Mexico’s Many Antigones: Uncovering the Mexican tradition of Sophocles’ Antigone

This dissertation is a first step towards tracing and analyzing a distinctly Mexican tradition of adapting Sophocles’ Antigone, starting in the second half of the 20th Century. It investigates the history of the ancient play in Mexico and establishes a corpus of 12 adaptations spanning from 1968 to 2015. Of these 12 plays, this project provides an in-depth analysis of three temporally spaced reimaginings of Antigone which best represent an appreciable shift in the use and character of the play within this national context. These three Mexican adaptations are José Fuentes Mares’ La joven Antígona se va a la Guerra (1968), Olga Harmony’s La ley de Creón (1984), and Perla de la Rosa’s Antígona: las voces que incendian el desierto (2004). The content chapters of this thesis examine these Antigone at length, remarking on their accomplishments, sociohistorical contexts, and their unique contributions to the history of Antigone in Mexico. These chapters interrogate each play’s engagement with ideas of resistance, revolution, resilience, and refusal as well as their deployment and negotiation of gender and class dynamics.By examining these three plays and the trajectory they represent, this project interrogates major trends and remarks on the difficulty of making definitive statements about a tradition, even one as small as condensed as this. Informed by the larger corpus of Antigones in Mexico, the conclusion of this project attempts to characterize the progression of Antigone within this national context as compared to pivotal moments in the country’s history. It argues that these plays challenge scholarly assumptions about the global history of Antigone as well as anticipate arguments and readings later made by powerful scholars in the fields of Classics and classical receptions. The analysis of these plays and their accompanying corpus serves to argue in favor of more specific and culturally informed approaches to reception. It likewise aims to support the inclusion of these plays and their surrounding scholarship into the broader discourse of reception, imagining a future for scholarship unrestricted by regional and linguistic barriers. The totality of this project aims to highlight a trajectory of cultural engagement by conceiving of these Antigones born from Mexico as the seeds of a tradition. In so doing, it aims to provide a point of departure from which future scholarship may go on to distinguish whether these engagements differ drastically from comparable counterparts throughout Latin America and other contexts. This study is an attempt to uncover a tradition, engage with its particularities, and hopefully invite further interest in the national contexts which compose our larger operational categories