ABSTRACT
In 1993, a bilingual troupe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, La Compañia de Teatro, produced a radical adaptation of The Merchant of Venice entitled The Merchant of Sante Fe. The production was set in colonial New Spain in 1670 and the Shylock character, Don Saul, was a moneylender who had outwardly converted to Christianity but who in secret remained a practicing Jew. In other words, he passed as a converso, or New Christian, but was in reality a crypto-Jew, a judaizante, a marrano. In the years preceding and during the run of the production, there had been much talk of individuals in present-day New Mexico who traced their lineage to crypto-Jews of the colonial period. The Merchant of Santa Fe was intended to exploit local interest in this topic by adapting Shakespeare’s text in accordance with facts and conjectures about the history of conversos, as well as to raise issues germane to current American ethnic politics.
