The Bard in the Borderlands

In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately think Shakespeare had much to do with the Latinx experience, Shakespeare’s career and the Spanish conquest of the Americas fit into a similar timeline.

The Bard in the Borderlands, a three-volume anthology of plays by Chicanx and Indigenous playwrights, explores the possibilities of retelling Shakespeare through the culture, language, and traditions of “la frontera,” or “the borderlands.” Simply defined by co-editor Katherine Gillen as “land that was once Mexico, but… became part of the United States” after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, there is very little “simple” about the history of this region. Its complex blend of identities and experiences are expressed in fantastic transformations of Shakespeare’s work, from a re-imagining of The Tempest set in a Houston school gymnasium to Macbeth‘s Weird Sisters practicing brujería.

In this episode, editors Kathryn Vomero Santos and Katherine Gillen and contributing playwright Andrew Siañez-De La O discuss how these works speak to Mexican American and Indigenous traditions—and what it means to create “a stranger Shakespeare.”

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 8, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Harter Music in San Antonio, Gideon Brower in Baltimore, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Production support was provided by Steven Jackson. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Katherine Gillen is Professor of English and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. With Kathryn Vomero Santos and Adrianna M. Santos, she co-founded the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva and co-edited the three-volume anthology, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera. She is also working on a monograph titled The Renaissance of Whiteness: The Classical Foundations of Shakespeare’s Racial Politics, which examines Shakespeare’s use of classical sources within the context of emerging racial capitalism.

Kathryn Vomero Santos is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University and a co-founder of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. She is the author of Shakespeare in Tongues (2025) and the co-editor of several books, including The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volumes 1–3 (2023, 2024, and 2026), Shakespeare and the Politics of Tradaptation: Power, Poetics, and Linguistic Justice (2026), and The Ethical Implications of Shakespeare in Performance and Appropriation (2024). As a current fellow at the National Humanities Center, she is working on a new book about the figure of Sycorax and her global afterlives.

Andrew Siañez-De La O is a Mexican American stage and audio dramatist from the US Borderlands. His work often explores his diasporic identity through mythmaking and monsters, with science-fiction and the high strange being his hallmarks. His works put a spotlight on systems of oppression and cultural erasure through uncanny reflections of the mundane. From alien abductions to sentient motels to fantastical storms, his talent for magical realism offers audiences new ways to experience everyday horrors and miracles in equal measure. He received a BFA in Theatre & Performance from Emerson College, completed a playwriting fellowship with the Huntington Theatre Company, and was a finalist for the 2022 Future of Playwriting Award from the Ucross Foundation and The Blank Theatre.

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

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Shakespeare’s plays are endlessly adaptable and remixable. So many artists, from so many traditions, have taken his work as their starting point.

A three-volume anthology collects plays by Chicanx and Indigenous playwrights that explore the rich history and geography of the borderlands—la frontera—while borrowing from Shakespeare. It’s called The Bard in the Borderlands, and its third volume came out earlier this summer.

Today’s episode brings together two of the anthology’s editors and one of the playwrights.

Kathryn Vomero Santos of Trinity University and Katherine Gillen, of Texas A&M University–San Antonio edited the anthology with Adrianna M. Santos, also of Texas A&M.

They call these plays not adaptations, but appropriations—for the way the playwrights are taking ownership of Shakespeare’s raw material.

They’re joined here by Andrew Siañez-De La O, who wrote the play Rough Magic. His appropriation reimagines The Tempest inside a Houston school while a hurricane rages outside.

Here are Kate Gillen, Katie Vomero Santos, and Andrew Siañez-De La O, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Kate and Katie, welcome to the podcast

KATHERINE GILLEN: We’re excited to be here.

KATHRYN VOMERO SANTOS: Thanks for having us, Barbara.

BOGAEV: And Andrew, it’s wonderful to have you with us, too.

ANDREW SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yes, I’m so excited.

BOGAEV: So, three volumes. This first volume is just plays relating to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. It’s so much wonderful work. When you started out, did you know just how much Shakespeare-related Latinx content there is out there?

VOMERO SANTOS: To tell you the truth, when we started this project, we thought we would just have one volume. We knew about eight plays that were rooted in the US-Mexico borderlands, but then we realized that we had far more plays on our hands. So, when we started working with our editor at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, we decided together that we should split it up into three volumes.

