It’s My (National) Stage Too: Sabina Berman and Jesusa Rodríguez as Public Intellectuals

Abstract

The fissure between past and present was defied by the woman who walked toward Mexico City’s zócalo, the main meeting place for demonstrators who in this case had come (by foot, on the metro) to listen to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the man who, for a time, and without irony, was considered by millions to be the “presidente legítimo de México,” the legitimate president of Mexico, and who continues to be known as Peje or AMLO (“Te AMLO,” a play on “I love you,” reads a common slogan). The woman was clad as a nun, “suffering” silently in the heat as she played the role of seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her performance of resistance was a fitting combination of word and image: the many depictions of Sor Juana, often seated in her library, were recalled through the habit donned by the performance artist who marched assertively among a sea of yellow AMLO T-shirts, visors, and umbrellas; and the large placard she carried presented a productive parody of Sor Juana’s untitled poem known as “Hombres necios” (Foolish men). The first four verses of the re-inscription read: “Foolish priests who accuse / Resistance in act ion / Knowing that it is you / Who are accomplices of corruption.”¹ In this case, the ridiculous men of Sor Juana’s iconoclastic poem are converted into present-day priests accused of active complicity in a web of corruption, among other key issues related specifically to the 2006 elections.