For Córdova, activism was more than a career, it was something closer to a vocation or spiritual calling. Shortly before she passed away in 2016, Córdova donated $2 million to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation to establish The Jeanne R. Córdova Fund “to support organizations focusing on movement building, human rights and journalism with a specific focus on Latina lesbians from South and Latin America and South African women — lesbians, feminists, lesbian feminists, butch and masculine gender-nonconforming communities.”

Córdova also published one final piece of writing titled “A Letter About Dying, to My LGBT Communities,” in which she reflected on her lifelong devotion to the fight for “freedom and dignity for lesbians.” Reflecting on her legacy and her monumental personal donation, Cordova recalled the earnest beginnings of her lesbian feminist activism:

“From the age of 18 to 21, I painfully looked everywhere for Lesbian Nation. On October 3, 1970, a day I celebrate as my political birthday, I found Her in a small DOB (Daughters of Bilitis) meeting. That’s when my life’s work became clear. Shortly thereafter I became a core organizer for two national lesbian conferences, one of which re-directed my path to create The Lesbian Tide news magazine, a national paper of record, as the historians say, for the lesbian feminist generation. And on it went for multiple decades of marches and later online organizing–this time intersectionally, to include all of me and my Latina identity.”

Growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, Córdova first came to understand her lesbian identity through her religious identity as she entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in Santa Barbara, California shortly after she turned 18. “I chose the convent because I knew I wasn’t interested in the world of men and women, marriage, children — ’that’ lifestyle,” she would recall in a 2012 interview with the Windy City Times. “[…] I’m sure the fact that I fell in love with God at the age of seven and made a vow to dedicate my life to Him was much informed by my strong Catholic parents’ (one Irish woman and one Mexican dude) teachings, as well as my latent lesbianism.”

In 1985, Córdova published the essay “My Immaculate Heart” in the radical and controversial anthology “Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence,” in which she described her year as a postulant. “I arrived on Entrance Day wearing my James Dean wraparound sunglasses, sincerely believing that the warriorship of my patron saint (butch dyke Jeanne d’Arc) was spiritually motivated,” she remembered in her essay “Butches, Lies & Feminism” in the 1992 anthology “Persistent Desire: A Femme Butch Reader”. “I left the holy sisterhood one year later thoroughly edified by the carnal motivations and wraparound body of novice Sister Marie Immaculata. My boot camp in the sisterhood of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (detailed in my autobiographical novel, “Kicking the Habit”) did clarify my lesbianism.” Throughout her career, Córdova maintained that her postulancy played a vital role in the development of her later work as a trailblazing lesbian feminist activist.

“The movements for social justice in the ‘70s and ‘80s [were] replete with ex-nun lesbian leadership,” Córdova explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “I have come to see the convent as a boot camp for us all.”

When Córdova left the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent, she was quickly elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the oldest lesbian civil rights organization in the United States. While working as a community organizer, Córdova also completed a master’s degree in social work at UCLA and juggled a budding career in journalism, publishing columns in both The Advocate and Los Angeles Free Press in addition to her work as Editor in Chief of The Lesbian Tide.

Shortly after the publication formally split from the Daughters of Bilitis in 1972, The Lesbian Tide published “A Collective Editorial” in response to efforts in the San Francisco chapter of the DOB to oust two trans women members. Announcing unconditional support for the inclusion of trans women in DOB, the editorial read: “Our common oppression is based on society’s insistence that we perform certain roles: wife, husband, mother, father, masculine, feminine, etc. We cry out, ‘You cannot define us. WE DEFINE OURSELVES! […] Please advise our transsexual sisters that, if they are not welcome in the liberal city of San Francisco, they are most welcome in the city of Los Angeles.” Keeping to their word, The Lesbian Tide subsequently hired several trans staffers and correspondents through the 1970s and ‘80s, including photographer Sue Cooke and Beth Elliott.

Córdova remained a vocal ally to trans women. During the infamous 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, when a contingent of attendees and speakers including radical feminist Robin Morgan sought to prevent Beth Elliott, one of the two trans DOB members ousted the year prior, from performing at the conference, Córdova offered a “loud and strong” defense of Elliott, who was ultimately allowed to take the stage.

Jeanne Córdova (left) at the 1973 First National Lesbian Conference. Source: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/digital/collection/p15799coll4/id/251

In the 1980s, Córdova also began publishing the Community Yellow Pages, the first national LGBT business directory, and shortly after founded another publication covering LGBT literature and culture, Square Peg Magazine. Córdova also published several of her own essays in some groundbreaking lesbian anthologies, including “The Lesbian Path” (1980), “Persistent Desire: A Femme Butch Reader” (1992) and “Dagger: On Butch Women” (1994). Lambda Literary awarded Córdova best “Lesbian Memoir/Biography” for her 2012 memoir “When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution.”

Córdova’s legacy as a trailblazing lesbian feminist activist has been preserved at the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the oldest continuous LGBT organization in the United States, where Córdova was elected Board President in 1995. Córdova’s extensive archival records remain vital documentary evidence of the rich and complicated history of the lesbian feminist movement in the United States.

The post Jeanne Córdova: Trailblazing Chicana Lesbian Feminist Activist appeared first on Latina.

Born the seventh of eight children in Supe, Peru, 1928, Tsuchiya was drawn to painting from a young age — later crediting her older brother Wilfredo’s interest in drawing for sparking her fascination with visual art. Tsuchiya’s father, Yoshiguro, was born in Chiba, Japan and studied in the U.S. for several years before arriving in Peru; her mother, Maria Luisa Castillo, was born at Chavin, in Peru, of both Chinese and Peruvian descent. Tsuchiya’s groundbreaking artistic career emerged directly from her experiences in Peru’s Nikkei immigrant community, which we’ll explore here.

Nikkei History

As Peru’s population of Japanese migrants, known as Nikkei, grew throughout Tsuchiya’s childhood in the 1930s, xenophobia and racial discrimination grew with them. 

In 1936, Peru halted immigration from Japan after Peruvian newspapers blamed the influx of Japanese immigrants for endangering native-born Peruvians’ employment. The following year, the Peruvian government passed an executive decree that effectively stripped birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Peruvian constitution, from all children born to noncitizen parents. In 1940, a three-day anti-Japanese riot known as the “Saqueo” arose in Lima in response to rumors of an impending Japanese uprising, during which more than 600 Nikkei homes and businesses were destroyed, with 10 Japanese-Peruvians killed.

Following the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service’s strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services — its wartime intelligence agency — identified Peru’s population of over 25,000 Japanese-Pervuians as a threat to U.S. victory in the war’s Pacific Theater. In the name of “internal security,” the Peruvian government launched a campaign of surveillance, mass arrests and deportations targeting Peru’s Nikkei communities. Blacklists of Nikkei were published in newspapers across Peru, and FBI agents from the U.S. were allowed by the local government to surveil Japanese-Peruvians. A letter by then-U.S. Ambassador to Peru, Raymond Henry Norweb, claimed that President Manuel Prado’s ultimate intentions were, in fact, “the substantial elimination of the Japanese colony in Peru.”

