Me Gusta Mucho: In Praise of Destinos
I didn’t appreciate it at age 15; twenty years later, it has so much to teach me
I’m not a person who stays up-to-date with pop culture. While I follow the latest news obsessively, my approach to movies and TV can best be described as the “comfort food” approach. I like mainstream stuff from the ’90s that has the vibe of The West Wing, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or Buffy: romantic and sweeping, yet full of side-quests; camaraderie-based, and perhaps darker or bittersweet in places but never nihilistic.
These are shows and movies that, while not as dry and perhaps content-less as Seinfeld or Frasier, reward repeat viewing. At least, they do for me.
That aesthetic, combined with new ideas about language learning that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, lies behind a now-31-year-old telenovela/telecourse for English speakers starting their study of Spanish. Developed by Bill VanPatten, then a college Spanish teacher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish consists of 52 episodes, each with a run-time of about 27 mins.
Production cost USD 5 million, which was real money in 1992, and was/is an unprecedented amount for educational material.
Destinos was used in the Spanish I class at my high school in San Diego. My memories of its premise were hazy: a letter, a lawyer from Los Angeles who had the same name as a classmate, a mission across the Spanish-speaking world, and an elderly Spaniard lady who looked a lot like my Spanish I teacher. (The Spanish word destinos means “destinations”, but can look like the equivalent of “destinies” to English speakers without much Spanish knowledge. This use of misleadingly familiar vocabulary word pairs, what as an ESL teacher I would now call “fun with false friends”, is done rather deliberately by the series to provide plot structure and context clues.)
It was one part of the curriculum alongside actual textbooks and exercises, presentations, and other listening practice from CDs. (Yes, CDs. This was the early 2000s.)
As a freshman, it was more interesting than the textbook, but it wasn’t riveting TV. Parts of it are very overtly didactic. Much of it, again by design, is repetitive. And of course, when you watch something in a class along with thirty other 15-year-olds, jokes, whispers, nervous laughter, interruptions from notes from the principal’s office, and other distractions abound.
I ended up doing four years of high school Spanish. The second two were with the school’s native-speaking teacher, a man born in San Diego’s twin city, Tijuana. His perspective on Destinos was bemusement. Of course, he knew it had prepared us for the material he covered, but he also liked to tease us about how didactic it was, and how it was a product of the early ’90s, from the rotary and touch-tone phones in so many scenes to the shoulder pads to the actual handwritten letter that kicks off the plot.
Then again, this was the guy who once apologized to us students because the music in some video he was showing us was de las ochentas.
All of which is to say that Destinos was nothing special to my teenage self, and yet somehow stuck itself into the back of my mind.
A story is worth all its words
Fast forward through the years, and I’m now working as an online ESL teacher, and still planning on getting out of my hometown. I’d love to travel to Latin America — Colombia, Argentina, and Panama are on my list. I want to go to Spain. Like so many, I returned to my study of Spanish during the pandemic.
Daily Duolingo lessons for two years have brought back the high school material, reinforced it, and pushed me beyond it. Now familiar with the system of language proficiency levels widely used in language teaching known as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, pronounced “sifer”), I’ve been feeling that greater comprehension and ease with Spanish that students begin to have at the B1, or low intermediate, level.
I wanted to listen to more of the language; this hunger for content also really starts around the B1 level.
And I remembered Destinos. Could I try it again and find it useful? How much could I understand? (Full probable pirating disclosure: I found the series uploaded to YouTube in its entirety.)
The sight of the familiar title card, the English-language narration that marks the first eight to ten episodes, and the basic comprehension questions brought the high school experience back. For a moment.
But without the distractions of a classroom, I felt completely different. It wasn’t as hokey as I remembered. A lot of it is structured to provide repeat exposure to “travel and customer Spanish” in as natural and non-dry a manner as possible. And I could understand about 95% of not only the informational Spanish of the narration but almost all of the direct conversational language.
These are the milestone triumphs that language learning is made of.
Then that comprehension gave me mental room to consider the story and its aesthetic.
