Recasting Shakespeare for a New Generation of Students and Audiences

“We were thinking through how Shakespeare is adapted and appropriated in the borderlands,” Gillen recalls. At the time they knew of one example of such a work: the Hamlet-inspired Ofélio by Josh Inocéncio, a queer Houston-based performer.  

Gillen and Adrianna Santos suspected others were likewise up to the challenge of making the works of the Renaissance-era British bard relevant to Latine, Chicano, and Indigenous students who live near the US-Mexico border, especially at a time when sectarian forces are stoking xenophobia. They sought “culturally sustaining ways,” as Gillen puts it, to engage the playwright’s works—material that was in any case required reading for their Latine students as it is for most everyone—and invited a group of scholars, teachers, and performers to join them in their search.

Among the like-minded collaborators they found was Kathryn Vomero Santos, whose research explores migration and racial and linguistic differences in Shakespeare’s work. She was also searching for new entry points to teaching Shakespeare that might connect more fully with her students, her community, and challenges of life in the borderlands.

Kathryn Santos eventually relocated to San Antonio to teach at Trinity University and began working more closely with Gillen and Adrianna Santos in creating the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (BSC), a multi-pronged initiative that celebrates the recontextualization of Shakespeare by contemporary Latine playwrights with texts, research and learning tools, and opportunities for scholars.  

“We’re helping to cultivate the next generation of people who are interested in Borderlands Shakespeare,” Adrianna Santos says.

Key to this mission is The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, an open-access scholarly edition of selected plays in this growing canon. Volume 1 was published in 2023; volume 2 this year. A corresponding interactive map, in development, charts where the plays have been staged or written. The BSC’s March 2024 Conference, “Adapting, Translating, and Performing Shakespeare in the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands” brought together scholars, teachers, students, and artists to explore this work further.  

Already the project is having an impact, says Adrianna Santos, describing feedback from a professor teaching James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa, inspired by Romeo and Juliet.

“It takes place after the Pueblo Revolt, and engages with ideas of colonization and the loss of Indigenous land and language and culture,” she explains. “One of the students said, ‘This is how Romeo and Juliet should have been… it wasn’t just about a fight between families.’”

Not just a rose by any other name 

Reckoning with the role Western literature has played on the frontier, Gillen points out, does not mean lionizing it as a cultural pinnacle. On the contrary, Shakespeare’s work offers a way to grapple with the enduring legacy of colonialism. It presents opportunities to explore how the political and social milieus that produced Shakespeare have infiltrated and shaped the borderlands over centuries. She cites, for example, a US Army performance of Othello—“a play about racism”—that took place on the eve of the 1846 US invasion of Mexico; then-Lieutenant  Ulysses S. Grant played Desdemona.

Shakespeare, Gillen continues, has particular significance for non-native English speakers; teachers use his work as a litmus test to evaluate cultural fluency and reading comprehension. In that way, Shakespeare serves “a kind of disciplinary and colonial function in the borderlands.” 

“It’s been used as a way of saying, ‘Do you fully understand English? You're not going to really assimilate unless you understand Shakespeare,’” Gillen says. Still, BSC members recognize Shakespeare’s outsized role as a cultural touchstone; ignoring him is not an option. Better to find creative and culturally relevant ways to make the work resonate for those in the borderlands, and everywhere.

Practically speaking, the works in the anthology empower Latine actors and playwrights to “do Shakespeare in culturally sustaining ways,” Kathryn Santos says. “He’s a mainstay in curricula and in theater training.” Indeed, she explains that Edit Villarreal wrote The Language of Flowers, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, to give Latine students in Los Angeles meaningful roles. This play, which appears in Volume 1 of The Bard in the Borderlands is not set across a racial divide, but across a class and generational divide. In this telling, Romeo is undocumented and his lover is a third-generation Mexican-American who’s told not to speak Spanish; the central conflict hinges on status—a salient tension this election year.

BSC members have also partnered with Humanities Texas and select high schools to workshop classroom lesson plans. One component may suggest having students undertake “context conversations,” as Kathryn Santos typically does, to illuminate the backdrop of specific adaptations. It’s an energizing exercise. 

“Latinx students are excited to bring their cultural knowledge into the classroom, and then students not of the borderlands and not from Latinx communities have an opportunity to learn these histories that are excluded from textbooks.” Kathryn Santos says, pointing out the synchronicity of events. “We’re not talking about Shakespeare and then a later colonial history that's applied: Shakespeare lived during a time when the Spanish had already colonized this part of the world, and the English were just beginning to build their colonial empire on this continent…. Shakespeare is part of this legacy.” 

As they’ve evolved the BSC, Adrianna Santos, Kathryn Santos, and Gillen have found—to their delight—that the notion of borderlands resonates worldwide, among stakeholders dwelling on all sorts of margins not just here, but in Europe and Australia.  

Borders, they say, are elastic.  

“This project is rooted in a very specific geographical context, but it has a wide reach,” Kathryn Santos says. “These plays deserve serious study not just from Shakespeareans, but by people in Mexican-American studies, by people in Indigenous studies” no matter where they live.