Since the 2017 murder of Mexican journalist Javier Valdez, his former colleague and wife of 27 years, Griselda Triana, has been in all kinds of forums advocating for the families of murdered or disappeared journalists.
This year, she added the theater to the list.
“Las periodistas cuentan” (The journalists tell) is a stage production from Mexican theater company Teatro Línea de Sombra, in alliance with Elefante Blanco, an independent digital media outlet from the state of Tamaulipas. The project seeks to raise awareness about the different situations Mexican journalists face from a theatrical approach in which journalism, art and activism converge.
“We are developing strategies beyond journalism to continue doing journalism, and to continue taking care of each other,” Carlos Manuel Juárez, director of Elefante Blanco and another of the journalists on stage, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
In her performance, Griselda Triana talks about how someone can rebuild their life after being a collateral victim of a crime against freedom of expression. (Photo: Sandra Perdomo)
The production stars a group of eight journalists on stage who narrate experiences from their lives as journalists, portraying different aspects of what it means to practice the profession in Mexico, in the midst of all types of hostilities.
Triana and Juárez are two of the eight journalists that make up the cast, which performed for the first time in October of this year with four stagings in Mexico City. The group is also comprised of Blanche Petrich, Reyna Haydee Ramírez, Mónica González Islas, Marcela Turati, Marcos Vizcarra and Félix Márquez.
In her performance, Triana talks about how life is rebuilt and redefined after being an indirect victim of a crime against freedom of expression in Mexico.
“I say that I am a very lucky woman because my support networks reached out from the moment they killed Javier. My support networks are precisely fellow journalists throughout this country, who have been very close to me and my family,” Triana told LJR. “But my situation is very different from those of most families of murdered and disappeared journalists. I would like families who have experienced the same thing to be able to have this same support."
In her performance, which lasts approximately 15 minutes, Triana also tells how she became a human rights defender through her search for justice for the murder of her husband. Today, she is the national coordinator of the Tejidos Solidarios network, which provides support to families of murdered and disappeared journalists. Triana also talks about how outrage over a lack of justice is common for most families of murdered journalists.
“It is an issue that traverses journalism: they are murdered or disappeared and we are the ones left behind. The majority of the families have experienced this alone, made invisible, abandoned by the institutions responsible for seeking justice,” Triana said. “What we all want is justice, and for that, families need to have support. So I talk about that part in this piece, when it’s my turn to close the performance.”
“The journalists tell” is part of a broader program from Teatro Línea de Sombra called “Fragmentos de verdad (Fragments of truth). It operates under the idea that journalists and activists work in search of some type of truth, Eduardo Bernal, a member of the company, told LJR.
“Fragments of truth” began in 2022 with the artistic installation “Zona Clausurada” (Closed Area), also carried out in conjunction with Elefante Blanco, which was a first exercise in bringing journalism closer to art and activism. With a performance, a journalistic investigation and a short film, this project addressed the phenomenon of forced disappearance in Mexico and the seizure of territories by organized crime.
Marcos Vizcarra tells how his garden represented an escape from the violence he has experienced as a journalist in Culiacán, Sinaloa. (Photo: Sandra Perdomo)
“The journalists tell” is also a multidisciplinary performance project, although in this case, focused specifically on the different faces of the practice of journalism in Mexico.
“We found many commonalities between the idea of investigative journalism and what we now want to delineate as ‘investigative theater,’” Bernal said. “In this latest work [‘The journalists tell’] we talk about journalism because it is a topic that interests us a lot and because journalism in Mexico today has taken on very great importance.”
The participants of “The journalists tell” agree that it is not a play per se, nor individual presentations. It is rather a theatrical work based on the real experiences of its protagonists.
Juárez called the project “an exploration of journalism through the performing arts.”
“This year we started working thinking about talking about the different ways of living journalism, from different sources, from the different situations we’ve gone through, from resistance to abandoning journalism,” he said. “Also maybe about the strategies that each of us has taken to be able to continue doing journalism or continue supporting so that freedom of expression does not decline further.”
