¿Qué Pasa, USA?
television series
¿Qué Pasa, USA? (Spanish: What's Happening, USA?) is an American situation comedy. It was the first US sitcom to be bilingual, and the first to be produced for PBS. It was produced and taped from 1977 to 1980 in front of a live studio audience at PBS member station WPBT in Miami, Florida and aired on PBS member stations nationwide.
The program explored the trials and tribulations faced by the Peñas, a Cuban-American family living in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, as they struggled to cope with a new country and a new language. The series is praised as being very true-to-life and accurately, if humorously, portraying the life and culture of Miami's Cuban-American population. Today, the show is cherished by many Miamians as a true, albeit humorous, representation of life and culture in Miami.
Synopsis
The series focused on the identity crisis of the members of the family as they were pulled in one direction by their elders—who wanted to maintain Cuban values and traditions—and pulled in other directions by the pressures of living in a predominantly Anglo-American society. This caused many misadventures for the entire Peña family as they get pulled in all directions in their attempt to preserve their heritage.
Use of language
The series was bilingual, reflecting the code-switching from Spanish use in the home and English at the supermarket ("Spanglish") predominant in Cuban-American households in the generation following the Cuban exodus of the 1960s. The use of language in the show paralleled the generational differences in many Cuban-American families of the era.
“¿Qué Pasa, USA?” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pasa, television and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8076455. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “¿Qué Pasa, USA?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.