Chicano Shakespeare: The Bard, the Border, and the Peripheries of Performance

Abstract

Questions of race, ethnicity, power, and identity are not “marginal” to the study of early modern texts, but are indeed central to the work of teaching Shakespeare to students living along the U.S.–Mexico border. Lack of visibility and access regularly alienates Chicanx, Latinx, and other students who have never been invited to imagine Shakespeare as “theirs.” This chapter details an innovative strategy for addressing this problem: student-directed productions (five-minute films) that incorporate original Shakespearean language with dialogue of the students’ own, in which students are free to address contemporary social issues. The result is creative projects that help students feel visible, surmount linguistic barriers, and put the issues that matter to them on the “map.”