Introduction to Volume 2

[print edition page number: xxxiii]

The four plays in Volume 2 of The Bard in the Borderlands are firmly rooted in the particularities of place, resituating Shakespeare within vivid Borderlands settings both past and present. In the tradition of teatro, the playwrights use performance to address pressing local concerns and historical injustices and to work toward healing and reparative action. Conceived with and for local communities, the multilingual Shakespeare appropriations in this volume reopen and redress colonial wounds in the artistic sanctuary of the public theater, a dynamic environment in which bodies move through space, time, and languages. These works activate the complex genre of comedy—which is often inflected with tragedy—to create opportunities for collective critique, laughter, and liberation.

The volume is organized chronologically, both in terms of historical setting and date of composition, tracing the shifting colonial contexts of the region. Ramón A. Flores and Lynn Knight’s The Merchant of Santa Fe (1993) refigures Shakespeare’s Shylock and Portia as Spanish Jews who continue to practice their religion clandestinely in seventeenth-century New Mexico despite the threat of the Spanish Inquisition. Indigenous spiritual practices are also suppressed by the Spanish colonial state, and the forms of Indigenous resistance we see in the play foreshadow the imminent Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Set roughly one hundred and fifty years later in the nineteenth century, José Cruz González’s Invierno (2010) reimagines The Winter’s Tale to explore ongoing colonial conflicts and the persistence of Indigenous knowledge systems in Alta California, where the Spanish have unjustly expropriated Chumash land and are attempting to ward off American settlers and military forces from claiming it for the United States. Unfolding over the course of sixteen years, Invierno depicts the rupture that occurred when the U.S. invaded Mexico in 1846, resulting in a two-year war that would end with a massive land grab. Under the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico was forced to cede over half of its territory to the U.S., thus redrawing the border between the two nations. This current border serves as the setting for [xxxiv] Bernardo Mazón Daher’s San Diego-based Measure for Measure | Medida por medida (2018) and Lydia G. Garcia and Bill Rauch’s La Comedia of Errors (2019), two bilingual plays that dramatize the effects of increasing surveillance, policing, and militarization in the region.

Similar issues are explored in the Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet appropriations by Edit Villarreal, James Lujan, Seres Jaime Magaña, Tara Moses, Josh Inocéncio, and Olga Sanchez Saltveit that we highlight in Volume 1. Whereas these works reinterpret the tragic implications of their source texts through Borderlands frameworks, those featured in Volume 2 turn to ambivalent comedies to capture the mixture of joy and tragedy that characterizes life in La Frontera. In Invierno, for instance, González employs the hybrid genre of tragicomedy to meditate on approaches to restoring Indigenous lifeways that have been damaged by colonialism. This emphasis is particularly evident in his collaborations with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, who had been actively working to revitalize their language, Samala, at the time of the play’s composition. By incorporating Samala into his adaptation of a play about reunion, revival, and healing in the wake of trauma and loss, González uses the tragicomic form to imagine forth the futures that colonialism attempted to foreclose.

To demonstrate the intergenerational impacts of past harms, González frames his play with a modern young couple named Aly and A.J., who turn out to be descendants of the nineteenth-century characters. Shakespeare becomes a metatheatrical point of reference for them as they work through their relationship to each other and to their pasts. As young lovers in the midst of conflict, Aly and A.J. instinctively turn to Romeo and Juliet as a point of reference but ultimately reject the predetermined tragic ending of that play:

YOUNG MAN
Look, I’m no Romeo—

YOUNG WOMAN
Stop.

YOUNG MAN
—but you’re my Juliet.

YOUNG WOMAN
That’s so corny.

YOUNG MAN
I know, it’s stupid. [xxxv]

YOUNG WOMAN
Their story ends badly.

YOUNG MAN
Yeah, well, ours won’t.

YOUNG WOMAN
What makes you so sure?

YOUNG MAN
’Cause when I’m with you I don’t feel so hopeless. (2.5)

As they reach for a tale from the past to explain their present, these young people find that Shakespeare’s hypercanonical story of teenage love and death does not align with the tragicomic nature of their narrative and fails to capture their newfound hope about a future that remains unwritten.

Mazón’s Measure | Medida and Flores and Knight’s The Merchant of Santa Fe explore the porous line between tragedy and comedy by engaging with two of Shakespeare’s most notorious problem comedies. They deftly rework their source material’s famously unsatisfying endings, in which moments of injustice puncture the supposedly comic resolutions. Mazón underscores the violence in Measure for Measure’s final scene, when Isabella escapes sexual assault only to be forced into a nonconsensual marriage with the Duke. In this play, as in others featured in this volume, an unjust legal system obstructs a truly happy ending, as the sexual autonomy and reproductive rights of the female characters are compromised by those in power. The Merchant of Santa Fe uses practices of reparative revision to address the troubling dimensions of Shakespeare’s comedy about the mistreatment of Jewish people in Christian society. While Flores and Knight do not shy away from the antisemitism at the heart of The Merchant of Venice, they mitigate the violence of Shakespeare’s conclusion, in which Shylock is stripped of his possessions and forced by the state to convert to Christianity. In their nuevomexicano reworking of the play, Doña Portía relies on Talmudic principles in her defense of Don Saúl, the Shylock figure, and Don Saúl’s sense of honor causes some of the Christians to reconsider their anti-Jewish prejudices. As in Invierno and Measure | Medida, though, the comic ending of Flores and Knight’s play cannot fully resolve deep conflicts, and the lives of the Apache, Pueblo, and genízaro/a characters remain shaped by colonial domination.