Not only was it more sincere, less cheesy, and even a bit more dramatic than I remembered, I found myself relating to the protagonist and her journey in a very tell-tale way — the first feeling that I’d found a fandom, and more than that, a fictional role model.
(Better than Carmen San Diego, anyway.)
Una carta con un secreto
So, what’s the premise of the series?
An old man in Mexico, Don Fernando Castillo Saavedra, has become increasingly infirm. He has had a successful life, becoming a wealthy business owner and estate holder near Mexico City. With his now-deceased second wife, he had three sons and a daughter, all now grown and most married with their own kids.
But this was his second life. He is actually a Spaniard by birth and upbringing; he came to Mexico after fleeing the Spanish Civil War. In particular, he was fleeing the Battle of Guernica and its aftermath.
In that battle, as far as he knew, his first bride, Rosario, died.
The series opens with the letter I mentioned from the old Spaniard lady saying that this was not true. The lady is someone named “Teresa Suarez”, who says she is a friend.
The lady claims in her letter that not only did Rosario not die in the Battle of Guernica, but she even later gave birth to Don Fernando’s son.
(Yes, this background info needs to be in English for Anglophone beginner-level Spanish students.)
But Don Fernando is not the direct protagonist of Destinos. He calls together not only his children but also his younger brother Pedro to discuss the letter and his desire to find the truth: did Rosario survive? If yes, did she have his son? Where were they now?
Pedro Castillo is a lawyer at a firm in L.A., and he hires his young colleague Raquel Rodriguez to investigate the matter. We get a strong sense from the context that Pedro has a good pre-existing relationship with Raquel, most probably, given their respective ages, that of mentor-mentee. The storyline and acting reinforce the impression that for Raquel, this assignment starts and continues through the series as a gladly undertaken favor and duty to Pedro.
Raquel, a hyper-competent Mexican-American fluent Hispanophone, is the one whose journey to the truth we follow as it takes her to a few different parts of the Spanish-speaking world.
You can see the elements already: a mild form of the multi-generational family drama of the telenovela, the bits of the history of Spain and the countries of Latin America, the very ‘90s focus on the new professional woman and how her life may or may not be balanced, and, of course, the destinations themselves and their cultural delights along the path of the investigation.
Then there’s the romance subplot, which grows to become mentioned “on main” as we say now. It’s just lovely. “Rewards rewatching”, okay? Bueno.
In the course of the story
Of course, I watched the series this time through the eyes of a freelance private language teacher as much as those of a language student.
It was didactic, in several ways. But what worked, and what didn’t?
The English-language narration given in the first few episodes is invaluable and then goes away once it has become distracting. As someone who had somewhat forgotten the premise from twenty years ago, that was helpful, but Destinos is aimed at elementary or false beginner Spanish students. Even low-intermediate students might not need the basic backstory in English and would benefit from hearing it in Spanish.
After that, the student is guided by four general elements:
- a Spanish-speaking narrator, who often widens the scope of the episode to focus on cultural, historical, or social background information, or to segue way into a vocabulary point before returning to the story
- Raquel breaks the fourth wall (that is, talking directly with the audience that she knows is watching the show) to review the events of each episode, ask basic comprehension questions in Spanish, give her own personal comments about the developments, and ask for viewer opinions
- A plot and dialogue that are well-structured for comprehension even through the increasing complexity of the grammar, including the use of those pairs of false friends, and genuine good, (and good sport!) middlebrow acting from the cast, all names in Latin American movies and TV
- The presence of child characters, who are themselves still learning literacy and vocabulary in Spanish as native speakers
Here’s an example of the plot use of these false friends I mentioned: Don Fernando receives the letter and wants to do something about its news, but he needs to talk it over. He’s frail. He needs help. He wants to explain.
So, he calls together his family. The sons living in the U.S. come south with their wives and kids, and his son and daughter still living at the big hacienda come. All the cousins hug. In Spanish, the word for “meeting” — a business meeting, say — is reunión. What does that word look like to an English speaker just starting to study Spanish? Reunion — that event where all your family gathers together after a long time apart.