The Peruvian government began coordinating with the U.S. to transport arrested Nikkei to internment camps throughout the American Southwest. Although these arrests usually targeted men, their wives and children often accompanied deported spouses and fathers, through a process that became known as “voluntary internment.” Forcibly removed from their homes, many Japanese-Peruvians were detained alongside Japanese-Americans in Justice Department internment camps, while many others were interned in “alien detention camps” run by the U.S. Immigration and Nationalization Service in Texas and New Mexico.

Guards patrolling fence at Enemy Alien Family Internment Camp in Crystal City, Texas. Source: Texas Hill Country Trail Region.

Because the Peruvian government refused the return of Nikkei at the war’s conclusion, only 79 Japanese-Peruvians managed to re-enter Peru from the U.S., while several hundred others were deported directly to Japan. Through the efforts of American civil rights attorneys, 364 Japanese-Peruvian men, women and children secured permission to remain in the U.S. as refugees, although many found their new living conditions even more dire: the families were relocated to Seabrook Farms in New Jersey to work as laborers in company barracks. The Nikkei who successfully returned to Peru faced extreme difficulties of their own, as they, like the interned Japanese-Americans, returned to their former homes to find their assets and property expropriated. While Tsuchiya’s family was not one of the many interned in the U.S., the entire Nikkei community was devastated by the sudden loss of so many friends and neighbors. This shock undoubtedly influenced Tsuchiya’s bold choice to situate her oeuvre squarely in the heart of Peru’s cultural milieu, asserting through her choice of artistic subjects that Nikkei people like her belonged in the country despite all efforts to exclude them.

Tsuchiya in Peru

In the wake of the war, Tsuchiya began attending the Escuela Nacional Superior Autónoma de Bellas Artes del Perú (ENSABAP) in Lima, where she trained in the workshops of both Quispez Asín and Ricardo Grau and spent several years as the private student of painter Manuel Zapata Orihuela, a leader of the Peruvian indigenismo artistic movement. Orhuela’s paintings often featured flat, brightly colored and stylized Expressionist forms that drew inspiration from the region’s pre-Columbian arts, Quechua culture and Andean landscape. The influence of Tsuchiya’s several years of study with Orihuela would show in the Nikkei painter’s future works, as the Quechua aesthetic influence remained visible on her canvases throughout her career.

Ficha de estudiante de Tilsa Tsuchiya. Source: Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes

In 1949, Tsuchiya took a leave of absence from her art education following the death of her parents. She only returned to ENSABAP in 1954. When Tsuchiya graduated in 1959, she received the school’s highest honors, the Gran Medalla de Oro. The next year she traveled to Paris to continue her studies at École des Beaux-Arts. In France, Tsuchiya focused on printmaking and engraving, exploring a darker palette and minimalist aesthetic within the unique style she had cultivated alongside Orihuela.

Although Tsuchiya’s first solo exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima came immediately after her graduation in 1959, it was her 1968 exhibition at the same museum that brought the Nikkei painter to great fame, with her dreamlike and seductive style receiving international attention. The exhibition came three years after the Peruvian government offered Japanese-Peruvians a parcel of land in central Lima for the construction of the Centro Cultural Peruano Japonés, informal compensation for their wartime persecution.  Tsuchiya’s canvases, populated by surreal mythological figures and diaphanous landscapes, drew equally from Tsuchiya’s dual Japanese-Peruvian heritage and her many years’ study of European artistic traditions. They evoked the erotic and the sublime in equal measure, and raised pressing contemporary questions of gender and identity. 

Ser mítico , 1971.

Tsuchiya’s Legacy

By the 1970s, Tsuchiya had cultivated a unique visual folklore that drew from Quechua, Japanese and European visual cultures, inventing her own myths and reinterpreting classical tales like Tristan and Isolde through sculpture, drawings and engravings, all newly exhibited alongside her paintings. At an exhibition in 1976 entitled Mitos, which featured a series of Tsuchiya’s works including El mito del guerrero rojo, Mito del árbol, Mito de la mujer y el vuelo, Tuschiya explained to El Comercio how her works arose in relation to indigenous storytelling traditions, naming some of the “myths” that inspired her art: the “Myth of the Lagoon,” “Myth of the Red Warrior” from Cerro de Pasco, and the “Myth of the Bird and the Stones” from Cusco. She admitted that when audiences viewed her paintings, “It’s like they are seeing inside me.”

Throughout her career, Tsuchiya forged deep friendships with several poets and artists. Following her infamous 1968 exhibition, Nikkei poet José Watanabe began paying frequent visits to Tsuchiya’s studio in Breña, and Tsuchiya also developed a well-known creative bond with poet Arturo Corceura, with whom she illustrated a collection of poetry entitled Noé delirante in 1971.

Canto de paz , 1977.

Three months before Tsuchiya’s passing in 1984, Petroperú organized the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her career, exhibiting around 50 works Tsuchiya had produced since 1959. In the summer of 1987, Tsuchiya’s work was featured as the sole representative of Peru in Art of the Fantastic: Latin America 1920-1927, an ambitious art exhibition organized in association with that year’s Pan-American Games in Indianapolis.

In the decades since her passing, Tsuchiya’s work remains celebrated in Peru and internationally. In the international art market, Tuschiya’s works continue to fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and in 2018, ENSABAP celebrated its centennial by posthumously awarding Tsuchiya the institution’s highest honor, la Medalla de Honor Daniel Hernandéz, in recognition of her enduring legacy in Peru’s national arts and culture.

Sin titulo , 1974.

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But the blending of the ‘traditional’ styles of Punjabi and Mexican dance in Buzzfeed’s 2017 report was no outlier. In fact, a couple years earlier, just a few miles east in San Francisco, the Duniya Dance and Drum Company and Ensembles Ballet Folklorico de San Francisco collaborated to develop choreography that brought together Bhangra, a folk-dance originating from Punjab region of India and Pakistan, with the Mexican regional styles of Ballet Folklorico. The performance, entitled “Half and Halves,” was organized to commemorate the community of Punjabi-Mexican families that emerged from the conditions faced by immigrant populations in early 20th century California, including immigration restrictions, racial segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws.

The U.S. Southwest is dotted with Punjabi-Mexican enclaves in states like California, Texas, and Arizona. One such enclave is Yuba City, California. The Punjabi-Mexicans of this locale trace their origins to a population of Punjabi migrant men who settled as agricultural laborers in California during the first decades of the 1900s, before the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 restricted nearly all immigration from Asia. These men were largely restricted from entering the United States with wives or other family members because of anti-Asian immigration policy, which sought to prevent the entry of nonwhite immigrant populations into the U.S. except as a source of cheap, and disposable labor. 

