ABSTRACT
Director, actor, playwright, performance artist, and social activist, Jesusa Rodríguez delighted audiences in her Mexico City cabaret and in international venues for decades with her hilarious satires of Mexico’s past and present. The following excerpts come from a play that she wrote in 1995 for Channel 40 television in Mexico City. In it, she juxtaposes various episodes from Mexico’s ancient and recent history, including the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Source 26), the censorship of Mexico’s Holy Office on the Inquisition (Source 21), the neoliberal era of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (Source 73), the rise to power of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN, here referred to as “the NAP”) (Source 62), the Zapatistas (Source 72), and the powerful influence that U.S. political and economic life exerts on Mexico. To what extent does Rodríguez distort these episodes from Mexican history in her humorous presentation of them? Why does she juxtapose the past with the present in this piece? How do her satires compare with Mexican satires from other periods (sources 34 and 70)?
433 Sor Juana in Prison: A Virtual Pageant Play
Characters:
SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
LISY/LYSY
ATTORNEY
PROSECUTOR
The spectacle that you are about to see is the result of years of experimentation with high tech. It is the Blessed Year of Our Lord 2000, and thanks to Him the National reAction Party has come to power in Mexico and finally restored decency and good manners to the social and political life of our country.
Any resemblance to real life is purely virtual.
The scene takes place in Sor Juana’s jail cell in the Almoloya penitentiary. Stage left is the nun’s desk, filled with books, ancient geometrical instruments, a pen, an inkwell, and a small Macintosh computer, the first kind to be introduced into the market. Downstage center is a single cot, and above it, a video screen. To the right, a black grand piano.
Sor Juana laughs as she reads a letter to the press from former president of Mexico Salinas de Gotari in November 1995. The text of that letter and a photograph of the ex-President dressed as Sister [Sor] Philothea is projected on the screen.
JUANA: Ha, ha, ha, this guy was really something! What a man! With one little letter written from his virtual exile he activated a whole group of politicians and intellectuals. “It was all a huge conspiracy,” he said. Ha, ha, ha. What a guy, smart-ass, and with that he got off the hook. He never got accused of anything, he was never forced to testify about the murders and the collapse of the country, he never returned a penny of what he stole, come on, he didn’t even get kicked out of the Party. No doubt about it: either this guy was a genius, or his peers were total assholes.
Oh well. The important thing is that the epistolary genre is alive and well again in Mexico. This can be my chance to get out of here. I have to send a message to the media, though it’s probably like throwing a letter in a bottle out to sea—or better, launching a bit into cyberspace. Naturally, only letters sent from abroad matter around here. I’ve got it! I’ll answer the ex-President’s letter! It never occurred to anyone to respond back then, and a five-year-old news item might interest the press.
I will title it: “Sister Sor Juana Gets Sore.”
To my most illustrious Ex-president, Ex-man, Ex-Cell-Intense, Carlos Salinas Kissinher, Bare-on of Bumsfeld, Chain-me, and lineage of the Fucksy, folksy Bush:
It is no will of mine, but my indignation, that has held up my reply these many years. It can hardly be a surprise that at the outset my bundling digital pen encountered two obstacles. The first, and for me the most obdurate, I find myself imprisoned in the Almoloya jail, where I was brought, deceived by men 434who said they believed in the NAP (later I found out it meant the right-wing “National Action Party” that you supported to gain power). Perversely, they scrambled the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries through virtual technology—imposing a reign of terror and persecution in Mexico, refrying ancient laws to the detriment of people like me, who refuse to have their brains fried and prefer to think freely….
The second impossibility is that they have placed in my cell, as if it were the convent of St. Jerome, a false, two-dimensional library, courtesy of The Official Press, hologram furniture, and an obviously obsolete Internet system. I would have preferred the Quadra 605 and not this Apple BCE. To top it all off, they want me to write their speeches for them, write splendid praises to their fundamentalism, and build triumphant arches to President Fucks and Bush, which, needless to say, is not in my nature.
Actually I know a lot of those guys get off jack-free. Take Cheney: although he did good things, that all seemed bad, he didn’t do any bad things that seemed worse. But me, they have in chains, to beat and humiliate me just for being a woman and inclined to COGITATION. I write desperately because today the attorney—believe it or not, NAP has put a nun in charge of the tribunal—today she will pass sentence on my case and I have reasons to fear she won’t give me a chance to defend myself.
