Review of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 1

The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 1, edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos, focuses on six theatrical appropriations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet by Latinx and Indigenous artists. On one level, the power of this collection is that it brings together several appropriations that have not been published previously. Tragically, as these appropriations remained in obscurity, the world has had little knowledge of the vital and dynamic ways in which Shakespeare informs Latinx and Indigenous artistic and cultural production and vice versa. Now rectified via this collection, what is readily evident is that the merging of Shakespeare’s plays with Borderlands traditions, stories, and histories has created plays that address the important questions of our day. Thus, on another level, the promise of this collection is its potential to animate conversations surrounding colonialism, racism, and other forms of exclusion in the Borderlands. The Bard in the Borderlands indeed invites its audience not only to see the richness of the Borderlands artistic and literary archive but also beckons its audience, from this newfound awareness, to place these works in the service of cultural and social justice. Reanimation, in this sense, is a form of literary and social activism that envisions a way forward; that is, it is a path from our current reality to more just worlds.

In the six plays of this volume, Edit Villareal’s The Language of…