Adapting Sor Juana: melodrama, serial television, and cultural memory in Juana Inés (2016)

Abstract This article reads the Mexican television series Juana Inés (2016, Dir. Patricia Arriaga. Canal Once. Mexico) as a cultural adaptation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz shaped by the formal and affective logic of melodrama. Rather than treating the series as a straightforward dramatization of Sor Juana’s biography, I argue that it reworks a layered field of historical record, historiographical debate, and cultural memory through the conventions of serialized television. Drawing on adaptation studies, Latin American melodrama theory, and television studies, the article examines how the series personalizes ecclesiastical power, reframes convent life, and renders Sor Juana’s bond with María Luisa Manrique as explicit reciprocal desire. Situating Juana Inés within the reconfiguration of melodrama in Mexican quality television, I argue that the series does not transcend melodrama in the name of prestige but refines and redeploys it as a vehicle for historical interpretation.