Another Lovely Cinderella Story...

     I believe that the magical Cinderella story is impregnated in all of Latin America. In a light hearted way, Dr. Acosta described the typical novel with our Cinderella: who is poor, beautiful, naive, rural, and with a evil stepmother. These are different versions of the Cinderella figure in the intimacy of our lives, in novelas, and in reality shows. Let's walk a mile in the glass slippers of each Cinderella. 
    My chilanga friend and I were discussing the different mentalities of love, romance, and marriage between the United States and Mexico. Amist it all, I found my self sighing once I heard the Cinderella story of her mother. She was known as "la roba maridos" that whenever she walked down the streets, husbands would hear the clacking of the heels and would run to peek out the windows. After begging for her love, she accepted a romantic date to Chapultepec, except she lost her heel down a street drain. He spent the whole afternoon saving her heel, but she called another pretendiente to rescue her, instead. Ever since then, her husband will awalys tease, "como me hizo sufrir por su amor."
    In the Brazilian novela "Amor a Vida," we are faced with a modern Cinderella that fits some charactersitics. She is beautiful and naive, but she doesn't have an evil stepmother, instead an evil adopted mother. The beautiful Paloma leaves her riches and falls inlove with a poor traveler. Blinded by love, she falls in deep love, abandoned when she is giving birth to his child, and finally rejects him, yet we will see him return in the future. 
    A true Cinderella with a different love story is the one of Marisela Demontecristo. A Salvadorena, poor, naive, rural and three judges as her evil step mother, she wins her crown as La Belleza Latina del 2013, her happy ending. Who saves her? Her true love, the over 10 million votes she received. As she heard her name proclaiming her as the winner, she cried telenovela tears, and was  as sweet, pure, and humble as Thalia de Las Marias. 
     The archetypal Cinderella transform, shapes and molds into everyday life in Latin America and in the United States. It can be the mother's romance, the novela de las 8, or on reality television. It's a good thing we don't all have to be a combination of poor, beautiful, naive, rural, and with an evil stepmother.
Here is Marisela Demontecristo receiving her award on Univision.