Radio Masewal is a multilingual performance created from the contemporary poetry of four poets who write in languages of Mexico: Rosario Patricio, in Ayuujk; Hubert Matiuwaa, in Me’phaa; Elvis Guerra, in Diidxazá; and Mikeas Sánchez, in Zoque. It also incorporates texts in Nawat Masewalcopa, Chinantec, and Spanish.

We made this project at the Compañía Nacional de Teatro (National Theatre Company) as people who are not speakers of the Indigenous languages we perform. As Mexican, Spanish-speaking people, we want to reflect on the distance that separates us from the languages of our country: languages we did not inherit, but which in many cases our grandmothers and grandfathers spoke. It is a distance filled with silences, guilt, and colonial wounds. We want to think about our place, or our responsibility, in the disappearance of the languages of Mexico.

We found it valuable to make this project within an institution like the Compañía Nacional de Teatro, whose mission includes representing the identity of Mexican theatre. Yet in more than fifty years of history, its entire repertoire had been in Spanish. This is why we wanted to reflect on the relationship that cultural institutions have historically had, in Mexico and around the world, with the construction of nation-states, the production of a national identity, and the disappearance of linguistic and cultural diversity.

The process was accompanied by the poets and by advisors from the communities. With them we worked on the pronunciation and intention of the texts, and we talked about the project and the ways it could build bridges. The cast was made up of people from different regions of the country, which allowed us to question “Mexican identity” as a monocultural construction in a multicultural territory.

We approached the languages and poems from a contemporary perspective, in which poetry intersects with performance, verbatim theatre, and documentary theatre. We wanted poetry to dwell not only in the word but also in music: we created original songs, with the poems as lyrics, in contemporary rhythms such as hip-hop, ballad, and corrido tumbado.

We made this piece to celebrate the beauty of our languages and also to speak about the absences and silences that have distanced us from them, since we understand that absence is also identity.