Introduction to Ramón A. Flores and Lynn Knight’s The Merchant of Santa Fe

[print edition page number: 1]

Ramón A. Flores and Lynn Knight’s The Merchant of Santa Fe adapts Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to the context of colonial New Mexico in the period preceding the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The play depicts the experiences of judeoconversos, including the “hidden” or “crypto” Jews who continued to practice their religion in secret despite Christian persecution. Written in 1993 under the auspices of La Compañía de Teatro de Alburquerque, where Flores served as artistic director, The Merchant of Santa Fe emerged from a contemporary interest in the Jewish ancestry of many New Mexico residents and explores the role of Judaism in the region.^[1] The Spanish Inquisition looms large as the play’s Shylock figure, Don Saúl, is tormented by Spanish Christian characters, particularly the fanatical Salazar and his friends Don Antonio, Rafael, and Lorenzo. Doña Portía, the wealthy heiress to an apple estate, turns out to be Jewish as well, although the audience does not learn of her concealed identity until the play’s conclusion. While the main characters are Spanish Jews and Christians, The Merchant of Santa Fe also depicts the experiences of the Indigenous Peoples in the region, including those living in the nearby pueblos and those who were captured and forced to labor as servants in Spanish households.

In the century leading up to and during the Spanish Inquisition, which was established in 1478, Jewish people in Spain experienced violence and persecution, and many were forced to convert to Catholicism. Amid escalating attempts to prevent conversos from maintaining ties to Jewish customs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued a decree that called for the expulsion of openly practicing Jews from Spain in 1492. Starting in the early sixteenth century, some conversos [2] emigrated to colonial Mexico, and several eventually moved north to New Mexico, where the challenges of settling the northernmost regions of the Spanish empire made the persecution of Jews less intense.^[2] Taking place after a period of heightened inquisitorial activity, The Merchant of Santa Fe dramatizes Salazar’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to convince the other Spanish Christians that identifying hidden Jews should be a top priority. Flores and Knight explore the nuances of this historical context to tell the story of Jewish communities in New Mexico while also rejecting the antisemitism of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which has often been deployed to reproduce harmful beliefs about Jewish people. By giving “voice to some of the regional victims of this global history,” Marissa Greenberg observes, Flores and Knight’s play “attempts to speak to and for the ghosts of New Mexicans, past and not-so-past, who seek to retain their faith, culture and identity in the face of persecution.”^[3]

One of the earliest documented examples of Borderlands Shakespeare, The Merchant of Santa Fe was conceived in the community-oriented vision of Chicanx teatro, and it was initially presented both at the KiMo Theatre and in two local churches as part of La Compañía de Teatro’s outreach program in Albuquerque. Flores, Knight, and their collaborators hoped that the play would have social benefits, as it both explores an underexamined aspect of local history and remediates one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays. Their aim, as Flores describes it, was “to fully expand the story in the context of Spanish Colonial New Mexico” and to “destroy Shakespeare’s anti-Semitic framework” in the process.^[4] As Elizabeth Klein and Michael Shapiro outline in their discussion of the play’s development, the theater company hosted social gatherings called tertulias, bringing together community members, academics, and theater practitioners from a range of religious and cultural traditions.^[5] Participants in these conversations discussed the history of Jewish communities in New Mexico, and they also provided feedback on the script. The Merchant of Santa Fe is thus deeply rooted in local histories and politics, and it is informed by the rich traditions of New Mexican theater. As Brian Eugenio Herrera explains, “theatrical performance has long stood at the nexus of the complex collision of indigenous, European, [3] and US migrations that have together configured the region’s distinctive nuevomexicano character.”^[6] The Merchant of Santa Fe reflects the particular influence of teatro, demonstrating its investment in performance as a site of political resistance and cultural exchange.

Flores and Knight’s adaptation follows The Merchant of Venice in many respects, though key events are transformed to fit its nuevomexicano setting. Rafael, the play’s Bassanio figure, seeks to woo Doña Portía, but he must first pass una prueba, a version of the casket test, in order to win her hand. In need of money to finance this endeavor, he turns to his friend Don Antonio, the titular merchant, who in turn seeks to borrow money from Don Saúl. In this adaptation, it is Antonio’s investment in Spanish Christian honor that turns what Don Saúl considers to be a standard business agreement into a situation with life-or-death consequences. Don Antonio objects to signing the bond that Don Saúl requires, even though his cargo trains are in jeopardy, exclaiming, “¡Pero mi palabra es ley!”, and he perversely demands that Don Saúl include the penalty of death in the bond. “If you don’t trust my word,” he declares, “then you might as well take my life, because that is how important a man’s honra is to him” (1.1). This conflict sets the stage for Don Antonio to collude with Salazar in exposing Don Saúl as a hidden Jew. The intercultural tensions are heightened when the Christians help their friend Lorenzo marry Don Saúl’s daughter Rebeca without his knowledge, believing that they are bringing about her salvation through marriage to a castizo, the term used in the play for white Spanish Christians.

