Defiant Re-Envisioning: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch
by Jonathan Burton with Yasmin Mendoza
Although Whittier College is a double MSI (Minority-Serving Institution) with over 50% Latinx students and 70% students of color overall, the first impulse of the students in our class was not to explore issues of race or citizenship in our adaptation of Act 1, Scene 2 of The Merchant of Venice. While roughly half of the students in this class on Shakespeare in American Life commuted from LatinX neighborhoods like East LA and Montebello, the first locations they proposed for our video were on the White west side of Los Angeles, places like Santa Monica Beach and the Hollywood hills.
These choices should be no surprise. As Daniel G. Solórzano and Tara Yasso have indicated, the force of popular culture means that, “[p]eople of color often buy into and even tell majoritarian stories” that erase and/or denigrate them. While the prompt for all fourteen classes participating in the Qualities of Mercy Project encouraged students to harness Shakespeare’s play to the specific concerns of their community, the communities of many Whittier students are eclipsed in popular depictions of Los Angeles. This also helps to explain, in part, why many initially laughed off Portia’s chauvinistic review of her foreign suitors, and chose, like Nerissa, not to linger on Portia’s blatantly racist dismissal of the Prince of Morocco. A well-meaning prompt is simply not enough.
In this reflection, we want to consider how to help students to move from a potentially self-effacing reverence for Shakespeare to what one member of the class would come to designate “defiant re-envisioning.” Ruben Espinosa, whose class at UTEP created one of the project’s standout videos, has suggested that we must “locate in Shakespeare the moments that will allow for the candid and necessary discussions in our classrooms regarding race, racism, and white supremacy.” Yet in order to activate those moments for our students we need first to join Adhaar Noor Desai in his commitment to “to topple the walls that privilege Shakespeare’s face over students’ lives.”
Unless and until whiteness is explicitly decentered, the Shakespeare classroom is, by default, a whitespace, especially when a white man assigns and evaluates the work. So, before the class could consider what qualities of mercy were important to us in Los Angeles, they needed to know that our classroom would be a space of mercy. Co-creating this environment required establishing above all that mercy is not the exclusive bequest of a white professor, but instead involves students granting to their own, sometimes marginalized, experiences attention co-equal to the attention they bestow upon Shakespeare.
The defiant posture of our class emerged through a consistent effort to disassociate our work with the iconic face of Shakespeare and conjoin it instead to faces more closely resembling those in our class. As Kimberly Coles, Kim Hall, and Ayanna Thompson have argued, students’ empowerment is contingent on their being “able to perceive themselves within a discipline.” So, we read essays by Kyle Grady, Sujata Iyengar, Ian Smith, and Elizabeth Valdez Acosta, each accompanied by a picture of its author. In a mock casting exercise, students defended their choices of a Portia and Nerissa drawn from headshots of exclusively black and LatinX actresses. Students were also fortified by the knowledge that they were collaborating with Shakespeare students at four other Minority Serving Institutions.
A second strategy that helped to decenter Whiteness and embolden marginalized students was embedding the project into a class shaped by culturally sustaining pedagogy. The goal of such work is not simply to lure students of color into an assimilationist performance of white middle-class norms, but rather “to perpetuate and foster — to sustain — linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.” Since students’ ability to claim canonical texts for themselves depends upon seeing their own lives as complex and worthy, these discussions emphasized the students’ ethnic consciousness, linguistic diversity, familial obligations, their ganas (determination), their spiritual strength, and their ability to navigate multiple, diverse worlds. These discussions would provide students with a set of guiding principles and a sense of authority to “creat[e] knowledge alongside — and sometimes in resistance to — Shakespeare.”
Our next step in laying the groundwork for a culturally sustaining practice in the project came in creating Shax-memes. This simple assignment is designed to help students recognize their right to tap into Shakespeare’s cultural capital and begin to make meaning with his works. While a few students used campus scenes captured in their own photography, most paired Shakespeare’s words with news images germane to southern California and/or Latinx community. Two examples follow:
While this assignment brought to light that shifting American attitudes toward immigrants, refugees, and people of color troubled many of the students, it was equally apparent that few had gone so far as to participate in activism or political processes. That students in southern California, and particularly Latinx students, might be concerned about where and to what extent they can speak about race and ethnicity should not come as a surprise. Several of these students have witnessed firsthand the effects of border militarization and ICE raids on their families, friends, and communities. For some, silence promises safety; for others, it is a product of inertia or anxiety about saying the wrong thing among more politically engaged peers. Still another factor was that students sometimes feel silenced by their discomfort with Shakespeare. As one student put it, Shakespeare’s plays “don’t represent who we are . . . Shakespeare is the ghost of values we never want to embody again.”