The Spanish title of the play – “Las periodistas cuentan” – is a play on words. In this case, “contar” in Spanish can mean both “to tell” and “to matter.” Journalists can tell their stories, but as professionals, they also matter, Bernal said. Therefore, the title is also a way to vindicate their work as members of the press.
The themes of the stories on stage are varied, as are the tones and styles of each narrative. Juárez's performance addresses the psychological process he experienced after being threatened for his journalistic work in 2017, to separate in his mind the journalist who covers violence from the person who experiences that same violence. Reyna Haydee Ramírez – who was a victim of digital violence after directly questioning former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – narrates in a comical way what it meant to attend one of the former president's infamous morning press conferences.
The staging seeks to add personal context for each journalist to the narrations, Alicia Laguna, executive producer of the project and artistic director of Teatro Línea de Sombra, told LJR.
“They are performances on a stage that we design and facilitate. They are life stories from a personal perspective, from the context of the journalist,” Laguna said.
Thus, Félix Márquez, a photojournalist from The Associated Press team that won the Pulitzer Prize this year for Feature Photography, relies on part of his photographic archive to tell his story. A group of plants is on stage with Marcos Vizcarra, who tells how his garden represented an escape from the situations of violence that he experienced as a journalist in Culiacán, Sinaloa.
Marcela Turati presents an video while telling the story of a security workshop for journalists that she created. Triana enters the stage with aguachile, a typical seafood dish from the western coast of Mexico, which she prepares minutes before her performance and distributes to the audience at the end.
Carlos Manuel Juárez is the director of Elefante Blanco, the independent media outlet that organizes the project, together with Teatro Línea de Sombra. (Photo: Sandra Perdomo)
Unlike other theatrical works, “The journalists tell” does not use a traditional script, nor were there rehearsals prior to the premiere, Laguna said. However, the participants organized themselves during prior meetings, and the director, Jorge Vargas, developed a technical script. The journalists, Laguna added, could build their performances freely, with time as the only limit.
“What there is in ‘The journalists tell’ is a space of freedom to speak, think and place what each of them wanted,” Laguna said. “We were just looking for that to happen, something really spontaneous. At the beginning there is a narrator who says that this piece was not rehearsed. It is an improvisation, which does not mean that it is something improvised. Jorge creates a base and a general outline, and they only know when they come in.”
At a time when journalism is under constant attack and is being discredited in Mexico, this theatrical performance is an exercise in sincerity with audiences, Juárez said.
“I think getting journalism out of the newsrooms is very important now. And this meeting with the audiences is also important,” the journalist said. “It is very worthwhile, given the crisis in journalism, for audiences to know who we are and that we are the same as them.”
Although the stories that make up the theatrical piece all involve difficult and even tragic events, Juárez made it clear that the project is not an exercise in victimhood, but rather a form of vindication and defense of the profession.
“It is not an exercise of playing the victim, it is an exercise of claiming that many of us take on when it comes to defending freedom of expression, to do journalism,” Juárez said. “It is not to be a victim, but to be increasingly strategic, take responsibility and raise awareness.”
The audience that attended the presentations of “The journalists tell” in October was made up mostly of people from the journalistic profession, as well as human rights defense organizations. But the company wants to reach other types of audiences, so they are in talks to present the piece in other settings.
The stage production will be presented at the LATAM Festival of Digital Media and Journalism on Nov. 8 in Mexico City. (Photo: Courtesy Teatro Línea de Sombra)
The project will be presented again on Nov. 8 as part of the LATAM Festival of Digital Media and Journalism, organized by the organization Factual, in alliance with DW Akademie. Juarez said they have not ruled out bringing other journalists into the cast to be able to alternate in future performances.
For Triana, the more diverse the audience they reach, the greater the awareness about situations facing journalists.
“If all these recent years have taught me anything, it is that we cannot waste any platform, any space, any forum from which we can raise awareness among other audiences, such as the theater, but also the people who go to a march or a protest.” Triana said. “We have to be in all the spaces we see to talk about what is happening with journalists.”