“Half and Halves”

The first recorded marriages between Punjabi men and Mexican women occurred in 1916. Punjabi men sought local women whom they could legally marry, for both companionship and as a source of domestic labor. As Karen Leonard, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine explained in her book Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans, “Many Punjabi’s married the Mexican women that worked on their land because of their cultural similarities and proximity. And when they’d show up at the county record office, they could both check ‘brown.’ No one knew the difference.”

In the early 20th century, Mexican women often lived and worked in close proximity to male Punjabi immigrants, increasing the likelihood of marriages between the two groups. Moreover, driven north by the political and economic tumult of the Mexican Revolution, an even greater number of Mexican families began to settle in the agricultural regions of Southern California throughout the 1910s. Thus, it was no coincidence that many Mexican families picked cotton alongside Punjabis. 

The El Centro, Calif. Sikh Temple, photographed in 1951. Source: https://earthjustice.org/blog/2021-may/how-asian-american-farmers-shaped-our-cultural-food-landscape

At the time, farm labor in the Southwest was often segregated based upon a perceived racial hierarchy that placed so-called “Hindu” and Mexican populations in the same low position within the state’s agricultural labor pool. Mexican women’s work in cotton fields also mirrored the gendered divisions of labor found in rural Punjabi life, as the work of picking cotton was one of the few forms of agricultural labor that Jat Sikh women performed in Central Punjab.

Marriage between Punjabi men and Mexican women did not occur without controversy. Local papers recorded several instances of Mexican men retaliating against both parties for the supposed ‘theft’ of ‘their’ women. In one instance, a group of Mexican men abducted two Mexican sisters who had married Punjabi men in the Imperial Valley and forced the women across the border into Mexico, where they were imprisoned for several days and flogged by their captors.

Dinner at the Phoenix home of Rosa and Jiwan Singh in 1951. At center is their guest, Indian professional wrestler Tiger Joginder Singh. Source: https://www.saada.org/project/timeline/punjabi-mexican-families

Despite early resistance to these cross-cultural marriages, a network of Punjabi-Mexican families began to develop across the U.S. Southwest, stretching from El Paso, Texas, through New Mexico and Arizona, and stretching as far north as Fresno and Yuba City, California. Punjabi customs prompted men to marry sets of cousins, close friends, or even sisters. Thus the mixed-race community that developed remained remarkably tight-knit. 

In some cases, Mexican women would connect Punjabi bachelors with relatives still living in Mexico, and some Punjabi men traveled across several states to find their partners — occasionally returning home with not only their new brides, but also their sisters, widowed mothers, or other female relatives who sought husbands of their own. Futhermore, a significant center for Punjabi-Mexican life emerged in Imperial Valley, located along California’s Southern border, where over half of all Punjabi-Mexican households settled.

Most children born of Punjabi-Mexican marriages were raised Catholic and spoke Spanish in their homes, but household cooking typically drew from both Mexican and Punjabi cuisine. The Punjabi-Mexican generation became known locally as “half and halves” and many members recall facing prejudice from both Anglo and Mexican schoolmates. 

Ernestina and Bishan Singh’s family, photographed in 1932. Source: https://earthjustice.org/blog/2021-may/how-asian-american-farmers-shaped-our-cultural-food-landscape

Bound Through Dance

The collaboration between the Duniya Dance and Drum Company and Ensembles Ballet Folklorico de San Francisco featured several numbers that addressed different facets of life in the Punjabi-Mexican community including farm life, marriages, and racial discrimination, and clips of interviews with the Punjabi-Mexican community members who inspired the show were featured throughout the live performance.

In Yuba City, the Punjabi-Mexican community organized their own dance to celebrate the legacy of the region’s unique “bicultural” settler community. The first annual Punjabi-Mexican dance known as “Old-Timers’ Reunion Christmas Dance,” was held in 1974 in response to the shifting demographics of California’s South Asian communities following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This liberalization of U.S. immigration law allowed increasing numbers of newly-arrived South Asian immigrants to settle in the U.S. The Old Timer’s Reunion Christmas Dance featured mariachi bands and included Mexican-American friends and family, in sharp contrast to the annual Sikh Parade that newcomers began organizing a few years later.

“Punjabi-Mexican Wedding”. Source: https://www.saada.org/item/20150317-4088

The Old Timer’s Dance, as it came to be called, eventually expanded to include the classmates and neighbors of the event’s founders, so by the late 1980s only two of the organizers and about ten percent of the attendees were descendants of Yuba City’s Punjabi-Mexican families. And by 2008, the Old Timer’s Dance reportedly drew only “a handful of people” each year. Although the character of the event changed, the intent remained the same: commemorating the joy and the resilience of the Punjabi-Mexican people, whose unique culture emerged in spite of — and arguably directly out of — the racially exclusionary nature of 20th-century U.S. immigration policies. 

While Punjabi-Mexican communities are not highly visible, the bicultural community retains strong bonds to the unlikely legacy of their ancestors. As a member of the community, Isabel Singh Garcia, explained to the LA Times in 1987: “I don’t want what our fathers did to be forgotten […] I’m Indian and I’m Mexican and I’m 100% American.”

The post The History of California’s Punjabi-Mexican Communities appeared first on Latina.

Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, “Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side”
Said, “Hey, honey
Take a walk on the wild side

-Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side,” 1972

Holly Woodlawn’s storied beginnings as an actress and muse were immortalized in Lou Reed’s hit 1972 glam rock song “Walk on the Wild Side.” Born in Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico, in 1946, Woodlawn came out at age 15 when she was living in Miami Beach with her mother, Aminta Rodríguez, and stepfather, Joesph Ajzenberg. Her adopted name telegraphed her indomitable desire for superstardom: “Holly” referenced Audrey Hepburn’s iconic turn as Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and her surname was scraped from the background of an episode of “I Love Lucy,” the American television sitcom that practically defined the 1950s. (Although in other cases Woodlawn recalled her last name coming from the name of the famous Bronx cemetery of the same name.)

Shortly after coming out in 1962, Woodlawn ran away from home and hitchhiked across the country to New York City. In a 2007 interview with The Guardian she explained her decision to run away, “I was 15 years old and failing at high school in Miami Beach because I was too busy partying. I was supposed to go to summer school to catch up and really didn’t want to, so I joined some of these Cuban queens to go to New York. I hocked some jewelry and we made it all the way to Georgia, where the money ran out and we had to hitchhike the rest of the way.” 

Credit: Kenn Duncan

When she arrived in the city, Woodlawn faced homelessness and soon would struggle with a heroin addiction. “I lived on the streets like everyone does when they run away. I met some girlfriends who took me in and we found a place in Queens. I was really lucky,” she told The Guardian. “I met this guy who fell in love with me and asked me to be his girlfriend. I started taking hormones for a sex-change and lived as his wife, working in the days as a clothing model at Saks Fifth Avenue. Oh, the things I did! And for six or seven years they never knew I was a boy. Not a clue!”