In Act 1, Scene 2, the students found a figure they did not want to become: Portia might “know what were good to do” in the face of problems such as gentrification and child separation, but she chooses to ignore such problems or disavow her role in sustaining white supremacy. For many students then, the project was not only a chance to rewrite Shakespeare, it was an opportunity to reflect on or make amends for their own, Nerissa-like, complicity. This meant consistently responding to Portia’s words and keeping a focus on aspects of Los Angeles that a Portia might be slow to acknowledge.
As they came to understand that Shakespeare could be rendered material for their own counter-stories, students in the class began to see that Portia’s commentary on her suitors might help them to speak where they had previously been silent. As one student pointed out, the Qualities of Mercy Project was an opportunity to be true to the College’s mission promising that “the Whittier education equips students to be active citizens . . . who embrace diversity and act with integrity.” For another, the project became a statement, “that we will not stand with racism, sexism, inequality, stereotypes, or anti-immigration policies. . . that mercy is abundant, that love is free, and that everyone is deserving of human kindness despite linguistic or national borders.”
The video begins with a Shakespearean trick, initially delivering on expectations only to overturn them. So, we open to the most conventional sights and sounds of Los Angeles before tearing these aside to make room for a less familiar and more Brown Los Angeles, one featuring Mexican muralism, hand-made tortillas, and Rockabilly-Norteño music. As the scene moves to a manicured backyard in the Whittier Hills, Portia’s “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world” is preempted by a gardener confessing, “Honestamente, mi cuerpesito esta cansado (Honestly, my little body is tired).” Thus, when our gender-reversed Portia utters his scene-opening complaint, his world-weariness is seen as dependent on the physical labor of people like Latinx gardeners who toil for minimum wage in the heat of Los Angeles’ celebrated sunshine. As one of the students observed, “Mercy is sometimes hard to find in Shakespeare’s play and sometimes it has to be inserted, or demanded.”
Defiant insertions and demands appear throughout the scene as Portia’s complaints are undermined by cutaway scenes of suitors reimagined in specifically Angeleno contexts. Our Condessa Palatin (County Palatine) is “so full of unmannerly sadness” as she stands before an East LA mural entitled “The wall that speaks, sings, and shouts” because she is reviewing news stories of child separation at the border and threats to the DACA program. Dama Halcon (Lord Falconbridge) is not a “dumb show” but a Honduran refugee striving to learn English from a dictionary. Above all the students were troubled by Portia’s desire to “shut the gates” on wooers like the Prince of Morocco, with his “complexion of a devil.”
Portia’s complaint sounds all too familiar to students who have heard white nationalist objections to California SB 54, declaring California a sanctuary state. They chose therefore to end the scene not with Portia’s bigotry but instead with the gates thrown open and twenty-one solemn Whittier students — Latinx, white, black, and Asian — entering with protest signs insisting, “I am the Prince of Morocco,” “Love is colorblind,” “I am Morokko no ōji,” and “Soy el Principe de Marruecos” to Las Cafateras’ triumphant folk-cumbia, “If I was President.” As one student concluded, “we used this project to strive for a unified and diversified consciousness in the world we will be inheriting, and made it clear that change is not an option, it’s a priority.” By inserting antiracist counter-images into the heart of Shakespeare’s majoritarian text, these students re-envision Merchant as a model for individuals seeking to move from complicity to defiance.
Jonathan Burton is Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College in Los Angeles. His most recent publications theorize early modern racial formations and explore culturally sustaining pedagogies for Shakespeare. Forthcoming work includes an essay in Renaissance Drama on “The Reinventions of Race in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London” and a chapter in the MLA Companion to Romeo and Juliet on “Erasing for Inclusion: Teaching Romeo and Juliet in Hispanic Serving Institutions.” He can be found on Twitter at @profjbshakes.
Yasmin Mendoza is a junior at Whittier College double majoring in English and Theatre with an emphasis in Performance. She made a brief appearance in Whittier’s Qualities of Mercy Project as the gardener and made edits to the script before production. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she currently researches the censorship of 20th and 21st century literature in America.
