Adriana Barraza honors the mothers of the disappeared

The renowned Mexican actress Adriana Barraza was unable to celebrate her 50-year career with a special project in 2021, but she does so now with ‘Madre’, a theatrical one-man show about mothers looking for their missing children, “a mourning that does not end” for women from Argentina, Mexico and many other countries.

This work with musicians and dancers on stage and written and directed by Naher Jacqueline Briceño opens worldwide on March 24 at the Miami Dade County Auditorium, where three performances are scheduled until the 26th.

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In an interview with EFE at her acting academy in Miami, the headquarters of her company Veritatem, whose name is due to the fact that “the truth is what we seek when acting,” says Barraza, the Oscar-nominated actress says she would like to represent ‘ Madre’ in Argentina and Mexico, the two countries that are closest to him.

They are also two countries where forced disappearance left, and continues to leave in the case of Mexico, very painful traces. “We have 100 or so thousand disappeared. Forced disappearance leaves a mourning that never ends, it’s something that never ends,” says Barraza, who has a great relationship with Argentina, the country of her current and former husband and where her only daughter lives.

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For her character, she was not inspired so much by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as by the “seeking” mothers of Mexico. “They are groups of mothers who for I don’t know how long, more than a decade, have dedicated themselves to doing what no one has done, neither the authorities nor anyone goes to the desert with picks and shovels. And especially, notice that it is a a very terrible thing, with long rods that they stick there where it more or less occurs to them that there may be graves,” says the actress from Toluca.

“If the tip of the stick, when you pull it out, smells like death, then you know that’s where you have to dig.” adds Barraza, who says that these mothers are moved by finding their children but they help to look for those of other women out of a “desire for justice. Graves of hundreds of people have been found thanks to them,” he adds.

The actress remembers that she met in person one of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, now deceased, and asked her if she thought her son was still alive. “Probably not, but I’ll never stop looking for him,” she replied.

Briceño has conceived the work around an “ancestral” or “millennial” character who represents to all the women who have searched for their missing children throughout history and from different places on Earth and that she could be a heroine of a Greek tragedy.

It is a character that for Barraza has been hard to compose and at the same time it has given him “immense joy. It is a very heartbreaking experience, very demanding. It requires a lot of energy,” he says, after recalling that in the four months of preparation there were moments when those who “couldn’t stop crying”.

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Regarding the terrible image of a Mexico with deserts that hide graves of murdered people, he says that “unfortunately” it is true and when asked who is responsible, he answers: “It will always be said that it is drug trafficking. But finally, and this woman also speaks Beyond that, drug trafficking is endorsed, flattered, and in collusion with a number of powerful people.”

At 67 years old and after having believed as a young man that fighting would end injustice, Barraza clearly acknowledges that he does not see a solution to the problem. “Right now, at my age, I say I don’t know, I just sit there trying to do what I can, of course,” he says. And “what can” is to put forced disappearance in the spotlight with a work like ‘Mother’, which is not going to be the only premiere this year of an actress who is sought after not only by directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu, who he featured her in ‘Amores Perros’ and in ‘Babel’.

In May ‘Mónica’ premieres, an Italian-American co-production with Barraza and Patricia Clarkson in the cast and directed by Andrea Pallaoro about a transgender woman who left home as a teenager and has to return to see her sick mother.

That same month, ‘El último vagón’ premieres on Netflix, directed by Ernesto Contreras, where she plays a rural teacher in a railroad town, and in August a Warner film, ‘The Blue Beettle’, with a Mexican superhero who has an 80-year-old granny who is none other than Adriana Barraza.

EFE

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Adriana Barraza honors the mothers of the disappeared