even though The George Lopez Show was canceled, Latin Americans are making it big on television. There is a trend toward more Latino actors, with shows like Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, and USA's Burn Notice. All of these shows feature Latinos and Latinas at their best, and sometimes their worst. The good thing is, that they are decidedly Latin, they are on mainstream TV, and they are proud to be so. This is a good thing.
Ever since the beginnings of television, America has been bombarded with images of skinny, skinny women, who all looked basically the same, and all did basically the same thing. They raised children, took care of a house, got in trouble with crazy schemes, and all managed to be bailed out by their husbands or fathers in the allotted time. They had no style of their own, conformed to very tight standards, and smiled benevolently as they served the members of their households like ignorant, happy drones. These shows, and the actresses they cast, portrayed life as happy go lucky, and taught girls and boys that mothers are supposed to stay home and cook and wash and clean like they don't need anything as long as they can serve and keep the dust bunnies out from under the couch. Somebody ring the gong!
We've had a few shows since then that were not about such fantasy characters, but the characters still struggled with the notion that because their life did not conform to the standards they saw on white, middle-American TV , that it wasn't good enough. They struggled with the idea that they and their lives were not "normal". No one wanted to talk about the fact that almost everybody's mom worked in the 1950's and "60"s. Someone had to teach you how to roller skate with a giant tray balanced on one hand, and she probably was not your age. Someone had to care for sick patients in a hospital, and all of them could not possibly have been young and unmarried and or childless. Why do you think women started to speak out so loudly about equal pay for equal work and getting equal career opportunities? So while the "ideal" family life was idolized, it was not happening nearly as often as the media would have us believe.
The television industry showed an upper middle class, white suburban lifestyle that was rarely obtained in the areas where most people were raised. My grandmother and my great grandmother worked, and no one felt shame about this, and they didn't screw up entire production lines while they did it. In the 1970's there were shows like, That's My Mama, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and All in the Family, but Hispanics were still being stereotyped as either entertainers or silly, uneducated people who couldn't pronounce the letter Y.
The 1980's saw American television shows darken decidedly, with the success of the The Cosby Show, and others. The 1990's brought us the shows Living Single and Malcom and Eddie. It has taken forty years for mainstream television to darken; for tolerance, acceptance, and education to even out the color on our screens. It's nice to see women who have shapes and curves and style on television, rather than the bobble-head looks of years past. How many people do any of us know who actually look like a Paris Hilton or a Kelly Ripa? Kelly's a nice girl, she's a good foil for curmudgeonly Regis.
Would somebody take away her exercise equipment, and give her a cookie? Please. No one is really this skinny, without there being a serious health concern for them somewhere. I do not understand why a woman would ever want to exercise to the point that all her lovely curves are gone. Mark Consuelos is a handsome Latino. Why is he not on her to eat something, for crying out loud?
This is what the entire world can learn from the browning of our screens. Yes, there are exceptions to every rule, and somewhere, there are a few poor souls who are naturally as skinny as Kelly Ripa. Most people, however, are not so lean. We need a little body fat; when we lose too much weight, our bodies go into survival mode. Women and girls will stop having periods, stop developing. We are not meant for this. We are meant to have curves, we are meant to have a shape of our own. We are supposed to come in as many different shapes and sizes as we do colors, maybe more. This does not mean that we should not take care of our bodies, only that we should not obsess over the way they look.
