While previous research on the genre focuses on its differences from the original soap, this work discovers that the innovations in telenovela do not obscure many similarities, especially the shared basic structure with American soap opera; it is indeed a continuation of the latter. Cultural ecology theory is introduced to show that when a genre travels across national borders to expand itself, it tends to bring about creation and get-together of various cultural forms of close kinship, which is defined as clustering of cultures. Cultural clustering is formed by mutual adaptation of entities of kinship. The process is proven to be beneficial to the members. In the case of telenovela, the cluster of the genre of soap meets various problems when competing with local genres in the Asian market, indicating that the cultural cluster reaches its limit when confronting other ones. On a macro level, this contributes to the diversity and sustainable development of the whole cultural ecology. It is finally proposed that the essence of healthy cultural clustering is not annihilation of differences, but reproduction of similarities between cultural entities. The study also aims to cast light on the existing cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization research by pointing out their respective limitations in the macro cultural ecology frame.