Introduction to Bernardo Mazón Daher’s Measure for Measure | Medida por medida

[print edition page number: 285]

Bernardo Mazón Daher’s bilingual adaptation Measure for Measure | Medida por medida situates Shakespeare’s problem comedy about morality, legal injustice, and sexual violence in a fictional border town near San Diego, California. Influenced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 border-themed production of Measure for Measure directed by Bill Rauch, Mazón strived to create a truly bilingual play for his 2016 adaptation, which would feature a majority Latinx cast and would be accessible to speakers of both Spanish and English.^[1] Developed with support from the San Diego Public Library, Measure for Measure | Medida por medida is rooted in its local community and in the political and artistic traditions of Chicanx teatro. The timing of Mazón’s production aligned with the San Diego stop on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Folio tour, an initiative that brought surviving copies of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s plays to cities around the country. Measure | Medida added an important perspective to the programming that accompanied the tour, showing what Shakespeare can look and sound like when channeled through the languages and cultures of La Frontera.^[2]

The characters in Mazón’s adaptation occupy various positions within their Borderlands community. Angelo, whose name visually and sonically resonates with the word “Anglo,” is the puritanical and hypocritical substitute for the absent Duke Vincentio. Insecure about his own status and loyal to white power structures, Angelo seeks to enforce harsh laws and, specifically, to punish Claudio, a Mexican American man whom he wishes to execute for the crime of having sex out of wedlock and impregnating his fiancée, Juliet, here imagined as a white woman and called a “gringuita” (1.4). Angelo’s claims to moral superiority also [286] shape his rejection of his own fiancée, Mariana, an undocumented immigrant, as well as his desire for Isabella, Claudio’s sister and a novitiate in a convent who pleads to him on her brother’s behalf. The lower-class characters from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Lucio and Pompey Bum (comically named Pompis—meaning “buttocks”—in Mazón’s play), are modified to fit their modern border setting. Their humor and language reflect a working-class sensibility that contrasts with the more elite posture of the other characters.

Because of Mazón’s innovative linguistic approach to reimagining Shakespeare’s play, Measure | Medida can be characterized as a tradaptation. The term tradaptation, coined by Québécois playwright Michel Garneau, describes works that blend adaptation and translation to attend to the political and cultural dynamics of language, particularly in colonial contexts. As Mazón explains it, his vision for bilingual productions—of Shakespeare and other plays—is to integrate Spanish in ways that go beyond simply “accenting certain parts of the story” and to create pieces that are “inclusive to monolingual audiences on both sides.”^[3] For Mazón, rendering parts of Shakespeare’s language into Spanish or Spanglish is not just a matter of translating the words for comprehension. Rather, he views his careful efforts to recreate the effects of Shakespeare’s verse in Spanish as an act of equity for Spanish-speaking audiences.^[4] This approach to translation resists the politics of linguistic (il)legitimacy that Gloria E. Anzaldúa famously describes in Borderlands/La Frontera when she discusses the violence of linguistic purity and the expectation that people living in the Borderlands will defer to Anglocentric standards.^[5]

Mazón’s artful reworking of Shakespeare’s dialogue is evident in his integration of working-class Borderlands Spanish into scenes taking place in the brothel and other public spaces. Colloquial language predominates, for instance, in the following exchange in which Pompis, the tapster at the brothel, responds to the news that Claudio has been condemned to die because Juliet is pregnant:

LUCIO
Basta ya con las bromas. No puedo creerlo. ¿La pura neta?

POMPIS
Segurísima, y es por hacerle panzona a la Julieta. [287]

LUCIO
No mames, quizás es cierto. He promised to meet me two hours since, and he was ever precise in promise-keeping. (1.2)

Here, phrases like “no mames” and “la pura neta” resonate with Mexican American audiences, while also registering Lucio’s shock at what he is hearing. The phrase “hacerle panzona a la Julieta,” moreover, captures the spirit of Shakespeare’s bawdy references to pregnancy in a Borderlands register. The characters’ speech patterns emphasize their distance from centers of political power, and their conversations underscore the ripple effects of legal decisions on the entire community.

