My Mother and Money

Josefina Orlaineta started working as a child. She is the mother of theatre-maker Anacarsis Ramos, and over the course of her 60-year working life she has had more than 40 different jobs and businesses. The family lived in Campeche, one of Mexico’s poorest states. While his mother struggled to make a living, her son left his narrow-minded hometown behind and moved to Mexico City to pursue a career in theatre and live openly as a gay man. Their paths went separate ways for ten years. In the documentary performance Mi Madre y el Dinero (My Mother and Money), the two look back on the mother’s work history and her complicated relationship with money. Orlaineta talks about her jobs with irresistible humour, sharing inventive sales tricks and survival strategies as she stuffs sausages on stage—as if filling the scenes of the performance with memories. Along the way, they come up with ideas for improving precarious working conditions in the arts and poke fun at Europeans’ need to express horror at the misery of other continents. The work delicately addresses the shame associated with poverty and class, and the vulnerability of the self-employed, whether traders or artists. What ethical negotiations are necessary when you want to tell another person’s life story? And how can theatre help us see ourselves through kinder lenses? Josefina Orlaineta succeeds as a performer, just as she has in her other jobs. Thanks to her innate stage charisma, Mi Madre y el Dinero is as clever and entertaining as it is profound.