Borderlands Shakespeare: The Decolonial Visions of James Lujan's Kino and Teresa and Seres Jaime Magaña's The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe

Shakespeare occupies a central place in British colonial history, as his works were often mobilized in the interests of empire.¹ As Leah Marcus notes, Shakespeare served as a "shining beacon of British genius and civility to the world" (4), and his plays were employed in the interests of "civilizing" colonized subjects. Because of this history, artists seeking to resist British colonialism have often turned to Shakespeare, appropriating his plays for decidedly anticolonial purposes. Whereas most scholarship on postcolonial Shakespeare focuses on regions colonized by Britain, this essay broadens the scope of postcolonial Shakespeare studies by turning to two Shakespeare appropriations rooted in the US-Mexico Borderlands: James Lujan's Kino and Teresa (2005) and Seres Jaime Magaña's The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe (2018). Analyses of such productions, we argue, must account for complex and overlapping histories of colonialism by Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Doing so, we suggest, illuminates the vital knowledge arising from regions shaped by Spanish colonization, which, as Walter Mignolo argues, is often obscured by the Anglocentric misconception that "postcolonial theories would only emerge from the legacies of the British Empire" (ix).² More specifically, we contend that decolonial perspectives—those pointing to persistent settler coloniality and developed by Indigenous and Chicanx theorists, activists, and artists—are crucial both for scholars analyzing Borderlands Shakespeare productions and for theater practitioners seeking to stage and set Shakespeare in the area that is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. As such, we heed Laura Lehua Yim's call for Shakespeare studies to attend to anti-settler critiques, infusing our anti-racist analyses with the critical Indigenous studies understanding of race as "a technology in ongoing structural processes of settler colonialism" (39). While we focus on the Borderlands, decolonial approaches to Shakespeare performance and appropriation are necessary throughout the Americas, especially in the United States, whose status as a settlercolonial nation often goes unrecognized.

Both Lujan's Kino and Teresa and Magaña's The Tragic Corrido appropriate Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to critique American colonial paradigms and reckon with Shakespeare's colonial legacy. Written by a Pueblo author and performed by Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles, Kino and Teresa is set in Pecos Pueblo/Santa Fe after the Spanish Reconquista in 1692. As such, it emphasizes political, cultural, and linguistic aspects of Spanish colonialism, as well as the value of Indigenous knowledge, spirituality, and social organization in ongoing resistance to coloniality. The Tragic Corrido, written by a Mexican-born author and performed by the Pharr (Texas) Community Theater, is set in a temporally indeterminate Rio Grande Valley, with references to the nineteenth-century Republic of Texas, the twentieth-century Chicano Movement, and the present militarization of the border. The Tragic Corrido takes a Chicanx approach to interrogating overlapping Spanish and US colonial legacies, and it celebrates Mexican American resistance to exploitation by white, Anglo settlers as well as the region's mestizaje, a term defined by Rafael Pérez-Torres as "an affirmative recognition of the mixed racial, social, linguistic, national, cultural, and ethnic legacies inherent to Latino/a cultures and identities" (25).³ With Lujan focusing on the trauma of Spanish colonialism on Indigenous communities and Magaña emphasizing the power of mestizaje to disrupt Anglocentric colonial regimes, the plays illuminate the shifting layers of colonialism in the US-Mexico Borderlands, as well as the attendant linguistic, cultural, and political complexities informing Shakespeare reception in the region. Both plays, we argue, successfully demonstrate the imperative of integrating decolonial perspectives into Borderlands Shakespeare productions.

Lujan's and Magaña's selection of Romeo and Juliet is significant. As Carla Della Gatta observes, Romeo and Juliet figures prominently within a growing canon of Latinx Shakespeare, a term she defines as "a textual adaptation or performance in which Shakespearean plays, plots, or characters are made Latino" ("From West Side Story" 151).⁴ This popularity reflects what Della Gatta calls the "West Side Story effect," which "involves...