Isabella, by contrast, speaks in a more elevated register, using both Spanish and English throughout the play but delivering her most well-known speeches largely in Spanish. For example, in response to Angelo’s proposition that she abandon her virginity and have sex with him in exchange for saving her brother’s life, she explains that she would rather die than do so:

That is, were I under terms of death,
Escogería cicatrices de
Un látigo, y me vistiera con
Ellos como si fueran rubíes crueles,
Y me desnudaría hasta la muerte,
Y abrazar el sueño eterno,
Antes de dar mi cuerpo a ti. (2.4)

This speech is an important one in Shakespeare’s play, as it highlights Isabella’s spiritual fortitude and depicts her as a martyr who is willing to subject herself to flagellation rather than compromise her religious vows. As Dennis Austin Britton has argued, this passage in Shakespeare also highlights Isabella’s exceptional whiteness, as the images of the red blood on the white skin of the martyr were central to formulations linking whiteness to spiritual purity.^[6] Yet this effect shifts in Mazón’s predominantly Catholic Mexican American setting, where religious devotion is not the purview only of white women. In this context, Isabella reflects the powerful influence of marianismo in Mexican and Mexican American culture, which stems from the veneration of La Virgen de Guadalupe. While Angelo is attracted to Isabella’s steadfast and principled faith, he also seeks to dominate [288] her, and his tendency to use English in conversation with her, though he uses Spanish elsewhere, suggests that he draws on his proximity to white power in addition to his masculinity in his efforts to bend her will to his.

Borderlands language politics take center stage in Mazón’s revision of act 2, scene 3, in which Duke Vincentio speaks to Claudio and Juliet about the “sin” the unmarried couple has “mutually committed” (2.3). In this scene, Mazón reassigns Juliet’s lines to Claudio, though Juliet remains on stage, and he adds a social worker, who translates for her benefit:

DUKE VINCENTIO
¿Se arrepiente, caballero, de su pecado?

SOCIAL WORKER (translating)
Repent you, good man, of the sin you carry?

CLAUDIO
Me arrepiento de él y sobrellevo la vergüenza con paciencia.

SOCIAL WORKER (translating)
I do, and bear the shame most patiently. (2.3)

In addition to creating a moment of linguistic access for monolingual English- or Spanish-speaking members of the audience, this scene radically inverts the hierarchy between Shakespeare’s English and Mazón’s Spanish. As the scene unfolds in real time, Shakespeare’s words are presented not as the original utterance but rather as a translation, and a translation of Spanish lines spoken along the U.S.–Mexico border at that. Moments like this one actively destabilize the linguistic and cultural boundaries that are so often drawn in service of oppression and discrimination.

The Borderlands context of Measure | Medida activates additional meanings related to the objectification of people within legal, religious, and economic systems in the Shakespearean source text. In Measure for Measure, bodily autonomy is often violated, and bodies are treated as interchangeable. These themes are emphasized in the “bed trick,” in which Angelo’s abandoned fiancée Mariana substitutes for Isabella under the cover of night, as well as in the “head trick,” in which the head of the prisoner Ragozine (a pirate in Shakespeare’s play and a “notorious narco” in Mazón’s) is swapped for Claudio’s. Although these exchanges facilitate the plot’s comic resolution, they are uncomfortably similar to Angelo’s demand that Isabella relinquish her chastity in exchange for saving Claudio’s life. For these reasons, Shakespeare’s play has sparked many questions about consent and has become newly resonant in the #MeToo era. In Mazón’s Borderlands reimagining,  [289] the play’s treatment of objectification also speaks to concerns about the violence faced by many people in the region, evident in the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, sex tourism in Tijuana, and the exploitative labor practices that capitalize on the economic disparities between the U.S. and Mexico.

In gesturing toward these larger crises, Measure | Medida points to the challenges of seeking justice and healing from the trauma that many have endured. As he articulates a legalistic understanding of eye-for-an-eye justice at the end of the play, Duke Vincentio proclaims, “Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers herida; / Igual por igual, measure por medida” (5.1). Here he evokes Anzaldúa’s description of the U.S.–Mexico border as “una herida abierta,” an open wound, “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”^[7] In its treatment of the deep wounds experienced by its characters, Mazón’s Measure | Medida forces audiences to reckon with the objectification and violence inherent in the continued coloniality that shapes La Frontera. The weight of these realities is underscored in Mazón’s long final stage direction, which indicates that Isabella appears visibly distraught when she realizes that she is being forced to marry the Duke against her will. As the lights fade, she clutches her cross and collapses to her knees in anguish. With this ending, Mazón’s play questions the Duke’s sense of justice and, with it, calls attention to the many injustices enacted against Borderlands communities today.

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