And so, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet became a way of rooting the first volume in the most commonly taught and well-known plays, and then Volume Two focused on comedies and tragicomedies; and our third and most recently published volume is what we’ve been calling our “punk rock, futuristic, queer” volume of Borderland Shakespeare.

GILLEN: It’s a lot of fun, the third volume. They’re all amazing, but we’re really excited about this one, which just came out this summer.

BOGAEV: Well, it’s such an exciting wealth of material, and I understand the whole idea originated at a Latinx Shakespeare conference. What happened there?

GILLEN: Yes, it was a conference we hosted at Texas A&M–San Antonio, where I teach and also where our collaborator Adriana M. Santos teaches. We held this symposium because we were interested in thinking about how to teach Shakespeare in the US-Mexico borderlands in culturally sustaining and responsible ways. At that time, we knew about a couple of these borderlands adaptations, and so, we set out to see what other work was out there. People kept calling our attention to plays that we hadn’t known about, and we really learned that this was a deep tradition rooted in Mexican American and Indigenous theater in the region.

BOGAEV: So, when you say, “deep interest,” did people just come up and say, “Wow, that’s fantastic. Where can I get more plays like this to teach in my classes?”

GILLEN: Yes. At first, we would talk about the couple of plays that we knew, and people would ask us, “How do we get those plays?” And we would say, “We don’t know. Maybe email the playwright, or we’ll try to put you in touch,” and that made us feel like we really needed to anthologize these plays so that people could teach them.

There were certainly some people who thought, “What? Mexican American theater and Shakespeare? Like, those things don’t really go together. What are you doing?” But the more we talked about it, the more people really saw that it was something exciting.

BOGAEV: Well, I imagine that people in the field might not be aware of plays like this because they don’t get performed all that often, or maybe aren’t published, or both?

VOMERO SANTOS: Well, I think that that’s true. A lot of these works are created to serve the needs of communities and students, and to break down the barriers that are in professional theater, where Latinx actors, Mexican American, Indigenous actors are not being cast in traditional Shakespearean roles.

So, there is the issue of performance, but then the issue of publishing. As I’m sure you know, plays don’t get published with the same kind of frequency as other modes of writing, so we see this project as serving a deep archival need.

As Kate was saying, these plays were largely unavailable to readers and to theater companies who could produce them in the future. And because ACMRS Press publishes all of its books open access, it’s been really wonderful to see people teaching these plays—not just in the United States, but in Canada and in places like Australia and Ireland too, that see resonances with the colonial histories of the US-Mexico borderlands and other global colonial histories.

BOGAEV: Wow, I was thinking I’m lucky I live in Los Angeles because I get to see plays like this, but that’s not the case for everyone. As you said, there’s a real structural barrier or barriers, and some of it is, I’m sure, financial and bias. Andrew, what challenges have you faced getting your plays produced?

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yeah, it can be very difficult for an artist of color to try and figure out what is the space you want to fill, but also, how do you represent your voice?

I spent a lot of time in my early years initially thinking, “What will people expect from me as a writer?” rather than, “What do I want to be writing?” It took me years to really get past my own personal bias before I was able to find my rhythm, find my style, and write a play like Rough Magic in this third anthology.

BOGAEV: Wow, and it’s an amazing play. I want to talk more about it a little later, but first I do have some big picture questions. I want to talk about the title to this whole project, Borderlands. You mentioned earlier the borderlands of US and Mexico, but it’s a broader term. How do you define its meaning in this literary context for this analogy? What does it encompass?

GILLEN: So, one way we think about it is land that was once Mexico but, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, became part of the United States. And of course, that land has always been Indigenous land, but it’s also land that has experienced layers of colonial history, and so, we do think about the border itself, right?

Gloria Anzaldúa, who’s a great theorist of the region, talks about the border, right, as an open wound? Una herida abierta. The border, right, is the site of violence but it’s also a broader space of connection, of hybridity, of a deep cultural history where people have had to be resilient and have drawn from the resources around them in order to create art and other ways of living that are often rooted Indigenous or African diasporic traditions, but also have incorporated Anglo and Mexican and Spanish traditions, right?