You’ve seen what they’ve done there? Bueno.
(That’s Raquel’s catchphrase. And speaking of…)
A peculiar kind of service, a peculiar kind of journey
As an online ESL teacher who works with adults, I have a kind of client/hired-help relationship with my students. They have the need to learn English, perhaps for particular purposes such as work or life in an English-speaking country, to access the vast amount of content now produced in English, or perhaps just as a hobby. (There are people who study languages purely for fun, did you know?)
As a freelance online teacher working through marketplace platforms, I haven’t had colleagues.
As someone whose teaching philosophy/method is very communicative, where the point is genuinely getting and giving information, teaching how to exchange emotional expression and recount experiences in English, I get close to mis estudiantes. Mis clientes.
I know about their lives, their work, their kids, and their spouses — as much detail as they feel comfortable sharing. Of course, it varies, but you’d be surprised. To be a good teacher, you have to be supportive of mistakes, and of attempts at, well, vulnerability.
Teaching someone the words to put in their mouth, with their permission and while managing their hopes and fears, is a privilege and an honor. It’s something that you need to have a sense of duty about if you’re going to do it properly.
And I do.
I seem to do this well enough to have consistently gotten great feedback from the majority of my students. It’s a joy, too, to be the one who introduces new words to people, who introduces and clarifies grammar (that is, conscious, comprehensible expression), who helps them tell stories they wanted to tell, and who improves their ability to do the essential task of communication in the current global language.
Yet, I need to keep that lodestar of professionalism in mind, because trouble has happened when things get blurry.
The Model of the Role
It’s what fandom does: imagining backstories for fictional characters, and the way Raquel Rodriguez holds onto her sense of professionalism spins a whole fiction-upon-fiction tale of how she was challenged on it and by it in the past.
She starts out, in fact, explaining her professional obligations and identity by insisting, in the subplot of an early episode, that she is not the prize-winning teacher a Spanish TV reporter is looking for. She is a lawyer and has a duty to guard the confidentiality of her clients.
(The subplot let them introduce the vocabulary of professions for the first of several times in the series. And for middle and high school students who might be confused at the start by her didactic role, it forces them away early on from ever calling her la maestra.)
Over time, of course, as she is the one gathering each clue to the fate of Rosario and her baby, it’s Raquel who takes in the full emotional weight of the story. It’s Raquel who begins telling the story (within the four walls of the show) to both the new members of the Castillo family she discovers and to the helpful neighbors and strangers she encounters.
It’s Raquel who sits with these new relatives as they come to terms with their changed identities and personal histories.
So, for Raquel, soy una amiga de la familia starts to live alongside estos son mis clientes fairly early on. But the former never erases the latter.
She does all this, crucially, as a traveler. She is a visitor twice over, and for much of the series, she keeps her own counsel.
And I needed to see all of that, in cultural media, at this point in my working life.
I am not getting any model or guidance off-screen, for better or worse, for the working relationships I have.
I needed to see a model of how your current profession doesn’t need to be the thing you dreamed of doing when you were growing up in order for you to be committed to doing it well and with honor. (Raquel wanted to be a history professor. I plan to write historical and other fiction.)
I needed to see her warm-hearted, yet still at some point detached professionalism. I needed to think about that point, that line.
I needed to see when she was offered an opportunity to make a wish on her journey, that she wished for the best outcome for her investigation: the gathering of the whole Castillo family.
I needed to see the depth and sincerity of the Castillos’ gratitude, the way Raquel was welcomed and treated as a full equal in their home, and how Pedro, in addition to offering his own gratitude, also reimbursed her expenses and paid her for her services towards the end of the series.
I needed to see something amazing that I never remembered from my high school viewing: the subplot with her parents.
Perhaps U.S. TV has created other examples of mothers fearful for (of?) their daughters’ choices, acting on that fear, and their daughters finally finding out and having to try to make good choices anyway, but as I don’t keep up with pop culture, I don’t know of any.
This three-decade-old piece of educational media shows its age. But more than even the best comfort food, it has guided me on my way.