She would recall in her 1992 memoir A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story, “In the late Sixties, the in thing to do was drugs, and I was very familiar with the trend[…] After a couple of Seconals, I became relaxed, and with a shot of speed I became famous. Drugs were an everyday occurrence for many of us, and became as common as breakfast. It seemed like the more drugs one did, the more popular he or she became. For me, a misguided runaway caught between a pair of high-heeled pumps and hi-top sneakers, drugs meant acceptance, security, and a good time.”

As she integrated herself into the outer fringe of Warhol’s Factory entourage, Woodlawn’s most frequent nightlife haunt became the legendary bar Max’s Kansas City, a favorite of Warhol’s and a watering hole for many of New York’s biggest names in art, literature, and music, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsburg, and David Bowie. A familiar face in the NYC bar scene, Woodlawn also recalled being at the Stonewall Inn the night of the infamous riot in the summer of 1969, when queer and trans patrons fought back against a police raid of the Greenwich Village gay bar in a rebellion that many credit for sparking the gay liberation movement.

Woodlawn’s fame arrived in 1970 when she was featured in the Paul Morrissey directed film “Trash.” In “Trash,” Woodlawn starred as “Holly,” the on-again, off-again love interest of Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, the biggest male sex symbol of underground films since his turn in Warhol’s 1968 film “Flesh.” Rolling Stone declared “Trash” the “Best Film of the Year,” and George Cukor petitioned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate Woodlawn for Best Actress in that year’s Oscar ceremony.

Although the Academy did not nominate Woodlawn, the following year she was cast alongside two other trans Warhol Superstars, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, in Andy Warhol’s infamous satire film Women in Revolt. Woodlawn followed that with another critically acclaimed turn as Eve Harrington in Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers. Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas described Woodlawn as “a genuine clown, an irrepressible, infectious mugger.” New York Times critic Vincent Canby called her an “anarchic talent [who] might someday become a conventional comedienne” and “an awkward but endearing underground amalgam of Patsy Kelly, Joan Davis and Martha Raye, with a little bit of Jack Lemmon.” Despite the acclaim, Woodlawn found little financial renumeration in her growing fame and continued to face struggles with addiction.

“Candy, Jackie, and I were the last pack of Superstars churned out by the Warhol Factory in the early 1970s,” Woodlawn recalled in her memoir. “Not that this so-called status ever paid the bills. I’ve been photographed by Scavullo and Avedon, and I’ve partied with the rich and famous. […] Still, I was living on welfare and feeding off friends.”

Through the 1960s, Woodlawn had been incarcerated for theft several times in New York and Puerto Rico, most infamously for her attempt to impersonate the wife of the French ambassador to the United Nations. Although she was initially held in the Women’s House of Detention following her arrest for impersonation, Woodlawn would later describe the indignity and sexual violence that she faced when she was transferred to a men’s facility, where she was held despite her vehement protests.

By the end of the 1970s, Woodlawn was incarcerated again while on probation, and her budding movie stardom began to falter. Woodlawn moved back home to live with her parents in Miami for several years before returning to New York and finding modest stage success as a club singer. Following Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, Woodlawn became a frequent subject of interviews on the Warhol Factory legacy, and she leveraged the opportunity to publish her memoir in 1991 and relaunch her film career with small parts in several independent films through the 1990s and 2000s.

Woodlawn passed away on December 6, 2015, at age 69. Two months later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would honor Woodlawn with inclusion in the In-Memorium segment of the 88th Annual Academy Awards, 35 years after Woodlawn was snubbed by the Academy for her iconic performance in Trash. Per her final wishes, Woodlawn’s estate established the Holly Woodlawn Memorial Fund for Transgender Youth at the Los Angeles LGBT Center with a donation of $25,000 in seed money. The Holly Woodlawn Memorial Fund for Transgender Youth, which continues to accept donations, benefits several programs at the Center including health care services for trans community members, Trans Pride L.A., and the Transgender Economic Empowerment Project.

Reflecting on the Lou Reed lyrics that she inspired, Woodlawn wittily remarked, “It’s a wonder I even survived this walk on the wild side, although to say I walked makes it sound so pleasant. Honey, I trudged! I crawled! I groveled! And then there were times when I waltzed.”

Updated June 11th, 2024.

 

The post Remembering Holly Woodlawn, Trans Icon and Puerto Rican Queen of Underground Cinema appeared first on Latina.

Source: Pastelgram.

An artistic provocateur since she first began performing in drag as a teen in the ‘70s, Davis has explained in several interviews that she “was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays.” Finding her art illegible within the conventions of LA’s underground scene, Davis adopted alternative language to describe her radical outsider art, describing herself as a “social threat,” a “sexual repulsive,” and — eventually inspired by Cuban American queer theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz — a “drag terrorist.”

“I couldn’t perform in many gay clubs because I wasn’t doing a spin on a popular Black singing diva like Donna Summer or Diana Ross,” Davis explained to curators at Studio Museum Harlem. “If you were a Black drag queen, you took on a persona like the “Grace Jones drag queen,” and I was writing my own songs and lip-synching. I was basing my persona on Angela Davis, the radical Black feminist.”

“When Angela Davis was the most wanted woman in America, I was just fixated with that image of her,” Davis described in a 2015 lecture at NYU. “By the late ’70s, I had decided I sort of wanted to sexualize her name and become her, more or less. So, I started in the late ’70s calling myself Vaginal Davis. I started to perform– or tried to perform– at these gay clubs in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. The people in these clubs, they would look at me and say, ‘Vaginal Davis? Well who are you supposed to be?’ And I said, ‘Well, Angela Davis– it’s a homage to that.’ And they’d say, ‘Well who’s that?’ They didn’t know who Angela Davis was.”

Source: https://scaaic.org/event/vaginal-davis/

Since she refined the Vaginal Davis character in the punk band Afro Sisters, Davis has developed several other personas in various conceptual bands. These many characters include a Chicana teenage singer named Graciela in the band ¡Cholita!; The Female Menudo, a white-supremacist “complete with ZZ Top beard,” known as Clarence in the thrash band Pedro, Muriel, & Esther; and Rayvn Cymone McFarlane in the band Black Fag. Davis explained in conversation with Rose Salseda, assistant professor of art and art history at Stanford University, that the character of Graciela was inspired by the “amazing sassy styles and defiance” of “Latina teens.” The character allowed Davis both to explore her own “Latin roots” and love of Spanish-language pop music and to present her “politics in a humorous fashion without being dogmatic, to show that women’s humour is playful and whismical.” Through these hyperbolic characters, Davis deployed exaggerated forms of self-invention to challenge and destabilize entrenched notions of racial and gender stereotypes. In spite of the numerous characters that Davis has adopted over her decades-spanning artistic career, “Vaginal Davis” remains her primary nom de guerre.

Although her adopted name pays homage to the iconic black radical, Vaginal Davis has long cited her own mother as the ultimate inspiration for her artistic life. “I’m so intertwined with my mother,” Davis explained in 2015. “My whole career as an artist, and all of my visual art, is basically co-opting my mother. My mother didn’t consider herself an artist, she just made stuff. Looking back to the things that she did, they were installations, assemblages– things in the art world that have proper names to them– she was doing this way back then. If I get any notice for any of my art works or any of my performances, it’s because I just copied my mother.”