We were interested in kind of thinking about that hybridity. Thinking not just about identity, though many of our playwrights are Latinx, Chicanx, and Indigenous, but we were also interested in the deep histories of place and how the artists were bringing Shakespeare to bear on all of that, but also bringing borderlands, cultures, languages, and traditions to bear on Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Oh, great. Okay. Thank you for doing that. Why does Shakespeare lend itself to issues and themes of borderlands? And is it more than the fact that Shakespeare just looms so large in literature and culture and history, period?

GILLEN: I think one reason has to do with the role of folk traditions in Shakespeare’s plays, and also his attention to place. But obviously he’s thinking about early modern England. But a lot of these borderlands plays are working in all these other traditions.

So, there’s Mexica mythology or oral tradition. There’s rituals such as Día de los Muertos. So, several of the Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet adaptations in Volume One, for example, are set during Día de los Muertos. There are also figures like La Llorona, the weeping woman.

You have in Shakespeare a whole pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, but you also have these more local rural traditions that Shakespeare is working with. I think there is a sense for many of the playwrights in our anthology that Shakespeare is canonical, is white, has been universalized, but also, that there are these particularities there that have analogs in some ways in the borderlands.

And there’s also hybridity. Katie has written about linguistic hybridity in Shakespeare, and there’s linguistic hybridity in these plays as well.

And so, I think there’s some space, at least an openness, in Shakespeare that lends itself to being kind of played with. And these authors are definitely taking what they are interested in from Shakespeare and leaving the rest, and working a whole bunch of other stuff in, so, Shakespeare’s sort of de-centered in the process. But they’re also working with material that does seem to resonate.

BOGAEV: Yes. And in terms of the history, we’ve often talked here about how Shakespeare’s played an outsized role in the history of colonization. But you point out in the introduction to this collection that it’s especially relevant since Shakespeare’s time period roughly lines up with the Spanish conquests in America. And also, that the English and US leaders in the early American territories used Shakespeare in encounters with Indigenous peoples, which is really intriguing and maybe not everyone knows about. How exactly did they use Shakespeare?

VOMERO SANTOS: Well, I want to address the first part of your comment, Barbara, by pointing to a fact that I love to highlight with my students when we teach James Lujan, who’s a Pueblo playwright, and his play, Kino and Teresa, which is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in the aftermath of the Spanish Reconquista after the Pueblo Revolt. What’s fascinating for me to point out to my students is that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was first performed in 1597 and the colony of Santa Fe was established in 1598.

So, we’re really not talking about separate histories here, right? We’re talking about coterminous histories. Shakespeare’s writing in London, and the Spanish are colonizing what we now know as New Mexico at this time.

So, a play like Kino and Teresa is remarkable because an Indigenous playwright is reclaiming this canonical English text to tell a story about Pueblo resistance in response to that Spanish colonization.

BOGAEV: That must blow your students’ minds.

VOMERO SANTOS: For sure. I think that one thing that’s really mind-blowing for students is that they think that they’re coming to a Shakespeare class, but really what they end up learning by studying these plays are Indigenous histories, Mexican American histories, and for many students, these are their personal histories. And so, it really challenges the notion of who’s the authority in the classroom and whose knowledge counts when it comes to Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: You were talking earlier about how the anthology highlights all the ways that playwrights are mixing it up—Shakespeare with cultural traditions, religious traditions, literary traditions—and I think the foundational long tradition of El Teatro Campesino is important to this conversation. So, remind us of the origins of that.

VOMERO SANTOS: So, El Teatro Campesino was founded on the picket lines of the Delano Grape Strike in 1965. Luis Valdez was a young man from that town, grew up himself as a farm worker, and after studying at university—studied English with an emphasis in playwriting—he thought he could use theater as an organizing tool to educate and mobilize farmworkers.

And what we found is that Shakespeare was not at the forefront of their minds. He was not part of their repertoire to begin with. But young students who were in college felt inspired by the idea that there were Chicanos doing theater—and doing theater that was political and designed for social change—and so, as the next generation of teatros and artists moved into professional spaces, they saw Shakespeare as a vehicle to advance many of the same political motives that El Teatro Campesino had, and then they moved on to adapt the plays, many of which are featured in our anthology.

