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 their narrow-minded hometown behind and moved to Mexico City to pursue a career in theatre and live openly as a gay man. Their paths diverged for ten years. In the documentary performance Mi Madre y el Dinero (My Mother and Money), the two look back on the mother’s working life and her complicated relationship with money. Orlaineta recounts her jobs with irresistible humour, sharing original sales tricks and survival strategies as she fills sausages on stage—as if filling the scenes of the performance with memories. Along the way, they come up with ideas for improving the precarious working conditions in the arts and poke fun at Europeans’ need to deplore the misery of other continents. The work subtly explores 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 gentler 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 witty and entertaining as it is profound.