Davis described her mother as a Black creole “femme lesbian separatist” from Louisiana who conceived Davis with a Mexican-American man she met at a Ray Charles concert, at the Hollywood Palladium. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Davis’s politics were shaped by her mother, a staunch feminist community activist who, according to Davis, “would plant food on the vacant lots for the whole community– all the Latinos, all the blacks, anyone who needed food.”

Davis has also cited the Black Panthers, who organized in South Central during her childhood, as important role models for her radical approach to performance: “When I was growing up, a little girl in South Central Los Angeles, the Black Panthers basically took over the education system. They came into the schools, they had guns, and they took over. They were teaching us all these revolutionary songs and chants and what not.”

Beginning in the 1980s, Davis began performing at queer punk venues in New York City, including the legendary Pyramid Club, where a “politically conscious drag performance art” scene was being developed by drag performers, including RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and Lypsinka. In 1987, Davis performed for the first time with RuPaul and queer “cowpunk” musician Glen Meadmore.

Through the 1990s, Davis continued to perform on stage and produce experimental videos. These included two VHS volumes of the Fertile La Toyah Jackson zine and The White to be Angry, a 1999 visual album by Davis’s band Pedro, Muriel & Esther that confronted white supremacist extremism and skinhead culture.

In a 2020 interview with them., Davis effectively summed up her career when she explained the conceptual divisions between “gay” and “queer” culture that have motivated her art:

“There is a difference between gay and queerness, between heteronormative-type gay people and people who are queer and live a real queer life. Being queer isn’t just sexuality. Queer to me means not wanting to fit in anywhere. It’s relishing in your outsider status as a misfit, weirdo, freakazoid. Always being suspect, perverse, maladjusted. It’s not about the mechanism, the nuts and bolts of sexuality. It’s more about the aesthetic drive as the principled guideline.”

The post Vaginal Davis: Genderqueer Godmother of the Queercore Movement appeared first on Latina.

Born Isabel Vargas Lizano in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rica, in 1919, Vargas got her start when she left her native country as a teenager to pursue a career in Mexico’s growing entertainment industry. After over a decade spent working as a street performer in Mexico City, Vargas slowly built her success in music, performing boleros, rancheras, and corridos as she partied hard at nightclubs across the city.

From the start, Vargas defied the gendered expectations of her era and the male-dominated ranchero music industry, dressing in men’s clothes and refusing to change the pronouns in the love songs she performed, such as “La Llorona” and “Piensa en mi,” which were written by men. Vargas drank heavily and smoked cigars, and was known for both her iconic red poncho and the gun that she often carried with her. In a 1991 interview, Vargas claimed that at the height of her fame she partied and shared beds with some of the biggest female stars of Mexico and the United States, including Ava Gardner and Frida Kahlo.

Vargas would later recount the memory of first meeting Kahlo in her autobiography:

Me quedé impresionada cuando vi que bajaban por la escalera de la casa, a la señora en una camilla y vestida de tehuana, los mariachis tocando y todos bebiendo tequila, una pachanga de tequila. Frida me invitó a quedarme a dormir, pues yo vivía lejos de Coyoacán. Después me fui quedando. ‘Quédate niña, me dijo, estás muy sola y no sabes nada de la vida, quédate en mi casa’, me dijo. Y yo me quedé. Ella pintaba y yo cantaba.’

In a letter to poet Carlos Pellicer, Kahlo described her own feelings that evening:

Carlos:

Hoy conocí a Chavela Vargas. Extraordinaria, lesbiana, es más se me antojó eróticamente. No sé si ella sintió lo que yo pero creo que es una mujer lo bastante liberal que si me lo pide no dudaría un segundo en desnudarme ante ella. Cuántas veces no se te antoja un acostón y ya. Ella repito es erótica. ¿Acaso es un regalo que el cielo me envía? 
Frida K. 

Letter from Frida Kahlo to Carlos Pellicer; Source: Revista Central

One of Vargas’ most famous songs is “Macorina,” adapted from Spanish poet Alfonso Camín’s poem of the same name. The song described the beauty of Maria Calvo Nodarse, a Cuban prostitute of Afro-Chinese descent better known as La Macorina, who moved through Havana’s wealthiest social circles, wore her hair short, and quickly amassed a fortune in furs, jewelry, mansions, and expensive cars. 

Vargas claimed that the inspiration for “Macorina” came to her after meeting Nodarse herself in Havana. In the documentary El amor Amargo de Chavela, Vargas described her first impression of the Afro-Cuban beauty: “Era una mujer guapísima. Negra mezclada de china. La vi y me quedé muda.”

Marvette Perez, curator of Latin-American Culture and Music for the Smithsonian Museum of American History, explained to NPR Music in 2010 how revolutionary Vargas’ performance of “Macorina” truly was for 1960s Mexico:

“I don’t think there could be a more queer song for a woman to sing. The song says, ‘Ponme la mano aqui, Macorina.’ Put your hand right here, Macorina. And whenever she sang the song, she put such sexuality, desire, and kind of sensuality into it that you knew why she was singing, why she was singing and to who she was singing it. She was singing it to a woman.”

Vargas’ singing style was similarly revolutionary for her time. Eschewing the accompaniment of mariachi, Vargas performed ranchera music solo, accompanied only by her own guitar. She sang slowly, stretching out the lyrics so there was no mistaking their meaning.

Frida Khalo and Chavela Vargas, Source: Revista Central

Vargas’ fame continued to grow during the 1960s. She released her first album, Noche de Bohemia, in 1961, and began touring internationally in Spain, France, and the United States.

By the late 1970s, though, Vargas’ heavy drinking and smoking began to take a heavier toll on her body, particularly her throat. And by the end of the decade, as Vargas drifted deeper into alcoholism, she was no longer performing at all. Vargas would later describe these years of her life in her autobiography as “hell,” as she struggled deeply with alcohol addiction until she was taken in by an impoverished family and nursed back to health and sobriety.

Vargas eventually made her return in 1991. She reemerged into the public eye on the same stages where she had gotten her start: nightclubs in Mexico City and Spain. As she regained her international fame through the 1990s, Vargas also developed a close friendship with Argentinian filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who began to feature Vargas and her music in several of his films throughout the decade, beginning with Kika in 1993. The silver screen was not unfamiliar to Vargas, as she had previously made an appearance in the 1966 Mexican film, La Soldadera. With Almodóvar’s support, Vargas made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003.

Although she made no secret of her sexuality throughout her career, Vargas came out as a lesbian in her 2002 autobiography Y si quieres saber de mi pasado. That same year, Vargas also appeared in the 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic, in which she performed “La Llorona.”

Vargas continued to perform up until her death in 2012, at age 91. Her last words: “Me voy con México en mi corazón.”

