MEXICO CITY — The peasant costume of coarse brown fabric and flared skirt was designed to give Amor Huerta an innocent look, but nothing could conceal the 7-year-old's ambition.
"I want to be a very famous actress," Amor said, batting her eyelashes. She'll probably get her wish. As a graduate of Centro de Educacion Artistica, Amor is already on the inside track to global fame.
For 23 years, CEA has reigned as the most significant feeder in the world for the wildly popular serial melodramas called \o7 telenovelas.\f7
There's nothing make-believe about the importance of \o7 telenovelas\f7 for Televisa, the biggest media corporation here, which produced 48 of the 50 most-watched television programs in Mexico last year. Programming brought Televisa more than $510 million in profits last year.
Televisa, which owns CEA, produces the majority of the world's \o7 telenovelas,\f7 and exports them to 130 countries. The number of viewers on this planet who have watched a CEA-trained heroine snag herself a wealthy hero ranges into the billions, with Televisa shows among the most watched in virtually all those countries.
"Ten of 20 who graduate [from CEA] will be in \o7 telenovelas\f7 ," said CEA director Eugenio Cobo. "Three or four will be stars." In a more modest scenario, CEA graduates are nearly ensured that they can survive as working actors, which is no small feat in a country where millions of Mexicans head to the United States each year in search of work.
It may make acting purists cringe, but training for a career on the small screen is a wise investment in Mexico. Last year, Mexico's film academy helped fund a total of 18 films. In the first six months of this year, they gave money to only four, and none of them have been released yet. (During that same period, U.S. moviegoers could choose from more than 200 feature-length films.)
By contrast, Televisa produces 20 \o7 telenovelas\f7 each year, with episodes running five times a week for about three to four months. Cobo calculates that 4,500 roles were cast last year.
"In the United States, the real actors go into film. But here, in Mexico, the film industry is far behind the television industry," said producer Christian Bach, who left Televisa several years ago to do theater before she began working at TV Azteca, a smaller rival network launched in 1993. "There's not enough money for films. The best options are theater and television."
