Young Latinx Shakespeares: Race, Justice, and Literary Appropriation

This book delves into the aesthetics and processes by which Latinx writers and creatives artfully adapt and appropriate Shakespeare for young readers. Shakespeare, this book demonstrates, is reimagined with social justice in mind, yielding literary mestizadas (the critical term employed to highlight the palimpsestic nature of these admixtures). These literary mestizadas not only create representational mirrors in which Latinx young readers can better see themselves and their lived cultural experiences but also offer them the opportunity to contest the social injustices that impact them and their communities. In this, the book provides the critical framework for understanding how Latinx young adult appropriations of Shakespeare offer young readers educational ecologies in which to thoughtfully engage with issues of race, gender, and sexuality. By focusing on this productive literary interplay between Shakespeare and Latinx youth literatures, this book directs us to the generative and transformative potentials that unfold from these hybridized texts. Understanding Shakespeare and Latinx, not in their separate spheres but in the way they blend together to create new, important literary formulations embraces these brave(r) new worlds in which Latinx youth are affirmed and empowered.

Jesus Montaño is an assistant professor of English at Baylor University, USA. He is a teacher-scholar of Latinx literatures and cultures, with special interest in children’s and young adult literary and cultural production in Our Americas. Along with his co-authored book Tactics of Hope in Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2022), Montaño’s program of study includes articles and book chapters in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Quarterly, and Liberating Shakespeare (Arden Shakespeare, 2023).