Carla Della Gatta
9th World Shakespeare Congress
Global Spin-Offs Panel
July 22-26, 2011 Prague
Shakespeare and American Bilingualism: Borderland Productions of Romeo y Julieta
“To be Latino in the United States is rather to participate in
a unique process of cultural syncretism that may become a
transformative template for the whole society.”
Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism, 2001
I am not such a truant since my coming,
As not to know the language I have lived in:
A strange tongue makes my cause more strange,
suspicious;
Pray, speak in English.
Queen Katharine, Henry VIII, (III.i.42-46)
Over the past few years, three American Shakespeare companies produced bilingual
Spanish-English adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most widely known play. Each
production fused Elizabethan English with modern-day Spanish, a complex juxtaposition not
only because of the use of two languages, but also due to the older English of Shakespeare. The
productions at Austin Shakespeare in 2009, the Old Globe in San Diego 2008-10, and the 2008
staged-reading by Chicago Shakespeare all point to a growing interest in bilingual performances
of the Bard in the United States. With the growing Latino population and efforts in cultural
outreach by established Shakespeare theaters, further bilingual productions may be on the
horizon. This paper explores the positioning of bilingual Romeo y Julietas in a multicultural
country as a precursor for further bilingual productions of all periods and genres. Ultimately, the
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perception of Latinidad in the United States is examined through this exploration of bilingual
Shakespeares and the new space and language that the productions create.
THE SURGE OF LATINIDAD
While productions of Romeo y Julieta mark a hybrid genre of translation and adaptation,
three other Shakespearean-influenced bilingual Spanish appropriations also emerged across the
country in the past few years. First, the Educational Theatre Company in Arlington, Virginia,
produced two bilingual shows in 1998, Bottom's Dream and The Comedy of Errors. According
to Tom Mallan, Professional and Curriculum Development and Director for both of ETC’s
bilingual productions, “both shows had concepts that re-cast the Shakespeare characters as either
Americans or Latin Americans, then they interacted accordingly”. In both shows, some
characters spoke English and others Spanish in order to indicate a greater chasm between
characters and locations1. In 2005, Georgia Shakespeare produced their first bilingual show by
creating a play for elementary school children called Miguel's Shakespeare
Adventure. According to Allen O’Reilly, Education Director, “the lines were delivered
alternately between English and Spanish”. It was brought back for 2006 and toured at the
Outrageous Fortune Theatre Company in El Paso, Texas2. Most recently, in 2010, Caitlin
McWethy, a student at Drew University in New Jersey, produced a bilingual version of As You
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“In Bottoms Dream we cut the lovers out of MSND completely, and cast the Mechanicals as gringo tourists visiting
Latin America on some kind of 'community theater tour’. . . One neat thing was that in the Titania/Bottom scenes
where she is usually speaking verse and he is speaking prose, the effect was heightened by her speaking Spanish and
him [Elizabethan] English” (Mallan). Further, “in ComedyA of Error(E)s we re-cast Syracuse as the US and
Ephesus as Cuba. . . We had a great bilingual actor play both Antipholi, one brother speaking American English as a
native (and dressed as a traveling American) and one speaking Cuban Spanish (and dressed very differently); we had
a single actor do the same with Dromio” (Mallan).
O’Reilly said, “even though we live in a heavy Hispanic area, the show had moderate success both years. One of
the criticisms was that the Spanish was "European" as opposed to Mexican. The tour in El Paso was tweaked to
accommodate that communities' students and was more successful there”.
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Like It. “McWethy chose to set the play in a place which is perceived to be as unlike the Garden
of Eden as possible, a barrio in Mexico City” (Kraynak). All three of these productions show an
immense amount of creativity on the part of the directors and adaptors, using Spanish and Latino
culture to enrich and alter Shakespearean plays for student audiences.