The post The Gender-Bending Costa Rican Singer Who Redefined Ranchera Music appeared first on Latina.

The exact date of the riot remains unknown, as San Francisco police records for this period no longer exist and local newspapers did not cover the events, but participants later recalled that resistance “erupted” in the cafeteria when a Compton’s worker called the police to remove a group of trans customers. When one of the cops attempted to arrest a trans woman, she threw a cup of coffee in his face. Soon the other queer and trans patrons joined in the resistance, throwing dining ware and furniture, shattering the windows, and swinging purses and high heels at the other officers. When the police retreated into the streets, the rioters followed, damaging a police car.

When the cafeteria refused to allow trans and queer people back into the building the next day, members of the Tenderloin’s LGBT community flocked to Compton’s to picket the business. The demonstration ended when protestors shattered the new plate glass windows that had just been installed to replace those that rioters had smashed the night before.

Arrest and police harassment were not new to the queer Tenderloin denizens who flocked to the 24-hour cafeteria at 1010 Taylor Street. Many trans women in the Tenderloin engaged in street prostitution, due to pervasive employment discrimination that barred them from most other jobs, and they needed a sheltered place in the city where they could gather and socialize through the night. Compton’s was hardly a welcoming establishment though: management and staff members regularly called police officers to clear the cafeteria in the years leading up to the 1996 riot. Vice officers regularly swept through the Tenderloin and arrested trans women and drag queens for wearing make-up or articles of women’s clothing, acts that were criminalized as “female impersonation.” But because they weren’t welcome at many of the Tenderloin’s gay bars, trans women had few other choices for where they could gather in the evenings.

Several of the participants of the Compton Cafeteria Riots were members of Vanguard, a short-lived gay liberation youth organization that was active in the Tenderloin district from the fall of 1965 until 1967. The month prior to the Compton Cafeteria Riot, in fact, Vanguard members picketed Compton’s Cafeteria after being kicked out and banned from the establishment. The article published about that demonstration ran with the headline: “Young Homos Picket Compton’s.” Shortly after the riot, Vanguard staged a symbolic “street sweep” march through the Tenderloin to protest the police’s neighborhood “sweeps” that sought to “clean up” the city through the harassment and incarceration of queer and trans sex workers.

After the riot, Compton’s Cafeteria began closing at midnight to prevent trans patrons from congregating and by 1972 the business closed permanently.

Felicia Elizondo, a Latina trans activist who frequented Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the 1960s, spent much of her later life working to ensure that the city would honor the legacy of the fierce trans women who led the fight for queer liberation in San Francisco. Born in San Angelo, Texas, Elizondo left home as a young teen and moved to San Jose, California, making frequent visits to San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. In Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker’s 2005 documentary, “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,” Elizondo described the social conditions that trans women and drag queens faced in the Tenderloin at the time of the uprising. Although Elizondo did not participate in the riot that night, she would go on to commit herself to honoring the legacy of those who did fight for the right to live free from harassment and arrest.

Felicia Elizondo, Source: Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005)

Throughout her life, Elizondo worked closely with other trans women of color to engage in activism that tackled both racial injustice and transphobia. After being diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987, Elizondo worked for several organizations, including P.A.W.S., Shanti and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and she contributed panels to the AIDS Memorial Quilt. She was a key organizer of the annual San Francisco Trans March and performed at clubs and charity drag shows as “Felicia Flames” with the musical drag group, the Tenderloin Queen’s Revue.

On June 22, 2006, as part of the city’s Pride celebrations, San Francisco unveiled a marble plaque commemorating the riot on the sidewalk at the corner of Turk and Taylor, the former location of Compton’s Cafeteria.

“Here marks the site of Gene Compton’s Cafeteria where a riot took place one August night,” the plaque reads, “when transgender women and gay men stood up for their rights and fought against police brutality, poverty, oppression and discrimination in the Tenderloin. We, the transgender, gay, lesbian, and bisexual community are dedicating this plaque to the heroes of our civil rights movement.” During the ceremony, June 22 was also declared Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Day in San Francisco.

In 2015, Elizondo was recognized as a lifetime achievement grand marshal of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee, and the following year, Elizondo spoke at events across San Francisco to commemorate the fiftieth-anniversary of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot.

In 2016, Elizondo also worked with San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim to rename the 100 block of Taylor Street to Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Way. “We were murdered, beat up, thrown in jail because we couldn’t be who we were meant to be.” Elizondo explained to the Bay Area Reporter, “I want this as a way to give memory to all the girls and boys who stood up for all of us at one time to be who we were meant to be.”

Aria Sa’id, executive director of the city’s Transgender Cultural District, explained that the name “Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Way” was ultimately a compromise, as city officials resisted the inclusion of the word “riot” on the street sign and community members pushed for the removal of “Gene” from the name, not wanting the city to recognize the transphobic owner of the cafeteria chain that collaborated in the harassment of trans and queer clientele.

San Francisco’s Transgender Cultural District became the world’s first legally recognized transgender cultural district in 2017 when it was formally recognized by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. District leadership and community members chose to remove “Compton’s” from the original name of the district to disassociate from the memory of Gene Compton. Since the district’s establishment, district leadership, who work independent of city leadership, continue to organize beautification and cultural events in the Tenderloin, and in 2020 launched a relief fund offering grants for trans Tenderloin residents who had been impacted by the coronavirus epidemic. In 2018, the Tenderloin Museum co-produced an interactive theater production inspired by the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, which starred several local trans actresses and drag performers who recreated the events of the uprising at a cafe just a few blocks away from the former location of Compton’s.

Felicia Elizondo passed away on May 15, 2021, at age 74, and Luis Gutierrez-Mock, a close friend of Elizondo, described the trans activist’s bold and unapologetic spirit for Bay Area Reporter: “She’d always say, ‘I’m a diva, I’m a bitch, I’m an icon, I’m a legend, and I’m your history.'”

The post Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: The Trans-led Uprising Before Stonewall & The Latina Who Upheld Its Legacy appeared first on Latina.

One of the earliest members that Valle recruited to his new house would become its mother, Angie Xtravaganza. Xtravaganza was born in 1964 into a large Puerto Rican family — one of 13 children that her devoutly Catholic mother raised in the South Bronx. A childhood of intense abuse pushed Xtravaganza out into the streets at a very young age, an experience the house mother rarely discussed in her later life. From the age of 13, Xtravaganza had already supported a family of her own, composed of queer and trans youth kicked out by their birth families, who gathered in Times Square and at the Christopher Street piers in Greenwich Village. To them, she was known simply as “Ma.” In Michael Cunningham’s 1995 article “The Slap of Love,” one of her children recalled Xtravaganza as an incisive judge of character who eschewed flashy wit for authenticity and candor:

“She was so for real, she could pull a fake in a minute. Someone that’s false, she could pull him out in a minute. She would never embarrass anyone, but after they left, she’d be, like, ‘She’s not for real.’ She just knew. And you knew that she knew. And if she thought you were a fake she wouldn’t have nothing to do with you.”

