This 'Romeo and Juliet' is set in a Mexican-American Phoenix neighborhood in the 1950s

There have been countless re-interpretations and modernizations of Shakespeare stories over the years. But there haven’t been many set here in the Valley.

A new book called “Rosa, By Any Other Name” does just that. It’s a novel by former Phoenix teacher Hailey Alcaraz, and it’s based on "Romeo and Juliet." The book is more of a remix than a retelling.

Alcaraz sets the story in 1950s Phoenix, with civil rights turmoil brewing in the city’s Mexican-American neighborhoods.

She said she’s less interested in the pure romance of Shakespeare’s story than how the tragedy of it would have rippled across Romeo and Juliet’s community.

Full conversation

HAILEY ALCARAZ: I have always had an issue with the way "Romeo and Juliet" ended. Just the idea that this, like, long seated conflict is suddenly resolved — especially in the wake of the tragedy of two young teens. Like that just blows my mind, and it just doesn't seem realistic to me.

So that was the impetus for this book, was like, what if it wasn't like, a neat little bow like Shakespeare says it was? What if, like, there is still some reckoning and some conflict awaiting these families as they grieve?

SAM DINGMAN: I had never thought about that until this moment, but I agree with you that this horrific death is so quickly kind of subsumed into the resolution of, like, a political dispute between two dynasties. ... With no consideration for the extreme trauma that this incident would have caused.

ALCARAZ: Yeah. And I mean, how many tragic things do we watch happen every single day? And, like, we're moved, but solutions still aren't readily available or just accessible or even efficient to arrive at.

DINGMAN: Is it fair to say that in your writing process for your book, you kind of started with where you knew you wanted to end and worked backwards?

ALCARAZ: Yes. In some ways. I knew the meat of my plot would start with the death of Romeo and Juliet. So I often describe this book not so much as a retelling, but, like, as a sequel. Because Romeo and Juliet die within the first third of my book and the bulk of the story focuses on OK, like, how are their friends and their community and their family grappling with this loss?

DINGMAN: Got it. OK. So by starting with a point of view about how the original ends, you then get all this — if I'm hearing you correctly — inspiration about other elements of the story to explore.

Talk to me from a character standpoint. What did that decision you made about other ideas you want to focus on lead you to in terms of how you thought about your Romeo and Juliet characters, for example?

ALCARAZ: Yeah. Well, I knew that they couldn't be the main characters if I was going to kill them off pretty early on. And so my story follows Rosa Capistrano. And she is a white-passing Mexican American. She is like best friends with my Romeo, whose name is Ramon. They're best friends in their neighborhood.

And then she becomes friends at her — at North High School, where she is attending with my Juliet. Her name is Julianne, and she is the daughter of a very powerful sheriff. And so Rosa becomes the lens of kind of like the bystander to the romance. But after Romeo and Juliet die, she's forced into the spotlight in ways that she wasn't prepared for.

And it sets her on a journey of, like, sharing the truth and kind of stepping into her own voice. You know, she's been kind of a wallflower, largely due to like, the cultural climate of that time period.

DINGMAN: So let's talk about that time period. Because you've made a very specific choice of when to set this. I believe it's 1955.

ALCARAZ: Yep.

DINGMAN: What was interesting to you about that time period in terms of these themes that you're interested in?

ALCARAZ: The big draw of that time period was Brown vs. Board of Education had just passed. And the way that manifested here in Arizona was really intriguing to me as I uncovered it. Arizona never legally required that secondary schools segregate based off race, but a lot of schools did it anyway. We had a Black high school, which is George Washington Carver High School.

And then a lot of schools and school districts voluntarily segregated by either having like Mexican classes or Mexican schools within their schools. So like, that was already kind of weird and wishy washy for a lot of reasons. And then as a state, we outlawed segregation a full year before Brown.

And so there was this pretense of like progress and like, well, we're not doing it like the same as the South, but like, the problems were still very much there. So Rosa, like, is legally allowed to be at North High School, but there's still not very many students of color there. It's still very much frowned upon.

And then it's also the rise of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement that has not been fully catalyzed yet, but the rhetoric is starting to be there. So people are starting to kind of push back against this idea that the only way to like progress is to assimilate. And so she kind of finds herself at the crossroad of those two things, in addition to her friend's ill-advised romance.

DINGMAN: Yes. But then complicating that further is the fact that, as you were alluding to earlier, she is a white-passing Latina. And from what I gathered, that was an experience that was also really important to you to reflect in fiction that you hadn't seen very much of.

ALCARAZ: Totally. That is part of my identity. I, unlike Rosa, I am biracial. But there's plenty of Mexican American and Mexican people who just happen to have fairer skin. And historically, especially in Rosa's time, that was used to their advantage. Which I think, from what I read, is very common around many racial groups of just kind of using proximity to whiteness to their advantage when they can.

But it also just, yeah, raises a lot of questions for her about, like, her privilege and then, like, just how lonely she feels. Not fitting into either world, and then just like, the weight of responsibility of being expected to do something with this identity category and not really sure if she's able to or wants to — what she wants to do with it.

DINGMAN: These ideas that you're articulating right now are something that we have a lot of cultural discourse about in 2025. But in 1955, it probably felt pretty taboo to even talk about some of these issues. And so to write about them from Rosa's perspective, in my mind, would present an interesting challenge. She's obviously feeling a lot of these things, but I'm imagining maybe not hearing those conversations very much in her life.

Was that a challenge that you had to confront with this?

ALCARAZ: Yes, especially with, like, the young adult audience, you don't want to info-dump all of these things. And so she's got to, like, interact with it all very organically. So in the book, she does join, like, a community organizing group. And that serves as, like, a really good opportunity for her to experience different perspectives.

And yeah, and when I wrote it, all these people that she interacts with kind of represent a different approach to like community change. Marco, who is Ramon's brother, and he's kind of like a firebrand community activist. There's a leader of the group, Verone, who has kind of like a Cesar Chavez-esque approach to it all.

And then her dad, who's very traditional and just doesn't want her to make any trouble, just wants her to play by the white man's rules and kind of get as far as she can. And through her journey, like, she sees that like no one is explicitly wrong for the most part. Like, there's parcels of truth to be taken from it, but like there's no one size fits all for like success or for like changing the world.

So she's got to kind of seek her own path. And I just don't think there's enough — especially historical fiction — but just, like, conversation about what our history was. Like, like, I received the vast majority of my education here in public schools. And I don't think I ever studied what civil rights look like here.

I had seen like as a teacher, I would teach about the civil rights unit. And, like, I had seen the signs, like "no dogs or Mexicans allowed." But, like, that was really the only glimpse, and that was not until I was in my 20s. So I really just, like, want to — I think it's very powerful for historical fiction to shine light on historical moments that like are not part of the mainstream.

DINGMAN: I really hear what you're saying there, because it is, of course, always significant to render a period in history that is not often presented. But writing about a civil rights history in a major American city where the narrative is messy and not well known seems particularly significant at a time when history museums are being told to take down exhibits that tell inconvenient truths.

ALCARAZ: Yeah, I'm happy to have put this book out there in a time when I think people need stories like this.

DINGMAN: Well, if listeners want to read some historical fiction that has some really strong romantic elements to it, they can check out Hailey's book, "Rosa, By Any Other Name." Hailey Alcaraz, thank you for this conversation.

ALCARAZ: Thank you so much for having me.