Language, Race, and Shakespeare Appropriation on San Antonio’s Southside: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch
by Katherine Gillen
As one-time San Antonio resident Gloria Anzaldúa illustrates in her frequently anthologized “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” language is intimately tied to culture, identity, oppression, and liberation:
Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself, until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
As students in my Shakespeare course adapted Act 1, Scene 3 of The Merchant of Venice to our context at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, they transformed the famous pound of flesh into una lengua, a tongue. In so doing, they highlighted oppression faced by Mexican immigrants, particularly the undocumented, and they celebrated the vibrancy of Borderlands languages, which are often derided as improper, incorrect, or impure. In their contribution to the Qualities of Mercy project, A&M-SA students insisted that diverse, Borderlands voices must be heard and valued, even — and perhaps especially — within the traditionally white, Anglo spaces of the Shakespeare classroom and Shakespeare performance.
A&M-SA is a Hispanic-Serving Institution located on the historically underserved and predominantly Mexican American Southside of San Antonio. Students in my course enjoyed the Qualities of Mercy Project because it both allowed them to participate in a larger national conversation and asked them to draw on regionally and culturally specific knowledge to adapt Shakespeare to our community. Moreover, students used the project as an opportunity to interrogate Shakespeare’s colonizing function and to theorize and instantiate the decolonial potential of Shakespearean appropriation — work with special resonance on a campus whose land was home to the Coahuiltecan nations before it was occupied by the Mission Espada and ultimately by the university.
In reflections, students expressed their excitement about bringing their lived experiences to bear on their production of Merchant. They were particularly inspired to do so by Alison Vasquez — actor, director, professor, and founder of the Latinx theater company Teatro Audaz — who visited our class to share her expertise as a Latina performing Shakespeare in both English and Spanish. Students saw that they too could take possession of Shakespeare. After a period of intense debate, the class decided to depict Shylock as an undocumented Mexican immigrant and Antonio as a Mexican American citizen who is prejudiced against undocumented people but who resorts to Shylock’s lending company to secure a loan for his friend Bassanio, a cash-strapped Anglo.
The students’ Anzaldúan message is clear throughout their film and is reflected in its multilingual dialogue. Shylock (Nancy Navarro) translanguages as the situation demands, employing Spanish, English, and Spanglish to communicate. For example, pushed to the breaking point, he turns to Antonio (Samantha Muñoz) and exclaims, “Or maybe I should be agradecido and say ‘Gracias, señor Antonio, for spitting on me, insulting me, and calling me an illegal.’ Here, te presto el dinero con mucho gusto!” In contrast to Shylock’s multilingual skill, Bassanio betrays the linguistic limitations of white monolinguals, as he has difficulty understanding simple phrases like “Antonio es un buen señor.”
While Antonio understands Spanish he refuses to speak it, a choice that provokes Shylock’s ire and influences his decision to demand Antonio’s tongue as collateral. Removing it, he asserts, would ensure that Antonio will “never speak badly about our people again.” This sociolinguistic context informs Shylock’s delivery of the warning, “If I don’t get my money back within three months, te corto la lengua.” The shocking threat is directed, pointedly, at Antonio, and it excludes Bassanio, who misses its meaning. Countering the racist disparagement of Spanish and the elevation of English in the region, moreover, Shylock regards Antonio’s hypocritical and assimilationist tongue as worthless, as it has been tamed by the forces of colonialism and white supremacy. It has become, as Shylock quips, less valuable than a cow’s tongue, which you could at least use for a “pinche barbacoa.”
Reflecting the centrality of Mexcian American perspectives to the production, students chose to have Shylock speak Spanish in his asides to the audience, which is implicitly imagined as sympathetic. When Antonio arrives, for example, Shylock turns to the audience and explains why he hates him:
Como me cae mal. Pendejo con su dinero y luego con el nopal en la frente pero ni quiere hablar español, el guey. Se cree un gringo con sus pinches papeles pero es bien cabrón con su propia raza.
[I hate him. Stupid with his money and then he looks as Mexican as I do yet refuses to speak Spanish, this guy. Thinks of himself as a white man with his fucking papers, but he’s a jerk to his own race.]