So, a great example of this is José Cruz González, who himself grew up as a farm worker and saw El Teatro Campesino performing. He was instrumental in developing the play that would become The Language of Flowers with Edit Villareal for his students at Cal State LA. And in 2010, he adapted The Winter’s Tale which is called Invierno, where he really depicts the long history of California, highlighting not only Spanish colonization and US colonization but going back to the Indigenous histories that are still alive in the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.

BOGAEV: And another Mexican American tradition, and maybe an outgrowth or part of El Teatro Campesino, is—and now I’m really going to butcher this term—rasquachismo?

GILLEN: I can answer that. The tradition of rasquachismo, which is defined as kind of making do with what you have—so, if you think about, say, lowriders or gardens that have a bathtub that’s a bird feeder—it’s this kind of tradition of saying, “What’s around me? How can I make art, but also art that’s useful?”

Teatro Campesino is part of this tradition in part because they were using the materials that were on hand. They were on picket lines, so they weren’t in a kind of professional theater space. So, they’re thinking about, “What’s around? How can we repurpose it to make theater?”

One play that’s in Volume Three is Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry. It’s an adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1, that’s set in a post-revolutionary space called Aztlán. But it’s also a dystopian space. It’s a post-pandemic space where all the white people have left what was once San Diego. And in any case, there’s all this garbage around, and there are all these, you know, abandoned iPhones and all this technology that’s not really working. But it’s all then put together by the people in the play, but also as the set. So, there are like broken down cars and things like that, but the set is actually constructed of some of this stuff.

That play, El Henry, is really interesting because Siguenza’s definitely relying on that tradition and calling out to it—and actually, Luis Valdez, the founder of Teatro Campesino, his sons starred in the first production of El Henry, so it’s really an interesting history there.

BOGAEV: Wow, there’s so many layers to that, because on one hand, you have this whole post-apocalyptic exploitation of the environment which is then connected to, I guess, exploitation of the people, right?

And then you have on top of that, the echoes, the resonance with Shakespeare as his companies worked almost in this tradition. They just used what was at hand. It wasn’t like they had a lot of money for sets or props. And they were drawing from their own traditions.

VOMERO SANTOS: I think that’s right. I think the itinerant nature of El Teatro Campesino resonates with the itinerant nature of Shakespeare’s theater, as you’ve said that kind of making do and drawing in folk traditions. The high and low.

I think the other big influence on Teatro Campesino, and therefore on the plays that we study, are the Mexican carpas, which are the traveling tent theaters. And a lot of the comedy that we see in works of Chicano Teatro, and therefore in borderland Shakespeare adaptations, are indebted to that traveling tent theater, which I think resonates in many ways with Shakespeare’s own theater.

BOGAEV: And it’s all recycling and remixing, of course. Andrew, that’s what you do for your play Rough Magic. So, what elements of The Tempest are you remixing? And could you please sum up the plot for us?

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yeah, absolutely. So, in Rough Magic, we find ourselves with two young kids who are going to use magic—or their understanding of magic—to bring back this ghost that is the father of one of the children, with the idea being to mend wounds that have hung over the family since his passing.

So, the entire play is set inside a school’s gymnasium at the height of a hurricane that’s hitting Houston. You have this magical element of a ghost running free in the school now, and you also have the impending doom of a storm, and you also have these kids who are just doing their best to try and mend the hearts of the people they care about.

When it came to choosing a Shakespeare play that I felt the most drawn to, I think The Tempest has always sat in the back of my mind. You know, there’s, of course, the colonial aspects that are explored in The Tempest. But there’s also all these magical and almost sci-fi elements to the play that I’ve always been drawn to.

There’s a playwright I always talk about whenever I talk about my own work, and that’s Georgina Escobar, who I met many years ago, and who expressed to me that some of the most successful work in terms of Latine theater approaches the subjects it wants to talk about through sci-fi and fantasy. It’s using these mechanisms and these familiar sci-fi fantastical settings to sort of almost trick audiences into this wider message.

There are audiences that will tune themselves out when they feel like they’re being taught something, when they feel like they are being asked to engage with something they’re not interested in. So, I’ve always thought of sci-fi and fantasy as such a fantastic way to lure audiences into that and then reveal the greater nature of the play as it goes on.

So I think jumping into Rough Magic as this play that at first is just about a couple of kids trying to do something a little dangerous but with a lot of heart, and then using that as a way to really explore this greater message about community and the role of sharing not just legacy and memories but also magic and care.

