Ugly Betty

An American prime-time comedy-drama series that ran on ABC from September 2006 to April 2010, Ugly Betty is the story of Betty Suarez, a plain, unsophisticated Latina young woman from a working-class background who works at Mode, a glamorous fashion magazine based in Manhattan. The series, the first to feature a Latina as lead in a network series, starred America Ferrera, best known to audiences for her role as Carmen in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. Ugly Betty was based on a Colombian telenovela, Yo Soy Betty la Fea (I'm Betty the Ugly One). During its four seasons, the critically acclaimed series explored issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a manner that held broad appeal for a diverse, predominantly female audience.

The popularity of the telenovela generally and of Yo Soy Betty la Fea particularly would likely have attracted Latina viewers to the ABC show, but ABC emphasized the connection by using Salma Hayek, one of the show's executive producers and well known in her native Mexico as a former telenovela star, in the early publicity. Hayek praised the campiness of the telenovela genre and the universal appeal of the unlikely Betty's work on a fashion magazine. The show premiered on September 28, 2006, to critical acclaim. Hayek's confidence in its appeal was justified as a loyal audience of women developed across a spectrum of ethnic backgrounds and ages.

A significant part of Betty's appeal to this diverse female audience is what ABC described in promotional materials as her “fish out of water” status. Betty, played by America Ferrera, a young actress of Honduran descent, is an outsider at Mode on several levels. Not only do her glasses, her braces, and her unflattering clothing mark her as unattractive in an office filled with beautiful, fashionable women, but also, on a more fundamental level, she is not tall enough, not thin enough, and not white enough to meet the prevailing standard of beauty. Even African American beauty Vanessa Williams, who played villainess Wilhelmina Slater, is light skinned, with the blue-green eyes of Welsh forebears. Betty's ethnicity intensifies her difference. Her difference is magnified for her coworkers and for the majority non-Latino audience when Betty is viewed within the context of her family.

Her father, Ignacio, is an undocumented Mexican immigrant who has worked as a janitor. Her sister, Hilda, is a sometimes jobless single mother of one son, Justin. Family is of great importance to them. Highly emotional, they like bright colors, loud music, and Mexican food, and their Queens home is filled with religious iconography. Although they are fluent in English, both Ignacio [Page 2108]and Hilda pepper their conversations with Spanish words, although the more assimilated Betty and Justin do not. None of the actors who played the members of the Suarez family are Mexican American. Tony Plano (Ignacio) is Cuban American, and Ana Ortiz (Hilda) and Mark Indelicato (Justin) claim some Puerto Rican ancestry.

Betty's family is warm and caring, supporting one another and willing to sacrifice for one another—the opposite of the cold, dysfunctional families to which most of the Mode staff belong. Wilhelmina Slater is emotionally distant from her father and sends her daughter to a boarding school in Europe, sometimes even refusing to take her calls. Betty's immediate boss, Daniel Meade (Eric Mabius), refuses to visit his mother during her rehabilitation, and Alexis Meade (Rebecca Romijn) wishes to kill her father and refuses to speak to her brother. If Betty's family is stereotypical, it's a stereotype both Latino and Anglo audiences found appealing.

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