This thesis analyzes the musical West Side Story (1957) and its movie adaptations from 1961 and 2021. Taking William Shakespeare’s lyrical tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1595-1596) as the source text, one of the objectives of this qualitative research is to investigate the points of convergence between all four works that allow spectators to identify a relationship among the different versions of the musical, and the Shakespeare play. A comparative analysis is then conducted between these different adaptations to identify how they change the portrayal and representation of the immigrants, and the narrative concerning the rival groups. To this end, the sources Shakespeare used to write Romeo and Juliet were consulted, as were elements of other adaptations of this play that, like West Side Story (1957, 1961, and 2021), transpose the story to settings of urban violence, marginalization, rivalry, and xenophobia where these social phenomena are neglected or addressed ineffectually by law enforcement. This research is supported by a three-fold theoretical framework: Adaptation Studies, based on studies by Linda Hutcheon (2011) and Julie Sanders (2006); Shakespeare Studies, especially Blakemore Evans (2003), Anna Stegh Camati (2021), and Courtney Lehmann (2010); and translation scholarship from the activist turn, such as Maria Tymoczko (2010), Mona Baker (2010) and Michaela Wolf (2012). It also draws on some ideas from the sociology of immigration applied to translation in order to analyze and understand the political context of immigration in 1950s New York, the period portrayed in the three productions of West Side Story. In addition to the theoretical framework mentioned above, this thesis also draws on texts that discuss the adaptations, to examine elements of Latino representation in the casting, the changes to the lyrics of the musical numbers and the order in which they appear, the inclusion of lines in Spanish for some Latino characters, and the scenes, with or without dialogue, that direct the viewers gaze to the plight of immigrants and xenophobia in the 20th and the 21st centuries. The analysis of the corpus indicates that the directorial choices Steven Spielberg made in West Side Story (2021) are the product of his time, meeting the expectations of the contemporary context of reception, highlighting the translator s and adapter s role and relevance as agents of narrative change and subversion, even if the director himself was unaware of the convergence of his adaptation project with the activist turn in Translation Studies.