The play addresses the practical consequences that lacking money had on your life and your mother’s life. When did you realize the connection between poverty and violence?

I can’t fully separate this process from having studied sociology and from understanding violence as a structural issue that stems from earlier structures such as class. We usually tell our stories without considering class, producing strange abstractions.

In Mexico, violence is associated with patriarchy and machismo, but people don’t talk about what causes it and perpetuates in our private lives. Drug traffickers and perpetrators of femicide are people from disadvantaged backgrounds. When I returned to Campeche to recover from a burnout and started working again with my mother, making chorizo together like we did when I was a teenager, it brought back many memories. In carrying out this repetitive task, which is tricky because you have to tie knots without tearing the membrane and also steeped in violence (the smell, the dead meat), the paradox struck me powerfully.

I started to question my mother about our past. The history of violence in my family had left a blank space in my narrative. We spent afternoons talking about the strategies and techniques she had to develop and keep adapting to survive, the struggles she faced because of financial problems and violence. I didn’t remember it. I started to notice the lack of tools for communicating, the lack of space and autonomy for family members, and the stress that causes.

Why did you choose to highlight the conditions under which your show is produced, even speaking openly about your mother’s salary?

People tell a lot of stories about the work of an artist. They are idealized myths that exclude its practical realities. We incorporated very open, specific discussions of this into the play to show the precarity of life in Latin America. Artistic companies in Mexico are working under conditions that are not acceptable.

Something very enriching for the process was the way in which, whenever we would idealize the work of theater and its influence on our lives, my mother would bring us back down to earth by questioning the material conditions in which it was produced. In a way, she saw it was just another job, where the first thing to do is to ensure a salary. This constant contrast between idealization and the material conditions behind it became one of the central dynamics of the play.

Ultimately, the performative negotiation strategies that she developed out of urgent necessity resemble the ones we use. The art of selling, which was one of the skills she used in her forty jobs, involves acting, adapting, improvising, and pretending. For me, it was fascinating to consider the life of a seller in theatrical terms. It’s something we have in common.

How did you use the biographical details of your lives to create a theatrical work?

Our company, Pornotráfico, is interested in the construction of collective narratives. We use theatre to reveal the processes by which they are made. When we started to record my mother’s account of her life, it was really hard for her. The memories were painful. We therefore developed an approach in which the acts of violence she recounts are recorded and shared with the audience without her having to act them out. She’s an actress, but she’s also a human being. This is her life. For her sake, we had to figure out how to tell her story, her narrative, differently. That became the main subject of the play.

It’s also about finding a different way to tell the story of my hometown, Campeche, where I spent 18 years of my life. There’s a stereotype that people from Campeche are lazy because they don’t work. Growing up, I internalized feelings of hatred and shame about my own city. Even though the state gives us money and resources and supports the country’s economy, we don’t have our own narrative. The narratives provided from outside are depoliticized. They talk about folklore and beauty. They make our history seem inevitable, as if poverty were a natural condition rather than a structural and political one. By sharing and politicizing my story, I have reclaimed ownership of my own narrative.

What gave you the idea to use cardboard boxes and shelves for the set design?

Our company never thinks about the set before starting the creative process. While developing a piece, we start introducing objects that relate to what we’re working on. For this play, we took cardboard boxes and shelves, which alluded to business but also to a kind of readymade—a form of representation produced immediately and precariously to fulfill a specific need.

We decided to project images onto the boxes to create a sense of fragility. We wanted poverty to be evident in the play’s aesthetic. Most theatres in Mexico aim for a colonial, European, classical aesthetic. But they fail in their attempt because they lack the infrastructure to achieve it. All that remains is their aspiration. On the other hand, we prefer to use minimalist solutions so that the set design raises questions about the act of representation. Who represents what? From what perspective? We don’t pretend that a box is a table—it’s simply a box. We speak from our position as a colonized Latin American country, and the ramshackle set represents our economic condition.

Interview by Elsa Pépin

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