1 4 3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003227304-10 9 [Cries in Spanish] The Memetic Role of Soraya Montenegro in Latina/o/x Popular Culture Dolores Inés Casillas, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Adanari Zarate Introduction Loyal Latina/o/x media users clearly remember the arrival of Soraya Montenegro in meme form. The close-up image of the telenovela actor’s perfectly coifed hair, bold make-up, and sinister gaze while in tears, quickly became a Latina/o/x meme sensation. Memes refer to the visual images accompanied by short phrases that populate diferent social media channels through users’ likes, forwards, or copies (Shifman 2013). The throwback, mid-1990s image of Montenegro with a few choice bracketed words conjured memories of the award-winning performances by the Mexican female actor, Itatí Cantoral, as the always-malicious telenovela antagonist. The circulation of Cantoral, while in character for her iconic, evil role of Soraya Montenegro within the telenovela María la del Barrio (María of the Slums) demonstrates, quite compellingly, how Mexican Spanish-language content can reinvent itself decades later within US Latina/o/x popular culture. Despite her transnational telenovela fame, millennial Latina/o/x audiences might only know of Soraya Montenegro through the broad circulation of these memes (Rodríguez 2018). Perhaps most telling of its popular culture success is how the meme has spawned into a niche economy with her face and signature bracketed captions featured on mugs, T-shirts, stickers, baby onesies, greeting cards, and keychains. 1 Montenegro is also a popular Graphics Interface Format (GIF) option when communicating via text. Limited to 15 seconds, GIFs are short moving images meant to accentuate an emotion to a written message. It’s this precise emotion, derived from an already dramatic telenovela genre, that has charmed both Latina/o/x and non-Latina/o/x media users alike. The series of Montenegro memes frst appeared on the microblogging platform of Tumblr. Eighteen-year-old Cristian Vazquez, reminiscing about childhood memories of watching telenovelas, turned to YouTube