Who's Watching?

Kicking off her pale pink flip flops, punctured by rhinestones, she flops onto the snowy white couch, still in her bikini, and snatches the remote off the designer coffee table. With a sigh she flips through the channels, hoping that new episode of Gossip Girl is on or maybe a Lifetime movie. All her go-to's are stuck on seemingly endless loops of commercials enveloped in those voices that are way too excited about a kitchen tool or the never-ending drawl of side effects for drug ad's. The TV is left on the local news channel and she pauses for a moment; manicured fingers slip into a bowl of pistachios and fingers curl around a few as she pops them into her mouth. Some student from the university is speaking in rapid Spanish, just like the cleaning lady she can never understand.

"Hola, Mama," she says as she walks into the kitchen, the smells of her mother's favorite dish of 'arroz con pollo' wafted up eagerly into her nostrils. After leaning over to kiss her on the cheek, she crosses over to the family room and and sinks down into the sofa, the same soft burgundy one she can remember sitting on as a child; the one her Mom says is exactly like the one she had growing up in Cuba. The TV was left on the Cuban soap operas, the only thing her Mama ever watched, so she leaned over for the remote. As she was rapidly flipping through the channels and quickly judging the quality of the station, her bitten fingernail with chipped red polish paused for a moment when she got to Coral Gables TV. Some story about the University, oddly enough in Spanish.

Earlier this week I was taking pictures for The Miami Hurricane at the grand opening of the new mural, a collage on the history of the University of Miami which runs through the main breezeway of the University Center. At one point I noticed that Coral Gables TV was covering the story and snapped a few shots of them interviewing students about what they thought about the new mural and how it represented the school. As I was taking pictures of one student, I realized that the reporter apologized after asking her a question and repeated it in Spanish after the black stare she received. She began to reply in rapid Spanish and began to think, who is going to watch this?

This thought struck me out of nowhere but once it had I could not get it out of my head. Who will watch this? Yes, it's true that Coral Gables TV is technically a local station, but not only the locals live around this area. Besides university students and locals, exiles and mobiles make their appearance as well. It just struck me as odd after reading about the locals, mobiles and exiles because I could not know for sure which audience the show was and is aimed for.