“Th’oppressor’s wrong,” or, what’s Hamlet to the Borderlands?

Abstract

This article offers a critical analysis of two poetic appropriations of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy: “El Hamlet Fronterizo” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and “To be a Pocha or not to be” by Iris De Anda. Both poets use the languages, geographies, and ontological concerns of the US–Mexico Borderlands to reimagine the Danish prince’s famously introspective speech as a performance text that reflects their lived experiences and consciousnesses as border subjects. For Gómez-Peña and De Anda, the figure of Hamlet becomes a means through which to reject Western colonial worldviews, to refuse assimilation, and to center Borderlands ways of knowing, being, and doing. When Hamlet’s soliloquy is reimagined in these ways, the most urgent question is not whether or not to be but rather what it means to be someone whose existence is made vulnerable precisely because it exceeds the increasingly policed boundaries of nation, language, race, and gender.