La Alborada (telenovela)

La Alborada (telenovela)
The title card of La Alborada; 1756 AN.
Genre	Telenovela
Created by	Idalia Bermúdez
Written by	Idalia Bermúdez
Directed by	Héctor Solano
Starring	Anaís Cordero Mateo Lebrón Pilar Quiñones Joaquín Benítez
Opening theme	"Alborada", performed by Anaís Cordero
Country of origin	Nouvelle Alexandrie
Original language(s)	Martino Wakara
No. of episodes	140
Production company(s)	Producciones Cemí
Release
Original network	Central Broadcasting Company
Original release	5.V.1756 AN until 17.XII.1756 AN

La Alborada (Martino for "the dawn") is a New Alexandrian telenovela that aired on the Central Broadcasting Company (CBC) from V to XII 1756 AN. It was produced by the Hato Rey studio Producciones Cemí and created and written by Idalia Bermúdez. Set in a Wakara fishing town on the Boriquén western coast, it follows Yarima, a poor young woman who is cast out by the wealthy family she marries into and returns years later, transformed and unrecognized, to reclaim what she lost. Anaís Cordero played the lead in her first major television role.

The series began in an afternoon slot and moved to prime time within weeks as its audience grew. Its finale, on 17.XII.1756 AN, drew an estimated 41 million viewers, the largest audience for an entertainment broadcast in CBC's history, and La Alborada became the most widely watched series the Federation had produced. Streaming on Interflix carried it into the Martino-speaking audiences abroad. It also became the first telenovela made in Boriquén to top the national ratings. The series drew attention for placing Wakara characters, language, and coastal life at the center of a national hit, and it prompted debate over its melodrama and its portrayal of wealth. Producciones Cemí announced a second season for 1757 AN.

Plot

Yarima is a young Wakara woman who lives with her grandparents, the fishers Guarí and Yabey, in the village of Yagüeca on the western coasts of Boriquén. She sells the day's catch at the roadside, swims in the shallows, and is rarely seen without her stray dog, Cohíba. She meets Rodrigo Valcárcel, the son of a Hato Rey shipping family, who is drawn to her and marries her partly in defiance of his stepmother, doña Rocío, who has arranged a match for him among the city's merchant houses. Rodrigo brings Yarima into the Valcárcel household, where doña Rocío and the rest of the family treat her with contempt for her poverty and her village speech.

When Rodrigo is sent abroad on the family's business, doña Rocío sets out to be rid of his wife. Yarima is falsely accused of theft, turned out of the house, and told that Rodrigo has abandoned her. In the weeks that follow her grandparents' home is destroyed, the old couple die, and Cohíba is killed. Believed dead by the family that ruined her, Yarima is taken in by don Renato Arteaga, a wealthy shipowner who slowly comes to understand that she is the daughter he lost years before. Under his care she is educated and remade.

She returns to Hato Rey as Solana del Río, an elegant and rich woman whom the Valcárcels do not recognize. Moving through the society that had cast her out, she draws doña Rocío's schemes into the open and turns the family's own creditors and rivals against it. Rodrigo, who never accepted that she was gone, is the last to see Yarima in Solana. The series ends with the Valcárcel fortune broken, doña Rocío disgraced, and Yarima restored to her name and reunited with Rodrigo.

Cast

• Anaís Cordero as Yarima, later Solana del Río, a fisherman's granddaughter who returns as a wealthy woman.
• Mateo Lebrón as Rodrigo Valcárcel, the shipping heir who marries her.
• Pilar Quiñones as doña Rocío Valcárcel, Rodrigo's stepmother and the family's matriarch.
• Joaquín Benítez as don Renato Arteaga, the shipowner who takes Yarima in and proves to be her father.
• Tomás Iriarte as Guarí, Yarima's grandfather.
• Carmen Aldea as Yabey, Yarima's grandmother.
• a supporting cast of the Valcárcel relatives, the household staff, and the fishers of Yagüeca.