BOGAEV: Oh, I am so interested in this. So, these kids, they’re using magic. It’s their abuela, their grandmother, who is the magician. Paola, she’s your Prospero, I guess, and your Sycorax? And her magic is—again, I’m going to butcher this—brujería? What is that?

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yeah, brujería. It’s a type of folk magic, you can think of it that way, that finds its roots in Hispanic communities. You can think of it sort of like santería. Brujería, it’s this deeply rooted community folk magic.

BOGAEV: And Caliban, how have you appropriated and remixed him?

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yeah, for Caliban, the janitor character in this play, Ignacio, I wanted him to be this sort of character that is stuck in this place—similar, right, to Caliban. He’s tending to the school. The school is shut down, it’s undergoing repairs, it’s being changed.

But he is sort of this monolith that has remained at this school, not just as this janitor, but as someone who went to the school themselves and can chart their own lives to the history of the school.

So, I wanted Ignacio to be this character who is a little bit comedic in this play, certainly, but also, someone who bears a lot of history and will begrudgingly share it with you. So, he becomes this pillar to these kids, right? He’s almost an adversary at points where they’re trying to hide from him or they’re trying to escape him, but then he becomes another member of this small group who are just experiencing this moment together.

BOGAEV: And the tempest together.

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yes, absolutely.

BOGAEV: So, they’re coming together as a community. So, Katie or Kate, how have other playwrights reimagined The Tempest?

GILLEN: This play, Rough Magic, is the only play that we know of in the borderlands Mexican American tradition that really reimagines The Tempest, although it’s interesting to think about the role that The Tempest has played in Mexican American studies more broadly.

So, for example, when there were attempts to ban or censor Mexican American studies in Arizona, for example, one of the texts that was censored was Shakespeare’s The Tempest, because it was being used in conversation with other works of Mexican American literature to think through some of these issues of colonization.

And, of course, The Tempest has a long history more broadly, especially in the Caribbean, of being reimagined. So, I think we talk about in the introduction of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, for example, where the Caliban figure becomes a more kind of Black radical figure of anti-colonial resistance, and where those colonial dynamics are really emphasized. Caliban then becomes that kind of figure—I think he and Ariel also play that role—within Mexican American studies, too, thinking about the different positions people occupy under colonization.

BOGAEV: There’s such a variety of approaches to these appropriations, but quite a few of the plays, of course, are exploring the history of oppression and the borderlands, and also, the immigration policies that have created conditions in Mexico and Central America that, in turn, force people to seek asylum in the US. One of the plays that dramatizes that is Marqués: A Narco Macbeth, which sounds really suspenseful. Tell us about that.

VOMERO SANTOS: Well, we came across this play while I was writing an article about this kind of micro-trend of Narco Macbeths.

BOGAEV: It’s a trend? A micro-trend?

VOMERO SANTOS: It’s a trend. A micro-trend.

It’s perhaps not surprising that a play like Macbeth, which is incredibly violent and is focused on the kind of feudal cultures of Scotland, would lend itself to the cartel violence happening in Mexico and, indeed, in the borderlands. But what I found was that there was a trend in journalism that would compare cartel leaders like El Chapo to Macbeth.

What I think is so interesting about a play like Marqués is that it dramatizes that plot line, but also pushes back and shows the complicity of the United States in cartel violence, in drug trafficking, and indeed, in not being responsive to the needs of migrants who are fleeing that kind of violence and seeking asylum in this country.

GILLEN: One thing that’s really interesting, too, about that play, which is written by Stephen Richter and Nica Andrade, is the way it’s also dealing with brujería in a way that’s similar to Rough Magic. Because the witches, of course, are brujas, and they’re also depicted as calaveras, so like, as, you know, skeletons. And so, they are part of—you know, as are the witches in Macbeth in many ways—they’re part of this kind of Indigenous tradition that’s very powerful, very feminine, and is really playing with these masculine figures in the cartel. So, there’s a lot that’s going on there, too, with thinking about Indigenous Mexican traditions and how that might connect to some of the Scottish traditions that Shakespeare’s dealing with.

BOGAEV: Cool. Well, what about language? Language is so central to Shakespeare. How have the writers here approached the question of, the inspiration of, Shakespearean language? And it seems there’s as many approaches as playwrights. Andrew, did this come up for you while you were writing Rough Magic?