The events of The Merchant of Santa Fe are intertwined with the dynamics of colonial occupation, as the Spanish fear revolt by the Pueblo Peoples and are at war with tribes they refer to generically as Apaches. The Governor-General’s “razón firme” policy purports to deal humanely with Indigenous communities and is supported by the play’s Jewish characters. In a scene reminiscent of the opening of Romeo and Juliet, the Governor-General of Santa Fe warns the colonists to stop fighting with one another and to behave more nobly: “The drought, the famine, the Apache raids, the streams of refugees, those are all warnings that we must change our ways” (1.1). The same Spaniards who are guilty of mistreating the Indigenous Peoples of the area, he suggests, are the ones “making trouble here” in Santa Fe (1.1). Giving credence to the Governor-General’s warning that such behavior compromises the colonial effort, the Apaches overrun the Spanish fortaleza while the residents of Santa Fe are focused on the trial adjudicating [4] the legality of Don Saúl’s bond, during which Salazar accuses Don Saúl of being a crypto-Jew. As Klein and Shapiro observe, colonial authorities appear “relatively indifferent to the presence of crypto-Jews among them” and are more concerned with the possibility of Indigenous uprising, making Salazar seem like “a pathological case.”^[7] Flores explains this dynamic in the following way: “At every turn Salazar is confronted by the irreducible reality that the principal issue is the viability and legitimacy of the Spanish colonial presence, not the purity of faith.”^[8] The shared investment in the colonial project thus unites Europeans against Indigenous resistance.

In their re-envisioning of the The Merchant of Venice, Flores and Knight emphasize both the historical oppression of Jewish people and the ethics of Jewish belief systems. The Christians surveil Don Saúl by eavesdropping on conversations and inviting him to dinner at Don Antonio’s house, where they serve him pork in hopes of exposing him as a crypto-Jew through his refusal to eat it. This Christian paranoia profoundly impacts the play’s Jewish community in ways that reflect historical realities. Don Saúl initially pursues vengeance against the Christians for mistreating him and for persuading his daughter to elope with Lorenzo, but he ultimately resists this desire because, as his friend Don Erasmo reminds him, “Vengeance goes against the very spirit of Judaic law” (3.2). Doña Portía reinforces this message at the trial. As Greenberg contends, it is significant that Doña Portía’s arguments come from Jewish law, particularly from ideas present in the Proverbs and the Talmud, rather than from Christian teachings or legal formulations.^[9] In contrast to Portia in Shakespeare’s play, who uses Christianity to attack Shylock, Doña Portía speaks to Don Saúl as a fellow Jew living in secrecy. However, it is not her plea that ultimately persuades Don Saúl; rather, he and Don Antonio both experience epiphanies in the final moments of their battle, just as Don Saúl is about to kill Don Antonio. Recounting the experience of locking eyes with his opponent, Don Antonio reveals that they “both realized that to give life and to be grateful for life is not dishonorable” (5.1).

Christian supremacy in New Mexico also affects the Indigenous characters, whose spiritual and cultural practices were suppressed under colonial rule. This is especially evident in the case of Lázaro, an enslaved Indigenous man—or genízaro—who is forced to serve in Spanish households. When Lázaro learns that Don Saúl is Jewish, he believes that it is his duty to report him, citing the fact that “The padre says it’s a sin to be anything but Catholic. I mean, he made me [5] give up my religion, sabes, when they first brought me here” (2.2). As is demonstrated in James Lujan’s play Kino and Teresa, another Shakespeare adaptation set in Santa Fe, Indigenous Peoples in New Mexico often kept their spiritual traditions alive despite Spanish attempts to eradicate them.^[10] This experience resonates with that of the Jewish characters in The Merchant of Santa Fe, and Lázaro wonders why they have been able to practice their religion in secret while he was forced to renounce his altogether.

The realization that Jewish characters have retained their spiritual practices influences Lázaro’s decision at the end of the play to reclaim his Indigenous roots and to listen to the wisdom conveyed to him in his dreams. In the play’s final act, he recounts to Rebeca the dream he had the night the fortaleza fell to the Apaches:

I dreamed I was living on the Plains, with a family who spoke a strange tongue. At first I couldn’t understand them, but then their words became clear. They wanted me to stay with them. I told them the Spaniards would find me and beat me for running away, but the family laughed and told me not to be afraid anymore. So I went with them. That’s what my dream said and that’s what I’m going to do. (5.1)

Lázaro determines that he must reject the status of genízaro, which obscures his tribal connections, to find his kin. Unlike his counterpart in Shakespeare’s play, Lázaro does not simply exchange masters but disavows them altogether, claiming to be his “own man now” (5.1). Nerisa, a genízara who serves as Doña Portía’s waiting maid, opts not to join Lázaro but rather to stay at her mistress’s estate and to marry the castizo Ambrosio. As she shares with Lázaro, she had stopped listening to her dreams long ago. While she is steadfast in her decision to assimilate, her admission conveys a sense of sadness about the losses she has endured.

The ambivalence conveyed through the depiction of Nerisa’s circumstances reflects the complexities of the play’s ending. Although Doña Portía’s estate, whose maintenance depends on the service of the Black mayordomo Ysidro, serves as a safe haven for Nerisa and for the Jewish characters, it remains a symbol of the Spanish colonial presence in the Manzano Mountains. When Doña Portía discloses her Jewish identity to her new husband Rafael, it is unclear whether he [6] will expand his narrow worldview. This open-ended final act embodies the spirit of Flores and Knight’s community-based endeavor to create art that fosters dialogue about the cultural legacies of the past, leaving it to audience members to take up this work in the present.

— Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos