Here’s the problem — I can’t decide whether I find Sí TV’s new reality show “Urban Jungle” revolting or delicious.  

The show extracts “nine suburban yuppies from their oh-so-comfortable lives” and drops them in East Los Angeles’ barrio to survive on low income wages. The teenagers are charged with adapting to their new life in the ‘hood, and are judged by three padrinos, who “evict” a cast member each episode.

At first I was appalled. The show panders to all of the simplest stereotypes: silly, rich, naïve white kids from Burbs vs. bad-ass, street-wise, and pragmatic residents of the inner city. You can predict the encounters between the visitors and the residents almost without watching. The presence of a TV camera reasonably guarantees that no serious danger will come to the show’s stars, but simultaneously ensures that people will act as they think they should — that is, that both the teenagers and the residents will play up the roles they know their audience is assuming they’ll fulfill.

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to the perpetuation of these stereotypes because the neighborhood I’ve worked in the for the past several years lives with the same kind of experiment. West Philadelphia is home to a large, low-income African American community — and the University of Pennsylvania. It’s jarring to ride the bus to work and watch shirtless fraternity brothers playing drinking games on their porches alongside the falling down homes of my clients and the delis where you can buy a single cigarette for 50 cents. There’s an unsurprising tension within the community, and little is done to bridge the gaps of understanding between the disparate groups. No less jarring are the non-students in the neighborhood — kids living and squatting in communal houses and playing Frisbee in the parks. They’re almost more out of place because of their attempts to fit in: they shop at the cheaper supermarkets and visit the free health clinic.

Assimilation is a tricky business. I’ll go out on a limb and argue that we can’t even begin to address it within the confines of a reality TV show. Jeff Valdez, the show’s creator and founder of the network says:  

This is more than just a reality show, it’s a social experiment. We’re taking these kids, whose only window into the barrio is a crime story on the late night news, and immersing them into a brand new environment. This show will humanize the Latino barrio and hopefully teach these kids a thing or two about life on the other side of the tracks.

A social experiment? A simplistic one at best, because while playing at poverty isn’t very funny, playing at poverty for an audience ensconced in their arm chairs isn’t funny at all. But maybe I’d feel a little less sympathetic towards the show’s hapless stars if they were making their mistakes on a major cable network, instead of Sí TV. The network is the only English-language Latino network available on your remote — in itself, a grand experiment in assimilation. As The New York Times points out, the network caters towards the projected 33 million Latinos who will live in bilingual or English-speaking households by the year 2010.

So, I confess: When the show premieres this Sunday, I’ll be watching. I’m expecting something thrillingly awful from “Urban Jungle.” Part of that is the ironic glee with which I can’t help but view all reality TV. But part of it too is that I’m hoping that by exposing the blatant frustrations and mistakes of culture-bending, it’ll make it a little easier for us to talk about what assimilation and differences really look like.

llouison