Other Latino and Spanish festivals hosted by Shakespearean companies have emerged
recently. In 2008, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival created a “Festival Latino” 3 in which they
offered bilingual backstage tours, Spanish captioning for six of their plays” and other cultural
activities and performances4. In 2009, GALA Hispanic Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre
Company, both in Washington, D.C., co-hosted a “Loving Lope” festival in honor of Lope de
Vega in which two of his plays were performed. Along with cohesive marketing, additional
events were offered, and The Spanish Embassy and the Washington Performing Arts Society cohosted an event during the festival5. Ultimately, Latino and Spanish cultures are being
celebrated, and capitalized, by these festivals and productions.
Motivation for these productions varied from inspiration to outreach to sheer accident.
At Drew University, McWethy got her inspiration from her interpretation of Harold Bloom’s The
Invention of the Human. She was unfamiliar with Spanish, so another student wrote the
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The success of this one-time event helped to shape a broader cultural outreach program. According to the
Audience Development Manager, Freda Casillas, “Festival Latino was a success and has morphed into CultureFest,
an event will [be held] every other year. [The] first CultureFest was in 2010” (Casillas).
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Until Festival Latino in 2008, OSF rarely engaged with Latino playwrights or Spanish- themed plays. Since 1990,
these included the 1995 production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, two plays by Octavio Solis performed in 1999 and
2005 respectively, Nilo Cruz’s Lorca in a Green Dress in 2003, and a play by Luis Alfaro in 2008. During the 2009
season, they premiered a musical version of Don Quixote, adapted by Solis. In 2010, they produced American
Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash and also hosted a staged reading of Lope de
Vega’s Fuenteovejuna.
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The productions overlapped by a little more than a week so that theatregoers could experience Lope in different
forms, yet the Spanish-speaking audience members didn’t have full access to both productions because only
GALA’s production offered subtitles. Hugo Medrano and Akiva Fox, the Artistic Directors of GALA and STC,
respectively, both felt that the festival was a success (Medrano and Fox).
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translation and additional poetry in Spanish. By contrast, at ETC, Mallan chose to do bilingual
work because he had done similar work with students in Costa Rica and Ecuador, and it is
“always lots of fun to heighten everyone's understanding (of all language) this way”
(Mallan). He was also motivated by the opportunity for the work to travel to different audiences.
According to Mallan, “ETC also partly took this on because there are bilingual education
initiatives in the school system in Arlington and nearby, so we were able to integrate this with
bilingual workshops for school children. We also performed Bottom's Dream at the
Smithsonian”. By contrast, the Loving Lope Festival in Washington, D.C. occurred due to the
announcements of the theatrical season by GALA and the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Both
theatres announced they would run Dog in A Manger, and GALA kindly gave the title to STC.
The idea for the festival resulted from cooperative planning between the two theaters and artistic
directors.
ROMEO Y JULIETA
I will focus on the three productions of Romeo y Julieta as indicative of the different
approaches to bilingual productions. These productions adhered more closely to the original
Shakespearean text than the previous mentioned adaptations. Also, the Old Globe, Austin
Shakespeare, and Chicago Shakespeare are three leading theaters for Shakespearean performance
in the United States. They are each located in three densely Latino6 areas, with each area
involving a different ethnic Latino community.
I used the term “Latino” here as a blanket term to encompass people from all Spanish-speaking countries,
including Mexico, Latin America, and South America. In the United States, the preference at this time is to use
“Latino” as the broadest term, which I employ for the remainder of the essay. Note that the term “Hispanic” also
includes those who emigrated from or who have ancestors in Spain. “Hispanic” is mostly used by those outside the
Latino and Hispanic communities.
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Each theater used different amounts of Spanish to engage their audience. Austin
Shakespeare had a "successful, semi-bilingual production of Romeo & Juliet" according to the
company's website. Alex Alford, Managing Director of Austin Shakespeare Festival, said
“’semi-bilingual’ was a term used to let the audience know that it wasn't a 50/50 English/Spanish
formula”. The Old Globe in San Diego produced three Romeo y Julietas with their summer
student camp, one each in 2008, 2009, and 2010, respectively. Director of Education, Roberta
Wells-Famula said that in 2008, the Old Globe’s “script incorporated much of the Neruda7 script
as well as some translation by a former Globe Education Department writer/educator” (WellsFamula). For Chicago Shakespeare’s staged reading, Director Henry Godinez8 abridged the play
and playwright Karen Zacarías9 did the translation, using the Neruda script as a reference.
