La mujer que cayó del cielo (2010), written by Mexican playwright V. H. Rascón Banda (1948–2008), is based on the true story of a Rarámuri woman from Chihuahua (Mexico), Rita Patiño, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Kansas for 12 years until her plight became known to a human rights organization. Since she was denied linguistic and legal assistance, the authorities never determined who she was and where she was from, nor did she have access to a real diagnostic process.
Drawing from the concept of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), the article addresses how Rascón Banda depicts the multiple abuses Rita suffered qua subject of knowledge and her resulting dehumanization as a result of her being an indigenous immigrant woman and, once interned, a mental patient. Central to the play is the forced ineffability of Rita’s experience, which in turn brought about an extreme case of hermeneutical or, rather, contributive epistemic injustice (Dotson, 2012), ending up in Rita’s hermeneutical death.