Ni Madre

Ni Madre revolves around the figure of La Malinche in her post-Cortés days. The chamber play is set in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel circa 1528 in the Territory of New Spain. After being sold into slavery, La Malinche was made to act as an interpreter for Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Within the postrevolutionary Mexican nationalist ideology of mestizaje, the figure of Malinxe is simultaneously a traitor and despoiled victim. Against this, the Malinxe of Ni Madre is a highborn woman who over the course of her life came to traverse class and caste divides via enslavement and concubinage, marriage and motherhood, and who now orders servants around. Ni Madre is a unique science fiction chamber play (with time travel and time collapse) examining the servant/served dyad connecting the past of world conquest and enslavement to the present of global capitalism and superexploitation.