Keynote Address by Jesusa Rodríguez
University of Massachusetts Amherst
New WORLD Theater
Intersection V: Creative UpRising(s)
April 5, 2008
Thank you for inviting me to UMass. Thank you, Antonia, who is going to do the interpreting. Thank you foremost for allowing me to denounce what’s currently happening in Mexico and helping me spread it out. I was planning an introduction of the present work. There is a popular saying: “There’s no evil that lasts a hundred years and no country that can bear it.” In 1810 in Mexico we fought our independence war. A hundred years later in 1910 the Mexican revolution exploded. It’s been almost a hundred years, since we are close to 2010, and Mexico is again at the brink of explosion. We know that a revolution is not possible for several reasons. First and foremost, this proportion with U.S. war potential. Also because violence just reproduces violence. Those of us who believe in a [pacifist] revolution, we are slowly but continuously working in a civil mobilization movement. For some this is just utopia or in many cases […] For those of us who are part of the creative resistance, this is the best way to live and to create art and science.
The prodigious woman that was Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz says in her famous response to [...]: “The only bad worth fighting for is that with no legend, and we know we have lost that ahead of time.” Today, at this dark time that Mexico is facing and the dominance of the ultra-right and anti-democratic regime, it is millions of us who think it’s worth starting this revolution in our country, through an organized movement of [pacifist] resistance. This might be our last chance to be a sovereign country or become slaves within our own lands and fall into the [...] of violence. As most of you know, Bush’s government is mostly responsible for this situation. The unsatisfied oil thirst has led the United States to a very big moral debacle. And just as [David Toro] said in his moment, each citizen who was rightfully born in this country has the right to know what the government is doing with their taxes. I propose this new North American invasion this time on oil. As our legitimate president says, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “If it is hard, we have already achieved it; if it is impossible, we will try.”