Those of us who have ventured into the theatrical act of Latinizing Shakespeare have found a fellow traveler in Carla Della Gatta. In her most recent book, Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater, she has identified our practices and brought them into focus for artists, scholars, and general readers alike. Della Gatta's book applies a magnifying glass to the unique practice of Latinx Shakespeare while affirming the presence of Latinx identities in U.S. theatre using examples from across the country. The Latinization process creates an immediacy of identification for local Latinx communities and allows for the recognition that Shakespeare's rich menagerie of characters speak their language, and inhabit their worlds. The Bard becomes El Poeta.
Della Gatta's study begins with a unique proposition: that we who engage in Latinx Shakespeare in the American theatre are working under the influence of what the author calls “the West Side Story effect,” which she defines as “the staging of difference of any kind in Shakespeare—familial, cultural, class—as cultural-linguistic division” (26). The Bernstein–Laurents–Robbins–Sondheim musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet became a foundation for Latinx artists to see Shakespeare activated as an invocation in matters of ethnicity, race, and othering. American audiences for the first time experienced a musical involving Puerto Rican characters even when Latinos weren't cast in the respective roles of Puerto Ricans. The play led more often than not to the casting of white actors donning brown face on Broadway, which also happened in the 1961 film, with the exception of Rita Moreno playing Anita.
Regardless of the discomfort we might feel today watching the original West Side Story film, with actors in brown makeup (even Moreno's face was darkened to fulfill the stereotype), this production became influential in the practice of creating space for a Latinx presence in adaptations of Shakespeare's plays—especially Romeo and Juliet—in the United States. Subsequent versions, including Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, use Latinization to signify difference and otherness. Della Gatta aptly attributes the influence of West Side Story in endowing Shakespeare with this type of ethnic difference clearly not found in the source play.
Language and accents are also deconstructed in Della Gatta's research. In the chapter “Aurality,” Latinx Shakespeares points to productions dividing Romeo and Juliet linguistically, with the Montagues speaking Spanish and the Capulets speaking English, leading to “different temporal languages” (60) in which the English remains Elizabethan and the Spanish is more contemporary. The actors’ accents may range from those who speak English without non-Latinx accents to Latinx actors who may be fluent in Spanish but have accents in English, and the U.S.-born Latinx actor who may not be fluent in Spanish but gets cast to use the language anyway. The “aural” experience of Latinx Shakespeare becomes even more diverse in the chapter on “Identity” as Della Gatta analyzes a Twelfth Night production in Los Angeles in which Latinx actors work side by side with Filipino actors speaking Tagalog, a Brazilian actor contributing Portuguese passages, and yet another actor speaking in her native Swedish. In an adaptation of The Winter's Tale by José Cruz González called Invierno, set in California during the Gold Rush, English, Spanish, Russian, and the Indigenous Samala language of the region are spoken.
As might be expected, not all Latinizations of Shakespeare have met with success. Della Gatta chronicles how a radio production of The Taming of the Shrew attempted to perform a bilingual Latinx version only to become mired in stereotypes as non-Latinx actors were asked to speak Spanish and the play was advertised—with a picture of the actress playing Kate posing in a strapless bikini—as “A Red Hot Radio Novela” (109). The author points out that Latinx Shakespeare productions need to integrate Latinidad fully to achieve what she calls “theatrical bilanguaging,” which is not about changing cosmetic elements but arriving at a more complex process of a decolonialized experience (23).
In the final chapter of Latinx Shakespeares, “Futures: Shakespearean Critical History,” Della Gatta chronicles a unique adaptation of the Shakespeare history, Henry IV, Part 1. In Herbert Sigüenza's version, El Henry navigates through a postapocalyptic world of 2045 in which Chicano gangs stand in for the royal houses in deadly dispute. Della Gatta uses the chapter to demonstrate how a unique adaptation like this one can bring “Shakespeare and Latinx theater into a new historical configuration” (152). This young Henry spends his time partying with El Fausto (the stand-in for Falstaff) in an Aztlan City (present-day San Diego) ruled by a dominant class of white Hispanics. This version of Henry challenges the original context of the play: preparing a king for ascending to the throne. This futuristic version instead becomes about asserting human rights and the reclaiming of indigeneity. This concluding chapter succeeds in showing how Latinx Shakespeare serves not just to reenvision Latinx cultures in the past but also to imagine them in a vision for the future. In this way, Della Gatta's book highlights the many ways in which Latinx artists engage with the Bard while reenvisioning American culture itself.