Spanish and English were used almost equally and within the same lines.
Along with the quantity of Spanish used, each theater incorporated Spanish appropriately
for their audience. For Austin Shakespeare, “the production was set in South Texas in the 1940's
with a Pachuco flavor” (Alford). This setting resonates with the audience in Austin, where a
specific form of Spanish-English mixing that is commonly referred to as “Tex-Mex”. Tex-Mex
refers to a style of music, food, and language that incorporates both Mexican Spanish and
American English influences.
“We estimate that the actual Spanish used was about 7%”
(Alford). To some, this would resonate as a “Spanglish10” version of Shakespeare, and therefore
7
Pablo Neruda published a translation of Romeo and Juliet in 1964. It is the most widely known Spanish translation
of the play by a Latino writer.
Godinez is a veteran of CST’s acting company, co-founder of Teatro Vista (Chicago’s leading Latino theater),
director of Chicago's Latino Theatre Festival, a director at the Goodman Theater, and Artistic Director at
Northwestern University’s Theatre Department.
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9
Zacarías is also the founding artistic director of Young Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, D.C.
“Spanglish” is a mixture of English and Spanish, but the term has a derogatory connotation to it. The OED
defines it as “a type of Spanish contaminated by English words and forms of expression, spoken in Latin America”.
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turn off a tier of patrons, but Alford felt that even the slightest use of Spanish would engage a
larger audience.
For the Old Globe, Spanish was used to show the division between the families, with the
Capulets as Spanish speakers and the Montagues as English speakers. Much like the famous
musical adaptation, West Side Story, the households were of different classes and backgrounds.
Wells-Famula said “most of the Spanish language was incorporated in scenes with the Capulets
and went back and forth between Spanish and English so that the audience would understand
what was going on” (Wells-Famula). This twist was also seen in the recent 2009 Broadway
production of West Side Story, directed by Arthur Laurents, who wrote the original book. It had
the Sharks singing and speaking in Spanish11 to “at last elevate the Puerto Rican Sharks to their
rightful place as equals to their deadly white rivals” (Pilkington). Both the Old Globe’s
productions and the new version of West Side Story heighten the Shakespearean premise of
division by incorporating language and class divisions into the families’ acrimonious
relationship.
After the 2008 production, the use of Spanish changed for the Old Globe, and
bilingualism became an even greater part of the show. According to Wells-Famula, in 2009 they
used less Spanish but “also included a deaf student actress so we also incorporated American
Sign Language in her scenes. The production was interpreted for the audience in both American
Calling the production “Tex-Mex” or “bilingual” may ultimately indicate the same mixture of language, but both
terms do not carry the negative implications of “Spanglish”.
To note, some of the songs were changed back to English after six months of the show’s run. According to The
New York Times, mid-way through the run “‘A Boy Like That’ [was] predominately sung in English to the original
lyrics and selected dialog and lyrics in ‘I Feel Pretty’ [was] reverted to English” (Itzkoff). Laurents was cautious in
his explanation for the change stating, "From the outset, the Spanish in West Side Story was an experiment. It's been
an ongoing process of finding what worked and what didn't, and it still continues” (Itzkoff). Some viewed this
change as catering to monolingual English-speaking audiences who were thrown off by the use of Spanish.
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Sign Language and Mexican Sign Language12”. The multiple languages of the Old Globe
production signal the only polylingual production of Shakespeare in the United States. Because
ASL and LSM are both visual-spatial languages rather than aural languages, staging must be
altered to adhere to the rules of both sign languages. Further, there are significant differences
between ASL and LSM as LSM uses more initialization than ASL and both have no grammatical
similarities to their spoken languages.