Shylock expresses his frustrations with Antonio, critiquing Antonio’s anti-immigrant sentiments and rejection of his Mexican identity. As he does, he speaks to a distinctly local audience through a shared discourse that includes regionally specific phrases such as “el nopal en la frente” (literally “a cactus on the forehead”), which he uses to indicate Antonio’s Mexicanness. As one member of the scriptwriting team wrote in a reflection, they endeavored “to make Shylock relatable to people of the Latinx community who are looked down upon because they don’t have a piece of paper that says they have the ‘right’ to be here.” Students hoped to demonstrate that neither Shakespeare’s Shylock nor undocumented immigrants in the US are granted the mercy of which Portia so eloquently speaks.
Language politics were central to the class’s discussions about the production, as students endeavored to represent San Antonio’s rich linguistic hybridity. They spent considerable time debating how much of the script should be in Spanish. In one somewhat heated exchange, a student wondered if translating Shakespeare completely into Spanish would alienate much of our audience. Another student responded, “So what? It’s not for them,” pushing back against the white Anglocentric power that Shakespeare often embodies and suggesting that theirs should be a performance by and for Latinx audiences. This student’s position was later complicated by a third student who noted that she doesn’t know how to speak Spanish because “our language has been stolen from us,” referencing the erasure of Spanish throughout the early- and mid-twentieth century in Texas schools and other public spaces.
The class ultimately decided to highlight the vibrancy of Chicanx Spanish, employing regional phrases and grammatical constructions, but they used English subtitles for these segments. They did so both to avoid excluding Latinxs who do not speak Spanish and to increase general accessibility (a move with which most students agreed, but which some regarded as a concession to Anglo dominance). Discussing the A&M-SA production in a recent RaceB4Race talk, Ruben Espinosa notes the slippage between the actors’ spoken words and the subtitles, which often opt for milder language. These slight mistranslations, he affirms, reinforce the sense that the production is aimed primarily at Spanish speaking Mexican Americans, who can access its full range of meanings.
Throughout our production process, I appreciated the ways in which A&M-SA students pushed back against the idea that Shakespeare constitutes white property. This whiteness, they emphasize, has a linguistic component, especially in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. As Jonathan Rosa argues in Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race, colonial histories have influenced the co-articulation of language and race in perceptions of Latinx difference, “such that languages are perceived as racially embodied and race is perceived as linguistically intelligible.”
This raciolinguistic reality shapes Shakespeare reception. As Espinosa writes in “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera,”
Because of Shakespeare’s deep interconnection with English, and with Englishness, he is often perceived to be less accessible to certain users, such as Latinxs. While apprehension surrounding the knotty nature of Shakespearean verse might partially guide these perceptions, attitudes about Shakespeare’s place in the establishment of English linguistic and cultural identity certainly drive these views.
English classrooms often reinforce the equation of whiteness with Shakespeare’s language, which is anachronistically equated with modern white academic English. As the A&M-SA students make clear, the linguistic limitations of the academy often exclude and oppress certain populations, whose contributions can disrupt, transform, and enhance our intellectual conversations.
The Qualities of Mercy project thus offered a valuable opportunity to employ antiracist and decolonial pedagogies that counter white approaches to teaching Shakespeare. But adaptation and appropriation assignments are not inherently antiracist or decolonial, especially in classes taught by white instructors like myself. Instead, instructors must actively employ antiracist strategies in their early modern literature classrooms, as shown in invaluable essays by Kim F. Hall, David Sterling Brown, and Ambereen Dadabhoy.
As part of this effort, our assignments must encourage students — particularly BIPOC students — to draw on their own lived experiences, languages, and embodied knowledges (a practice Lisa Jennings and I discuss in this Sundial piece). The process of crafting an appropriation, moreover, must be accompanied by critical conversations and readings about race and colonialism, thus opening space for students to critique ideologies often embedded in Shakespeare’s plays rather than feeling pressured to reproduce them. As A&M-SA’s contribution to the Qualities of Mercy project vibrantly demonstrates, students can create masterful pieces of art and generate trenchant critical insights when they are empowered to approach Shakespeare in their own voices.
Katherine Gillen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. Her work focuses on constructions of race and gender in early modern drama and on Shakespeare adaptation and appropriation, particularly Latinx Shakespeare. Her book Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (2017) was published on Edinburgh University Press, and she is currently working on a monograph titled Race, Rome, and Early Modern Drama: The Whitening of England and the Classical World. You can follow her on Twitter @KatherineGillen.