Production

La Alborada was created and written by Idalia Bermúdez, a Boriquén screenwriter who had worked in radio drama before turning to television. The script reworked the familiar telenovela arc of a poor woman's fall and return, and set it in a specific place, a Wakara fishing community of the kind that rarely appeared on the national networks except as background. Bermúdez wrote the early Yagüeca scenes with passages of Wakara dialogue, subtitled in Martino, a choice the production kept despite early doubts from the network that a national audience would follow it.

The series was made by Producciones Cemí, a small Hato Rey studio for which La Alborada was a first national production. It was directed by Héctor Solano on a modest budget, well below the figures the Valencia Studios productions had spent on the form. Anaís Cordero, cast in the lead, had worked mostly in regional theater and was little known outside Boriquén; the role made her a national figure over the course of the season. The fishing-village scenes were shot along the Boriquén coast and the Valcárcel mansion at a restored estate near Hato Rey, with studio interiors at Producciones Cemí. The production ran to 140 episodes.

Music

The theme song, also titled "Alborada", was performed by Cordero and released as a single during the show's run. It reached a wide audience independent of the broadcast and became closely tied to the series, its opening bars enough to identify the show. Clips set to the theme circulated heavily on ClipWave, where the song outlived the finale.

Broadcast

CBC carried La Alborada on weeknights from 5.V.1756 AN. The network had bought it for an afternoon slot and moved it to prime time within a month as the audience climbed. The series streamed on Interflix alongside the broadcast, which carried it into Santander, Valencia, and Martino-speaking audiences abroad, where it was subtitled and in some markets dubbed. The finale aired on 17.XII.1756 AN.

Reception

Ratings

The audience grew steadily from the afternoon run into prime time and held through the autumn, by which point La Alborada was the most watched program on New Alexandrian television. The finale drew an estimated 41 million viewers, the largest audience for an entertainment broadcast in CBC's history and, by the network's account, for any telenovela the Federation had produced. Crowds had begun gathering outside the Producciones Cemí studios in Hato Rey on filming days well before the end of the run.

Critical response

Reviewers credited Cordero's performance and the specificity of the coastal setting for lifting a conventional plot. Reinaldo Pou, writing in El Diario de Boriquén, called Cordero's Yarima the first telenovela lead in years that Boriquén audiences recognized as one of their own. The series was also faulted. Critics found its later episodes heavy with melodrama, and several described the Valcárcels as cartoons rather than characters, the rich drawn so broadly that their cruelty carried no weight. A smaller line of criticism, voiced by some Wakara commentators, held that the show still framed Wakara life through a Martino-language romance and leaned on the picturesque poverty it claimed to honor.

Cultural impact

Much of the conversation around La Alborada turned on what it represented rather than what happened in it. The series put Wakara names, Wakara speech, and the daily life of a Boriquén fishing town in front of viewers across the Federation, in a form that usually kept such material at the margins. Yuiza Bohi'o, leader of the Wakara People's Party, called it "the first time in years that the country watched Wakara people be the whole story and not the scenery." Regional tourism bodies reported a rise in inquiries about the stretch of coast where the village scenes were filmed.

The show became a fixture of social media during its run. Clips of its sharpest confrontations spread on ClipWave, and a line Yarima delivers on her return, "Me echaron descalza de esta casa. He vuelto con zapatos" ("They threw me out of this house barefoot. I have come back wearing shoes"), passed into common use well beyond the audience that watched the broadcast. Commentators placed La Alborada in the line that ran back to the 1742 AN "Telenovela Boom" and the Wechua-language drama Sumaq Llacta, the last regional production to reach a national audience on this scale. It was the first to do so out of Boriquén, and it was credited with renewed interest in Boriquén production among the networks.

Second season

Producciones Cemí confirmed a second season for 1757 AN, with Cordero returning and the story moving beyond the events of the first, with CBC indicating that the show has retained the prime-time slot. Cordero had been linked to two further productions by the close of 1756 AN.

See also

• Central Broadcasting Company (Nouvelle Alexandrie)
• Producciones Cemí
• Boriquén
• Wakara people