When she was 14, Xtravaganza started to do drag and perform in balls in Harlem, learning the art from the legendary performer and designer Dorian Corey, mother of the House of Corey. By 16, Xtravaganza had begun to transition and compete in New York’s ballroom scene. When she went out, her signature accessories included “drop earrings and seven-inch stiletto heels” and she walked a category known as “model’s effect,” in which contestants were rewarded for most convincingly embodying the runway performance of a fashion model.

Danny Xtravaganza recalled one particularly memorable night that the house mother, the youngest of all the legendary mothers of Harlem, snatched a trophy with her impeccable fashion sense and larger-then-life sense of glamour.

“She wore an eggshell-colored linen suit, a mini-skirt and a blazer, with brown trimming and brown buttons. She had a brown organza blouse underneath the jacket, and a white duster and a brown shawl. Angie went to the middle of the runway and started spinning. And the shawl she was carrying got bigger and bigger and bigger. The first time she walked, it just looked like a regular little shawl, but it turned out to be, like, fifty feet long. She started swinging it, and all the other queens got tangled up in it.””

In 1983, the House of Extravaganza made its debut on the ballroom scene and its members quickly began to accumulate trophies for fashion and vogue performance. Less than two years later, though, Valle passed from an AIDS-related illness. He was 25 years old.

Hector Crespo Xtravaganza, an Afro-Puerto Rican founding member of Xtravaganza, would go on to co-lead the house with Angie Xtravaganza in the years following Valle’s death. Born in 1965 in Puerto Rico, Crespo was raised by his single mother in Jersey City and frequently skipped school to take the PATH train into Manhattan to visit the Christopher Street piers, where the city’s Black and Latinx trans and queer youth gathered.

“I started hanging out around Christopher Street when I was nine,” Crespo explained to Cunningham in “Slap of Love.” “My first experience with a guy, I was seven. When my mother found out I was gay, she started treating me like shit. She was, like, ‘You want to be a woman, start cleaning up.’ I was treated like a slave. So I ran away. I ate out of garbage cans, slept in abandoned buildings.”

Before Hector Xtravaganza was a house father, Angie was his mother. He recalled in the same interview how Angie, five years his junior, had leapt to his defense to fight a truck driver who, mistaking Hector for a hustler, had threatened and insulted the younger man when he rejected the trucker’s groping and solicitation.

By 1989, the House of Extravaganza had dropped the E from their name and became known as House of Xtravaganza. The change, which referenced the Roman numeral for 10, a perfect score in ballroom, came in response to both the House’s and ballroom culture’s growing fame. Several members of Xtravaganza were featured in the December 1988 issue of Vogue, May 1989 issue of Time, and September 1989 issue of Vanity Fair. At the 1989 Love Ball, a star-studded celebrity charity fundraiser organized by the Design Industry Foundation for AIDS and modeled after a traditional ballroom competition, the House of Extravaganza took trophies in several categories including “Banjy Team,” “Wedding of the Year,” and the voguing grand prize. Extravaganza House member David Ian Xtravaganza hosted the night as master of ceremonies.

The following year, members Jose Gutierez and Luis Xtravaganza would also choreograph and star in the music video for Madonna’s chart-topping single “Vogue” before going on to work as choreographers and backup dancers for Madonna’s iconic and controversial Blonde Ambition tour.

Venus Xtravaganza, Brooklyn ball, 1986, Photo by Jennie Livingston; Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/06/paris-is-burning-documentary-drag-jennie-livingston-interview

In 1990, the House of Xtravaganza was featured prominently in the documentary Paris is Burning, which introduced ballroom culture to mainstream film audiences. The film captures the moment that Angie Xtravaganza was awarded “Mother of the Year” at the titular Paris is Burning ball, organized by Paris Dupree, founding mother of the House of Dupree. The film also features Venus Xtravaganza, an aspiring model from Jersey City who Angie described as her “closest daughter” in a particularly emotional story arc. On Christmas Day, 1998, Venus Xtravaganza was found dead at the Duchess Hotel in New York, evidence suggesting that she had been strangled four days prior. Although her killer was never found, filmmakers included a conversation with Venus in the documentary during which she recounted an earlier experience of escaping from a man who attempted to hurt her upon realizing that she was a trans woman.

In 1991, Angie Xtravaganza was diagnosed with AIDS. She passed two years later, on March 21, 1993, at age 28. Like most trans women in the ballroom scene, Xtravaganza had relied on low quality hormones throughout her life, which left her with chronic liver disease that exacerbated the progression of the disease. A few weeks after her death, the New York Times published an article structured around Angie Xtravaganza’s memorial service entitled “Paris Has Burned.” The article mourned the many deaths of New York’s ballroom scene, including Angie’s daughter Venus and Kim Pendavis. The article also addressed the controversy surrounding accusations that Paris is Burning exploited the talented members of the ballroom community, who saw little renumeration for their participation in the documentary despite its significant commercial and critical success.

Despite the NYT’s grim forecast about the future of New York’s ballroom culture, the House of Xtravaganza continues to thrive in the world of ballroom and beyond. As one of the oldest active houses in the ballroom community, the House of Xtravaganza and its members continue to make their impact in the fashion, television, dance, music, and film.

The post The Legendary House of Xtravaganza appeared first on Latina.

Yo en vuelo de un avión, cruzando el cielo del

(Polo Norte,

Para dirigirme al Lejano Oriente…

En un sueño te vi…

Tu cuerpo manchado de sangre!!!

Y tu bello cabello negro, largo, estaba cortado!!!

Sentada en una Flor de Loto subiendo al cielo,

Como la Virgen Buda “Kum Yim”.

Born in Jinotepe, Nicaragua in 1955, Arlen Siu Bermundéz is remembered as an icon of the revolutionary Sandinista youth. The daughter of Rubia Bermúdez and Mankuey “Armando” Siu Lau — a former soldier in the Communist Revolutionary Army who migrated from Guangdong, China in the late 1940s — Arlen spent her childhood in Jinotepe painting, dancing and playing the guitar. Per her father’s recollection, Arlen was uniquely interested in their family’s Chinese heritage: when her father refused to teach her his native tongue, she defied him and pursued Cantonese lessons from her grandmother Luisa instead. 

As a student in Jinotepe’s La Escuela Normal de Señoritas, Arlen hoped to become a teacher, aspiring specifically to combat illiteracy in rural Nicaragua. But in continuing her studies at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) — where she also sang with Marlene Alvarez and the band Grupo Pancasán — Arlen grew deeply involved with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional — the Sandinistas — a revolutionary socialist party emerging out of the student movements spreading across Nicaragua’s universities. The Sandinistas took inspiration — in ideology and in name — fromr Augusto César Sandino, the revolutionary combatant who successfully ousted U.S. occupying forces from Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. 

