Identification, Social Representations, and Schooling in Chespirito's Television

• In Event: Resonances of El Chavo del 8 in Latin American Schooling, Childhood, and Societies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore political links between television content and the production of identifications and social representations of schooling. It is mostly a theoretical discussion based on characters of Roberto Gomez Bolaños’ television, which started during the last part of the 1960s in Mexico and has since spread throughout the continent and beyond. Chespirito provided an engaging short narrative about school in a society marked by poverty, exclusion and violence, producing an interesting and complex process of happy popular identification.

A main assumption in this paper is that, against ideas of manipulation or submission of audiences to media content, the way people and TV programs interact should be studied as an active process of overdetermination and resignification marked by contextual and historical conditions that influence the production of political and social identities. To provide a deeper understanding of this process, the link between content and audience can be explained attending not only to communicational dynamics, but also to signifying practices in a sociopolitical frame. The social representations and identifications generated in TV shows such as the one produced by Chespirito, should be problematised in this logic to make possible new explanations about the making of identities, of social bounding, of social equivalence and particularly, about the dynamics of politization “around media” which implies, among other things, the re-production of figures of state and society beyond political parties, government, affiliations, etc.

The paper is organised into three sections. In the first one, a context on the work of Roberto Gomez Bolaños -Chespirito- is provided. In the second one, the discussion addresses theoretical notions, such as interpellation and identification, as well as social representation. Here, the work of Roland Barthes, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Rancière and Jacques Derrida is evoked. The final and most important section deals with the content in one of the TV Shows invented by Chespirito: El Chavo, focusing on some particularities in the characters and the dialogues. The discussion deals with three processes: 1) the model of interpellation, 2) the idea of school and education, and its relation with the prevailing social structure of the show, and 3) the identification of the audience with the characters, the representation of the school and its implicit socio-political implications: the delightful acceptance of a “tragic representation” of school for a society in poverty.

For decades, the dynamics between education and media has been revised from different approaches, which have tried to study its effects on learning, classroom interaction and performance; this also impacted the way in which formal and informal education has been explained. Nowadays, social media has changed rapidly, moving the traditional boundaries of production, distribution and reception of content. One effect of the technological change is that many contents produced in the “old media” times, were not actually studied. El Chavo and its sociopolitical effects are one of them: for over 40 years Chespirito’s television delivered representations about society and schooling to millions of people that should be put under deeper intercultural scrutiny.

Author

• Ernesto Treviño Ronzon, Universidad Veracruzana