Hernán Cortés, héroe parodiado, en Águila o Sol (1984) de Sabina Berman

In the context of the “des-celebration” of 1992, Mexican dramaturgy produced a corpus of plays that critically reassess official history, reconfiguring it through the lens of twentieth-century concerns. Within this framework, the playwright Sabina Berman wrote Águila o sol [1984], a play that takes the conquest of Tenochtitlan as its central focus in order to parody its foundational epic narrative. This article argues that Berman subverts the conventions of historical theatre by deconstructing the heroic figure of Hernán Cortés, traditionally elevated to the status of a founding myth. It examines the conqueror’s dramatic construction along two principal axes: speech and gesture. Cortés is characterized through incoherent and anachronistic discourse—marked by Anglicisms and vulgarisms—and through a gesturality that shifts toward the grotesque and the animalistic. This representation contrasts sharply with that of other historical figures, such as Moctezuma II and La Malinche, who do not exhibit these traits. By displacing the solemnity of the foundational myth into irony, Berman transforms epic narrative into a vehicle for political critique. Written in the midst of the foreign debt crisis, the play participates in a broader theatrical tradition that problematizes national narratives while inviting spectators to interrogate emergent forms of subordination in their contemporary political present.