Don’t Mess with Tejana Shakespeare

“Don’t Mess with Tejana Shakespeare” advances the idea that we can reframe Shakespeare and that freed from his service to empire crafting, as evidenced in films such as King of Texas, starring Patrick Stewart as a Texan King Lear, Shakespeare can be redeployed not only to disrupt neocolonialism, racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression, but he also can be remobilized to create new complex social and cultural formulations, as found in Samantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters. Interrogating the legacies of colonialism in the past and neocolonialism in the present, in this, means addressing the ways in which white racial frameworks, such as those found in King of Texas, are disrupted by stories, such as Tigers, Not Daughters, that highlight resistance to white supremacy and that celebrate the region’s mixed cultural, racial, and linguistic legacies. Tejana Shakespeare emerges from this intervention whose goals are to rid Texas, as well as the US, of its racism and misogyny. Newly reimagined in Tigers, Not Daughters, Tejana Shakespeare’s purpose entails disrupting oppressions faced by Latinas and propping up in their place novel ways of being, doing, and knowing that center inclusion, equity, and justice. This is to say that Tejana Shakespeare invites us to see a world in which daughters can be tigers, specifically when it comes to social justice.