This paper aims to analyze some of the relations that exist between ethnic identities and the media, especially television. Springing from ethnographic research on the descendants of Italian immigrants in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, the reception of the television soap opera Terra Nostra, broadcasted by Globo broadcasting network in 1999-2000, was used as a case study. The reception of the soap opera favored the reflection of the notion of "Italian" belonging and encouraged a series of dialogs between the imagined and locally perpetuated tradition and that, which was transmitted on television. In particular, the questions of sex, sexuality, narratives of the colonization process and the diacritical elements present in the community of Italian descendants in São Paulo were some points in which there was a divergence from local value patterns.
ethnic identity; italians; television