![]() ¡O Romeo! emphasizes the persistent power of Mexica spirituality, even in Shakespeare’s colonial imagining of Mexico. Conquistadors do not integrate, they impose. “Los conquistadores no integran, imponen,” she insists (1.1). Rifke reminds him that this is not the reality of colonization. However, Shakespeare naïvely believes that his art can transform colonization into a benign process of cultural exchange, and he hopes to write a story in which Xochiquetzal “ntegrat her life and her faith with” those of Don Armando (1.1). He marvels at the “mystical potion” xocalatl, or chocolate, and he takes Rifke’s advice to incorporate a hummingbird, which was “very important para los Aztecas” into his play, leading to a line about a “huitzilin that sips the flower’s dew” (1.1). He enthusiastically learns Spanish from Rifke and presses her for information about Mexica culture. Shakespeare is eager for new knowledge from the Americas. In ¡O Romeo!, Shakespeare’s creative process reflects his curiosity about Mexica (commonly known as Aztec) culture, but it also reveals his limited cultural awareness and the appropriative impulses he shares with many other European writers. Shakespeare’s in-process play relates the love story of Don Armando, a Spanish conquistador, and Xochiquetzal, a woman from Tenochtitlán, the ancient capital upon which Mexico City was built. His source is a series of letters that his housekeeper Rifke - a Jewish woman from Spain who fled the Inquisition - has received from her brother, a missionary in the “Nuevo Mundo” (1.1). The play’s central conceit is that Shakespeare is writing what he hopes will be his most important work: a play about Mexico. ¡O Romeo! takes a humorous approach to such serious topics, using satire and absurdity to make a trenchant anticolonial critique while also reflexively commenting on the politics of Shakespeare’s afterlives. While the historical Shakespeare died in April, the death of Sanchez Saltveit’s Shakespeare aligns with celebrations of Día de los Muertos, opening the possibility for understanding the concepts of life and death as well as the legacies of Shakespeare’s works through Indigenous frameworks. The play, co-created with the Milagro cast, takes place in 1616 as Shakespeare is on his deathbed. Olga Sanchez Saltveit conceived and devised ¡O Romeo! in 2014 for the annual Día de los Muertos festival at the Milagro Theatre, the premier Latinx theater company in Portland, Oregon.
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