For the staged reading hosted by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Spanish was used to
repeat some lines and to replace others. The setting was a modern Latino community, and
renowned actress Elizabeth Peña starred as Lady Capulet. Chicago Shakespeare’s script was
more evenly bilingual throughout than the other two productions discussed previously. Some
speeches were entirely in one language, such as the Prince’s first speech and all of Queen Mab,
both in English. An example of the interchange is seen from the prologue below.
SEVERAL VOICES
1 Two households,
2 Dos casas
3 both alike in dignity/ ambas en nobleza iguales
4 En la bella/ In fair
5 Verona
6 where we lay our scene,
7 Y un odio antiguo que engendra un nuevo odio
8 From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
9 Where civil
10 sangre tiñe sus civiles manos
11 Y aquí desde la oscura entraña de los dos enemigos
12 son nacidos dos amantes desdichados bajo estrella rival
13 A pair of star-cross-d lovers take their life;
14 Su lamentable fin, su desventura
15 Entierra con su muerte/ (bury) their parents' strife. (Godinez 2).
For further inquiry into productions with ASL, see Peter Novak’s translation of Twelfth Night, the first ASL
translation of a Shakespearean play. Also note Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s inclusion of deaf actor Howie Seago
as the ghost of King Hamlet, Tubal, and Poins in their 2010 season.
12
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A reading of the prologue shows two forms of bilingualism at work. The first is the example of
repeating a phrase in Spanish after using the English as seen in the first two lines. This is also
done in the reverse; phrases are translated into Spanish and then repeated in English. Line 5
brings the two languages to unity with “Verona” which is pronounced and spelled the same way
in English and Spanish. The second form involves starting a line in one language and finishing it
in another. It is first evident in lines 9-10 where the thought starts in one language “Where civil”
and finishes in another “sangre tine sus civiles manos”. A third form, realized numerous other
places in the script, involves intermixing languages within the same sentence. When Mercutio
tells Romeo to borrow Cupid’s wings, Romeo replies, “I am too sore herido with his shaft /
Under love's heavy burden me hundo” (Godinez 11). Here words are interwoven within a single
phrase, generally selected by identifiable words in a particular language, but also to keep the
meter regular. Both lines contain five iambs, so they retain the rhythm of Shakespeare’s script
even though some words are in contemporary Spanish. This type of flexibility seen in a
bilingual production is not possible within a monolingual translation.
CODE SWITCHING AND BILINGUALISM
These three forms, the repetition of phrases in another language, the completion of a
thought in a different language than the beginning of the line, and intermixing within one phrase
are examples of “sign codes” in bilingual speech patterns. John M. Lipski defines “Code
switching” as “switching between two languages within the same discourse involving the same
individuals” (Lipski, Varieties 229-30). This phenomenon is common in the United States
among Spanish/English speakers but Lipski notes that code switching is not common in all
bilingual communities, as evidenced “by the relative scarcity of intrasentential French-English
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shifting in Canada” (Varieties 239). This switching mid-sentence may seem confusing to many,
and indeed, it is off-putting to those who do not master both languages. According to Ana Celia
Zentella, “Spanish and English monolinguals are thrown off, or put off, by the rule-governed and
rule-breaking switches alike, especially when in written form, but bilinguals always know where
to laugh to cry” (58). This is the reason that terms such as “Spanglish” carry a pejorative
association and ultimately discredit the advanced linguistic and conceptual ability that code
switching requires.
According to Lipski, code switching occurs in two situations. The first is an
“unconscious anticipation of words or phrases intimately linked to the second language” (Lipski,
Varieties 234). Benvolio’s first line to Romeo in CST’s script is “Buenos dias, cousin” (Godinez
3). In this instance, the prevalence of Shakespeare’s use of “cousin” (fifteen times) or “coz”
(four times) within the original script tie “cousin” to a consistent and identifiable word in Romeo
and Juliet. “Cousin” has a broader meaning other than a relative, and it can also be used “ As a
term of intimacy, friendship, or familiarity13” (OED). The direct translation in Spanish, “primo,”
does not carry such multiplicative connotations. Therefore the use of “cousin” must be retained
in English for a fuller meaning that the word conveys. By contrast, “Good-morrow,” which
“Buenos dias” replaces rather simply, is only used that one time in the original script. “Goodmorrow” is an antequated way of saying “Good morning,” thus causing the morning greeting in
contemporary Spanish to be more easily understood than the expression in Elizabethan English.
