Diving deeply into familiar tales: Ashland's 'Shane' and 'Quixote Nuevo' * Oregon ArtsWatch

"Playwright Karen Zacarias first encountered Jack Schaefer's classic 1949 novel Shane as a sixth grader and recent immigrant to Boston from Mexico. Not yet having internalized the expectation of seeing white Americans at the center of every story, she envisioned the main character of this classic Western tale as Puerto Rican baseball start Roberto Clemente, a hero of hers who happened to be Black, and the farming family at the center of the story as Mexican."

"She later came to realize that her perspective in childhood was not so outlandish. Certainly the accepted conception of the classic Western features an all-White story (save, perhaps, for the odd Native American in a marginalized role) - but in reality a quarter of cowboys and farmhands by the end of the 1800s were African Americans, many of whom had moved West after leaving enslavement."

"Another quarter of the cowboys and farmhands were of Mexican descent, some of whom had been Mexican citizens before the borders changed following the Mexican- American war. And some of these could have accessed land via the Homestead Act, by which the U.S. federal government encouraged westward expansion by offering land taken from Indigenous people to families who farmed it for five years - not offered to indigenous people, but offered to some Black and Brown people."

Oregon Shakespeare Festival's final two shows of the 90th season revisit familiar stories while centering characters previously marginalized. Karen Zacarias first encountered Jack Schaefer's Shane as a sixth grader and recent immigrant, imagining the hero as Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente and the central farming family as Mexican. Her early perception was corrected by a teacher, but later historical facts validated multicultural Western realities. By the late 1800s roughly a quarter of cowboys and farmhands were African American and another quarter were of Mexican descent. Some Black and Brown families accessed land through the Homestead Act, land originally taken from Indigenous peoples.

Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News