In short, I know that you (to resort to the language of NAP) don’t give a fuck, but whereas thou hast more influence than any among the NAPPERS, I appeal to thy merciful Internet beseeching thy intercession on my behalf from the bottom of your hard drive. From this Convent of Our Father Saint Ignatius of Almoloya, your least fortunate, Juana Inés de la Cruz….
PROSECUTOR: … I want you to know that your virtual performance art piece on the Birth of Christ does not qualify, and it is prohibited on the grounds that it offends intimacy, genitality, and human reproduction according to the regulations for spectacles mandated by the municipality.
JUANA: But Mother! This performance is being presented in the Capital!
PROSECUTOR: But you have Susan Sarandon in the cast, and she’s a hippie radical, plus
Trudy Guiliani says it’s a piece of shit…. According to chapter 9 on the law of public spectacles, Article 140, it is absolutely forbidden to display a naked human body in any establishment, as well as any sexual acts that go against morality and good manners, as well as any other act that goes contra natura.
JUANA: But, Mother, what is really contra natura in my view is the current attack on Iraq and our civil liberties.
435PROSECUTOR: We have resolved that issue. Don’t you read the newspapers? But don’t change the topic. We have concluded that your show is destabilizing. Why do the subalterns have to speak? Don’t you understand that it provokes subversion? People are the ones who provoke violence. Why would they go out in their cars if they know they’re going to get stolen? Provocation. Anyway, you’re an emissary from the past. Can you tell me why you mention events from 1995 in your performance?
JUANA: I’m only trying to give some historical fundamentals.
PROSECUTOR: I see. Fundamentals, is it? And they say that we’re the fundamentalists.
(The President comes on the screen with whatever news made the headlines that day. “Economic recovery is not only wishful thinking. It’s bushwhacked idiocy.”)
JUANA: By the way, Mother, who is that guy? No one remembers him anymore.
PROSECUTOR: He was a functionary of the past regime, but he died at the hands of his wife. And because we’re behind in cataloguing, his name hasn’t been entered into the database yet.
JUANA: And what happened to Subcommandante Marcos?
PROSECUTOR: His cause became meaningless. Now that we’ve exterminated all the Indians in the country, the Zapatista movement has become obsolete—good riddance! …
JUANA: All right, Mother. I want to know exactly what I stand accused of.
PROSECUTOR: You stage the birth of the Messiah live, and that goes against the intimacy of human persons according to Article 39 of the regulations. Moreover, in that scene, you include a total frontal nudity with the objective of attracting morbid attention, and increasing your revenues.
JUANA: But, Mother, that is not correct. I never staged frontal nudity.
PROSECUTOR: What are you talking about? Let’s look at that nativity scene.
(Image of the Manger with the classic Virgin and Child pose.) There! You see! The baby is stark naked! …
PROSECUTOR: And you, enemy of Mexico, give it up. You’re going to rot in Almoloya. Here is the sentence passed by the Holy Tribunal:
436EDICT: In exercise of the power vested in us, we, the NAPPING Inquisitors against depraved heresy and apostasy declare:
Hitherto, the virtual performance art piece proposed by the nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is banned In Totum. Or better still, the work of the aforementioned nun is banned in Tototototum Piarum Aurium. And it will be banned by the Holy Orifice in any language, even for those who do not know how to read, even in books-on-tape. It cannot be translated, nor printed, nor pirated on pain of Excomunio Ipsofacto Incurrenda. And aforementioned nun will remain in custody for the rest of her days to write the hagiographies of the saints: Saint Jesse Helms, Saint Strom Thurmond, and Saint Clarence Thomas….
Ours by the grace of God.
Mexico, ever true
National reAction Party.
JUANA: (Desperate) Gods! This was the democratic change we were waiting for? We’ve moved from the dinosaurs to the fundamentalist troglodytes. Poor Mexico, so close to God, so far from the United Way. The beginning of the NAP for the elite, and the end of the nap for the workers. The worst torture is to lose hope. I will write my epitaph.
“I, Juana Inés de la Cruz, ratify my version of events and sign it with my blood. I wish I could let all of it out in benefit of the truth. I beg my beloved sisters to take pity on this country and not vote either for the dinosaurs or the troglodytes. I, the worst of all: Juana Inés de la Cruz.”