The second way in which code switching appears is through “complex or compound
sentences in which code switches occur between the individual clauses because, in effect, each
13
The OED dates this meaning back to 1418 and twice cites Shakespeare for this usage in 1616 for Henry XI Part
III and All’s Well That Ends Well.
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full sentence is produced in a single language” (Lipski, Varieties 234).14 An example of this is
seen in Romeo’s response to Benvolio later in that same conversation. “Here's much to do with
hate, but more with love. / Why, then ay, un amor odioso! Y, Ay,un odio amoroso!” (Godinez 4).
The typological similarity within the two languages faciliates the process of switching. The
ideas resonate in the second sentence, and the switching of “hate” and “love” in the English
portion establishes contrast. The second portion in Spanish does not include antithetical ideas,
but simply reverses the word order. The lines juxtapose ideas and structure, making use of the
rhetorical tool of antimetabole. Further, “hate” and “love” are stated once in English and then
twice in Spanish; this repetition across languages facilitates understanding of the concepts to
bilingual speakers and allows them to be identifiable for monolingual speakers.
The third form, of intersplicing, is what is most open to criticism as a degredation of both
languages. Jane Hill uses the term “Mock Spanish” to describe “the insertion of Spanish words
and phrases like mañana [and] Ah-dee-os” (Zentella 52). The selection of words in either
language can be as deliberate as the passage cited above which maintained the meter and
selected words in each language that had the fullest signification. But to the ear that cannot
maneuver between languages with this level of facility, this manner of code switching can seem
the least desireable.
Despite the facility of code switching among bilinguals, both consciously and
unconsciously, the practice does not resonate with monolingual speakers because of the
perception that it is destroying a dominant culture and due to a feeling of exclusion by that
monolingual group. Michael Holquist studies the ontological status of bilingualism and
concludes that monolingualism “presumes a concept of the autonomous self and of the uniquely
The title of Shana Poplack’s 1979 seminal essay “’Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN
ESPANOL’: Toward a Typology of Code-Switching’” on the study of el bloque Puero Ricans in New York
illustrates this phenomenon.
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homogenous state” (25). This idea of selfhood and nationhood is upset by the sharing with
another language, and therefore another culture and new identity. While Alexandra Jaffe
illustrates a shift in bilingualism from “cultural-deficit towards bilingualism-as-added-value”
(51) over the last ten to fifteen years, she too concludes that modern notions of national identity
are tied to a single language (51-52)15. Spanish is the most frequently taught language in
American education. (Lipski, Varieties 10) but it retains an association with negative stereotypes
of Latino communities along with issues with immigration, fear of job losses, and culture wars.
All are wrapped up in the antagonism of code-switching, or more colloquially referred to as Tex
Mex or pejoratively as Spanglish.
THE FUTURE OF BILINGUAL PRODUCTIONS
It is difficult to discern if these productions mark the beginning of a trend in bilingual
productions of Shakespeare or, due to the foreignness in style and the inability to gauge the
“success” of the productions, if they will disappear from American theaters. Austin
Shakespeare’s production occurred during their annual free Shakespeare in the Park in the
summer. For the Old Globe, all forty high-school students admitted to the Summer Shakespeare
Intensive receive a full scholarship for the four-week session. Also, Chicago Shakespeare’s
staged reading was performed at a local high school, for free. A free talk-back session with the
director and cast followed the reading on both nights. The accessibility of free productions of
Shakespeare in the United States is quite common due to arts funding, though the ability to
perform non-traditional appropriations remains a struggle.