Although Garcia and Rauch’s La Comedia of Errors is the most traditionally comic of the plays in this volume, it too underscores the pain and alienation that often drive Shakespeare’s comic plots. Opening with an acto that echoes [xxxvi] the artistic methods of Chicanx teatro, La Comedia places Shakespeare’s early farce about mistaken identity within a bilingual Latinx community, mobilizing linguistic misunderstandings to humorous effect while also delivering trenchant social commentary. While the twins share names and heritages, as they do in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, they speak different languages due to the fact that they have grown up on either side of the border. Indeed, the comic plot emerges from the tragedy of family separation, and many characters live in fear of deportation. As Antífolo de México says in frustration, “Este sueño americano es una pesadilla” (4.3). In La Comedia, which dramatizes the thin line between dreams and reality, sanity and insanity, the so-called American Dream becomes a nightmare. Although the play ends with the happy reunion of the twins and their parents, it is nevertheless marked by grief for the incredible loss of time together. As with the other texts in this volume, the tragic undertones of comedy resonate in La Comedia’s Borderlands contexts, calling attention to unjust social policies and practices even as the production itself offers a sense of joy and community.

Like the other plays in The Bard in the Borderlands, the works gathered in this volume arise from a shared sense of fellowship, and they address common interests and social issues. The Merchant of Santa Fe was inspired by community conversations about the Jewish heritage of many residents of New Mexico, and Invierno amplifies the cultural revitalization work undertaken by the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. La Comedia was part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s efforts to make theater accessible to broader audiences. Through a series of “community hosted experiences,” the script was developed collaboratively with local dramaturgs and consultants, and the play toured to schools and community centers throughout Oregon’s Rogue Valley. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s earlier efforts to adapt Shakespeare to Borderlands contexts influenced Mazón’s Measure | Medida, as he drew inspiration from a 2011 bilingual production of Measure for Measure directed by Rauch. Staged in the San Diego Public Library and open to all, Mazón’s own bilingual production radically reimagined what it means to make Shakespeare accessible by placing Spanish on equal footing with English.

Language plays a key role in these plays, all of which aim to reflect the linguistic histories and lived experiences of their intended audiences. In the plays set during the period of Spanish colonization, Indigenous characters resist and mourn attempts to eradicate their languages. Invierno’s incorporation of Samala demonstrates the urgency of supporting present-day language revitalization efforts. To reflect the variety of settlers, institutions, and traditions that shaped nineteenth-century California, Invierno also incorporates Spanish, Russian, [xxxvii] Gaelic, and Latin. In The Merchant of Santa Fe, the genízaro/a characters, who have been enslaved by the Spanish, have lost connection to their native languages, and the Apache language is accessible to the servant Lázaro only as something to be mockingly approximated for the amusement of his masters. Nonetheless, Lázaro ends the play seeking to reconnect with his Apache kinspeople and to reclaim his cultural practices.

Taking place in a more contemporary setting, La Comedia and Measure | Medida feature bilingual dialogue in a variety of Spanishes, Englishes, and Spanglishes to reflect the heterogeneous speech of fronterizos. They also incorporate everyday practices of translation, both in legal contexts with state-appointed translators and in the more informal modes of interpreting that occur routinely in multilingual communities. For example, Garcia and Rauch’s play features several moments in which some characters interpret for the benefit of other characters as well as for the audience. The addition of La Vecina (literally, the neighbor) to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors highlights the value and complexity of this interpretive work, which is often as much about culture as it is about language. Measure | Medida similarly includes a scene in which a social worker translates Spanish dialogue into Shakespearean English for Juliet, a white monolingual character. In this moment, Shakespeare becomes the translation rather than the original, a reversal that disrupts textual and linguistic hierarchies. Mazón artfully translates Shakespearean verse into his own Spanish verse form throughout the play, thus resisting the tendency of some adaptations and productions to use Spanish only in informal dialogue or in scenes with lower-class characters.

The plays’ linguistic innovations often reflect and intersect with the injustices faced by Borderlands communities. The appropriations in this volume depict the movement of individuals and groups across shifting and sometimes restrictive geopolitical borders, and the plays set in recent periods dramatize the particular hardships faced by those who are undocumented. For instance, the legal system is not designed to support characters such as Antífolo and Drómio de México in La Comedia or Mariana in Measure | Medida, all of whom live in danger of deportation and detention because of their legal status. In addition to addressing the precarity of migrants, several of the plays also deal with gender violence. Measure | Medida recontextualizes Shakespeare’s most direct exploration of consent and sexual assault for Borderlands communities, emphasizing the manifold ways that power can be abused to harm people in vulnerable positions. Invierno reveals the long history of such patriarchal domination in colonizing projects, as Hermonia’s mother was raped by a Spanish colonist, thus sparking a cycle of intergenerational trauma and domestic violence that affects even the present-day characters in the play. The experiences of these female characters [xxxviii] resonate with the brutality that many Latinas and Indigenous women still face both in interpersonal relationships and in encounters with law enforcement and legal systems.

As they navigate these personal, legal, and social landscapes, many characters in the plays are guided by their spiritual traditions. Paulina in Invierno regards the preservation of Indigenous spiritual practices as crucial to ensuring a future for the Chumash Peoples. The Jewish characters in The Merchant of Santa Fe continue to practice Judaism under threat of persecution, and the Indigenous characters remain resilient amidst the forces of cultural genocide. Despite the colonizing role that Christianity has played, several characters draw on it as a source of strength and solace. Isabella remains steadfast in her devotion although those in power attempt to use it against her, and Antífolo de México seeks sanctuary in the chapel of the convent where his mother once sought refuge, recalling the many undocumented immigrants who have been similarly protected in places of worship. Across the plays in this volume, the theater, too, serves as a source of sanctuary—a site of collaboration, solidarity, and hope. Through the composition, production, and performance of these plays, communities come together to act as witnesses to cycles of violence, to heal the wounds of the past, and to imagine futures in which comic endings are possible.