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yeah, a little bit. I wanted there to be this, sort of, freedom of dialect and freedom of accent in the play. So, I know Ignacio, our Caliban, kind of leans into this almost Chicano Mexican Border Spanish, where there’s a mix of sounds and consonants and crunchy words that sound slightly off, but they’re pointing to a very specific community on the border.

So absolutely, I think language plays such a fun role, especially in a rumination like this one, where you are blending not just one monolithic culture, but also all the subcultures within them: in terms of brujería, in terms of Pocho Spanish, and Chicano Spanish, just sort of filling that space with all these different voices.

BOGAEV: This anthology seems so timely in this political moment, anti-immigrant movements, and anti-DEI sentiment, and thinking of everything from the current administration’s focus on deportation to the tightening of borders. But you also mentioned that this is the 10th anniversary of the founding of the librotraficantes in your notes to the anthology. What is that group’s mission?

VOMERO SANTOS: So, that group was founded, actually in response to the outlawing of the Tucson Mexican American Studies curriculum, by Tony Diaz and his fellow literary community in Houston. They were outraged, rightfully, when they heard not just that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was being banned, but works by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo were being banned, and so, they organized a caravan from Houston all the way back to Tucson, and they gathered hundreds of thousands of books and people along the way. They had banned book bashes in various cities.

They operate under an organization that’s even older than the librotraficantes called Nuestra Palabra led by Tony Diaz, and they’ve been a collaborator of ours on various events. We’ve done events with them here in San Antonio and in Houston to really celebrate Latinx literary culture.

So, to your point, when we published this anthology in 2023, we, of course, sensed some of the backlash that we are experiencing in full force now. But what we point out there is that this is not new. And so, these playwrights are really operating in this space of resistance that emerges from the Chicano movement, but of course, continues on in these really robust and important literary traditions.

BOGAEV: When you say you experienced backlash in 2023, what did that consist of?

GILLEN: Well, we teach in Texas, and so, there’s been a lot of scrutiny of curricula, in particular of the literature that’s being taught in high schools and even now at the college level. But in the tradition of the librotraficantes, we kind of see ourselves as smuggling Mexican American and Indigenous literature into curricula in the sense that Shakespeare becomes a kind of vehicle, right, for that work. Sometimes we get a pass because it’s like, “Oh, they’re just doing Shakespeare.” But we’re really trying to redirect the energy away from Shakespeare to think more about these rich traditions which have not always been amplified and are often censored and oppressed.

BOGAEV: A really convenient foil and a way to reclaim Shakespeare.

GILLEN: Exactly. Shakespeare’s helping us do the work.

BOGAEV: Well, you’ve already answered the question, but ultimately, you write that these appropriations of Shakespeare achieve a kind of cleansing and rebirth of Shakespeare’s work to arrive at—and this is quote—”A stranger Shakespeare.” That is such an evocative phrase. What do you mean by it?

VOMERO SANTOS: Well, that phrase is borrowed from an article published by Ruben Espinosa, and he was one of the first people in our field to be calling upon border knowledge as a way to understand and reframe Shakespeare.

I think this idea of a “stranger Shakespeare” is one that frees Shakespeare, in some ways, from this burden of having to stand in as this universal figure that automatically applies to every possible situation.

What we found with our students is that reading these adaptations allows them to interpret Shakespeare alongside these living artists who are using Shakespeare to ask questions about themselves, to highlight the issues facing their communities. And even if our students are not themselves Mexican American or Indigenous, they feel, one, that they’re empowered to ask questions and to be curious. But then they also feel empowered to ask questions about themselves and where they might find themselves not necessarily reflected in Shakespeare, allowing themselves to ask questions through and in dialogue with Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Well, I could talk to all three of you forever. Thank you so much for joining me.

GILLEN: Thank you. It was really fun to have this conversation.

VOMERO SANTOS: Thanks for having us.

SIANEZ-DE LA O: Yes, thank you so much.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Kate Gillen, Katie Vomero Santos, and Andrew Siañez-De La O, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

All three volumes of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera are out now from ACMRS Press, and are available open access at acmrspress.com.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster.

We had technical help from Harter Music in San Antonio, Gideon Brower in Baltimore, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had production help from Steven Jackson. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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