15
Sandra R. Schecter and Robert Bayley agree on the coexistence of antithetical views of American Spanish/English
bilingualism. “Generally, elective bilingualism is viewed by the larger society as prestigious, whereas
circumstantial bilingualism has been considered a deficit” (Schecter 194). See also Frances R. Aparicio’s notion of
“differential bilingualism” in “Whose Spanish, Whose Language, Whose Power? An Ethnographic Inquiry into
Differential Bilingualism.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures. Vol. 12, 1998. 5-25).
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Reception was positive for all three productions, but that doesn’t ensure further
experiments with this style. In Austin, Alford estimates that “Of about 8500 total audience
members, approximately 10% were Hispanic. Entire extended families came, many with little or
no English”. At the Old Globe the 2008 “performance was well-received by the audience and
the students loved the bilingual aspect. We did hand out a scene-by-scene plot synopsis so that
people could keep up” (Wells-Famula). Despite the perceived positive reception, none of the
theaters have no plans for another bilingual production. The Old Globe had their final bilingual
production in 2010 because of personnel changes and fewer Spanish-speaking students. WellsFamula said that she “really enjoyed the bilingual program and am sorry that we are no longer
doing it.” Funding through CST for cultural productions was refocused and mostly relegated to
the strength of Teatro Luna within the Latino community to fulfill this audience need.
But the growing Latino population will shift and overtake the ageing Latino population in
America, and I contend will alter the prejudice and perspective of bilingual theatrical
productions. Latinos under the age of 25 are growing at a faster rate than any other youth
group16. As evidenced by the excitement of the student groups at the Old Globe and the setting
of Chicago Shakespeare’s production at a local school, the younger generation is more apt to
embrace code switching and language play than the older generation. This may be due to
assimilation concerns as well as Zentella’s contention that language play “flourishes during teen
years, when slipping in and out of two languages and several dialects enhances the multiple
identities that Latin@ adolescents try on” (58-9). Romeo and Juliet is a love story between
“27.2 [is the] median age, in years, of the Hispanic population in 2005. This compares with 36.2 years for the
population as a whole” (latinostories.com). Further, according to a report released in March 2001 by the Pew
Hispanic Center, there were 17.1 million Latinos among children under the age of 17, constituting 23.1% of the
population in this age group . . . Latino adults now make up 14.2% of the adult population in the country”
(votolatino.org).
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teenagers, and it is this Shakespearean play that is taught in nearly every American high school
as means to engage young people in Shakespeare, and theatre, for typically the first time.
According to Godinez,
For many in the United States, growing up bilingual is a fact of life. . . It cuts
across the generations. Spanish at home, English at work or school, both with
friends. Finding how these two headstrong teenagers fall for each other in a world
divided not just by two households, but by two languages, is fascinating.
(chicago.broadwayworld.com)
This experience, while seemingly appealing to a niche bilingual minority, is in actuality, a group
on the rise. Not only is the young Latino population growing and shaping American culture, but
the Latino population as a whole has grown significantly in the last decade17. As of the 2010
U.S. Census, Latinos comprise 16.3% of the population, larger than any other minority group
(2010.census.gov), and by 2050, U.S. Latinos will total to 96-100 million, constituting “the third
largest Latin American nation, behind Brazil and Mexico” (Viego 108). Yet the shift from
Spanish to English amongst American Latinos is complete in two generations18. It is this shift,
this space between one language and another, that creates a space for a new type of theatrical
production.
But the creation of a third language is ultimately what is reflected in bilingual
productions, and most aptly in bilingual Shakespearean productions. Shakespeare is the most
performed playwright worldwide, and the United States has more Shakespeare festivals than any
other country. A trend that begins in Shakespearean appropriations in the nation’s most
renowned theaters, free and accessible to the public, will most likely be replicated elsewhere.
Latinos are growing at a faster rate than any other ethnic group. “More than half of the growth in the total
population of the United States between 2000 and 2010 was due to the increase in the Hispanic population”
(2010.census.gov).
17
See Lipski, Varieties p.5. Also, Alejandro Portes and Lingxin Hao, “E Plurbis Unum Bilingualism and Language
Loss in the Second Generation.” Sociology of Education. Vol. 71, No. 4. 1998. 269-94).
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The mixing of English and Spanish has taken shape over the last thirty years with the growing
Latino population, but intersplicing modern-day Spanish with Elizabethan English is entirely a
new phenomenon. Yet the controversy will remain. Zentella feels that “bilingual dexterity”
allows speakers to “poke fun at their own semantic and grammatical constraints” (58) while
Lipski claims that it will ultimately result “in the deterioration of the Spanish language”
(“Spanish” 198). Different members of the Latino community relate to both of these
conclusions, which is the reason that code-switching is not necessarily favored by native
speakers of either language. Bill Ashcroft argues that code-switching can ultimately confirm
identity19, and I agree that it will confirm not a Latino or an Anglo identity, but an intercultural
American one. I contend that these productions are not simply translations of Shakespeare or
typical adaptations; they are a site of creating a new space and a new language.
This new space, often called la frontera or the borderlands20, is both literal and figurative
in the American Latino experience. Latinos are spread throughout the United States, but for
those living in the southwest United States, the territory where they reside was once Mexico.
Ashcroft notes, “In an enormous region covering five states, many Chicano/as are still living in
their ancestral homeland” (23). Unlike diasporic communities, many Latinos did not move
away from their homeland, rather, the lines delineating their homeland moved away from them.
Bilingual productions of Shakespeare are not a post-colonial attempt to appropriate or subvert
“Rather than diluting cultural identity, linguistic versatility and adaptability can confirm it. This is true of all postcolonial literatures, which produce hybrid narrative strategies such as code-switching, glossing, syntactic fusion,
untranslated words, all of which function both to hybridize and to distance, to communicate while establishing
difference” (Ashcroft 21).
19
For a more thorough discussion of views on the borderland, see Viego. He discusses Walter Mignolo’s idea of
“border gnosis”, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s “rascauche aesthetic” and Chela Sandoval’s “oppositional consciousness”,
and José Estéban Muñoz’s “disidentificatory practices” along with Anzaldúa’s “border subject” (126).
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the colonizer’s literature, rather they are the mark of a new genre and growing culture in a
country that claims Shakespeare for itself.
The term “Latinidad” is used to describe the growing influence of Latinos on American
culture. Just as Viego contends that the idea that U.S. culture “is being Hispanicized or Latinized
is to suggest . . . the present future tense” (119), Beltrán employs Deleuze and Guattari to explain
it’s rhizomatic nature21, that “rather than being defined in terms of some particular end,
Latinidad ‘is always in the middle, between things … intermezzo’” (167). It is this middle as
well as the future, that allows for the growth of new forms of language and culture. The
productions of Romeo y Julieta over the past three years are indicative of a new genre that can
only be created in the space of a bilingual borderland. M.S. Suárez Lafuente claims “difference
has to be reached precisely through language by deconstructing, by undoing the linguistic
process, widening ‘lost intersticios,’ the fissures, as the best way to subvert the patriarchal ‘I’”
(138). It is only through the subversion of a monolingual selfhood and nationhood that various
forms of bilingualism will be accepted in the United States. The mixing of a sixteenth century
British playwright and a twenty-first century Spanish vernacular is a means of creating this new
American genre.
21
See also Ashcroft p.24.
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New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 13-28. Print.
Beltrán, Cristina. The Trouble With Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Casillas, Freda. Personal Communication. 15 Feb 2009.
Chicago.broadwayworld.com. “’Romeo y Julieta’: Shakespeare en Español.” 24 Jun 2008.
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“Cousin.” Def.5. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Oxford UP. 15 Feb 2011. Web.
Fox, Akiva. Personal Communication. 20 Dec 2010.
Godinez, Henry and Karen Zacarías. Romeo y Julieta. 2008. Print.
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