Sandino’s assassination in 1934, at the hands of the National Guard of General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, proved equally consequential. Somoza would proceed to lead a coup d’état two years later, establishing a Somoza family regime that would maintain control of the country for the next 42 years. In this time, the Somoza family accumulated immense wealth through bribery, land grabbing and corruption. By the 1970s, they owned nearly 25 percent all Nicaraguan land. And after a 6.2-magnitude earthquake effectively leveled Nicarauga’s capital, Managua, in December 1972, the Somoza family and their National Guard embezzled millions of dollars in international aid intended to rebuild the city, leaving thousands of Nicaraguans to fend for themselves.

The Somoza regime’s corruption in the disaster’s wake inflamed resistance to the dynastic government. Strikes and demonstrations spread across the country, and the ranks of the Sandinistas swelled with young people like Arlen.

As the Sandinistas’ popular support grew, Arlen rose to prominence chiefly as a political songwriter and musician. Most famously, Arlen penned and performed “Maria Rural,” a song celebrating rural Nicaraguan women as “madre[s] del campo/madre[s] sin igual,” earning her a reputation as the voice of Nicaragua’s attendant women’s movement. Arlen also composed several essays of Marxist and feminist analysis; in her lyrics and writings her alike, she condemned sexual violence and disappearances committed by Somoza’s soldiers and highlighted the central role of peasant women in Nicaragua’s past and, with luck, its revolutionary future. 

Arlen visible’s role in the Sandinista movement made her an obvious target of Somoza’s government. In August 1975, two years after joining the Sandinistas, the National Guard ambushed a Sandinista training camp in the mountains outside of León, killing Arlen and several of her comrades.

Source: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=43629

In his mourning, Arlen’s father published the poem “El Gran Dia Para Arlene” in her memory:, 

When you left for that great destiny,

you left me your guitar, your unfinished painting, 

your prophetic poem, and the book Juan Salvador Gaviota

so that I could feel your love beyond 

the heavens and earth.

That mourning extended well beyond Arlen’s immediate family. Months after Siu’s death, students in Jinotepe continued to carry her photograph alongside Sandinista flags while protesting the National Guard. One particular image, by the photographer Susan Meiselas, captures well the students’ furrowed brows and rasied fists — a ceremony of  defiant grief. 

Arlen’s legacy persists to this day, largely through poetry and song — in the work of other Nicaraguan artists as much as her own oeuvre — ensuring that Arlen’s revolutionary song lives on.

Source: https://medium.com/@anagsiu/la-mul%C3%A1n-que-nunca-regres%C3%B3-18cf6738716d

The post “La Chinita de Jinotepe”: Arlen Siu’s Life as a Poet and Revolutionary appeared first on Latina.

–José Sarria, 1997

The biography of political activist and legendary drag artist José Julio Sarria, Absolute Empress I de San Francisco, opens with his two family trees: “biological” and “adopted.”  A descendant of large, wealthy families with roots in Spain and Colombia, the life of José Sarria, founder of San Francisco’s International Imperial Court System, was deeply rooted in an awareness of the power of pedigree.

Born on December 13, 1922, Sarria explained his lifelong fascination with royalty as a product of his youth in the interwar period, a time “of kingdoms” when “there was still a lot of places where there were kings and queens that you read about in the paper.” As a child, Sarria’s favorite role was, of course, the queen.

“We would build carriages and sedan chairs,” he described of his childhood play. “I rode, they carried, they pulled! I was the boss.”

Nearly 50 years later, Sarria would become the “Dowager Empress to a lengthening line of successors,” according to his biographer, “as well as dukes, duchesses, czarinas, and assorted Court dignitaries.” Through the Imperial Court, Sarria oversaw a sprawling volunteer fundraising organization that, in its early years, primarily organized charity drag shows and other events to raise funds for the local queer community.

The Imperial Court’s hierarchy developed out of annual coronation and investiture fundraisers in which local chapters of the Imperial Court elected a new leader. In turn, the newly crowned monarch presented court titles to officers who would serve the community under their reign. As the inaugural, self-appointed Empress, Sarria set the Imperial Court’s tone of campy yet elegant pageantry.

But Sarria’s activism began several years before his coronation, emerging in the Bay Area’s queer bar circuit that included The Pearl in Oakland and the Black Cat Café in San Francisco.

Honorably discharged from the military during World War II, Sarria quickly gained recognition for his singing talent while working as a cocktail waiter at the Black Cat, where he was hired to perform nightly parodic operas as “The Nightingale of Montgomery Street.” Celebrated for his performances of arias adapted from Carmen, which Sarria reworked to tell a melodramatic tale of cruising and evading the local vice squad in present-day San Francisco, and his ritual of leading patrons in a rendition of “God Save Us Nelly Queens” at last call, Sarria developed a loyal following. Harvey Milk’s biographer recalled that Sarria sometimes brought the Black Cat crowd into the streets to perform for men who had been arrested in police raids earlier that night.

José Sarria at the Black Cat Bar; Source: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15799coll4/id/5458/rec/28

Police raids of gay and lesbian bars were a routine, and often violent, occurrence in the lives of queer people living in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s. Afterwards, arrested patrons often saw their names, addresses and workplaces published in local papers.

The 1969 Stonewall uprising, a major catalyst for the U.S. gay liberation movement, began when patrons at the Greenwich Village bar fought back against a routine police raid and set off a riot.

Drag queens and trans patrons in San Francisco were particularly vulnerable during raids, as they were often arrested under local ordinances that criminalized cross-dressing “with an intent to deceive.” The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco has been credited as the start of organized trans activism, when trans women and drag queens resisted arrests specifically targeting those who police perceived as men dressed as women.

In the late 1950s, Sarria consulted an attorney and began distributing black cat-shaped tags to fellow drag queens that read “I’M A BOY” to counter police claims of deception. He also advised arrested patrons not to plead guilty, as was routine, but instead to demand time-consuming jury trials that forced police and prosecutors to meet a fairer standard of evidence, thus overloading court dockets and discouraging discriminatory mass arrests.

Source: https://www.queermusicheritage.com/nov2012s.html

In 1961, Sarria became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States when he ran for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Directors. Out of 34 candidates, Sarria earned nearly 6,000 votes and finished ninth. And though he did not secure a seat on the board, his run proved possible a politically significant gay voting bloc in city politics, laying the groundwork for the future election of openly gay leadership in San Francisco, including that of Harvey Milk. With Sarria’s endorsement, Milk won a seat as city supervisor in 1977 on the same board Sarria had campaigned for 16 years earlier.

Sarria at a protest at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco; Source: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15799coll4/id/1933/rec/39

Following his unsuccessful bid for local office, Sarria helped form the first-ever gay business association in the United States, the Tavern Guild of San Francisco (TGSF), founded to protect gay bars from the constant police raids that threatened both their patrons and liquor licenses. The TGSF established a phone network that tracked police and warned Guild bars of potential raids while raising money for bail funds and legal fees for patrons and employees arrested at TGSF bars.

In 1963, Sarria founded another homophile organization, the Society for Individual Rights, dedicated to grassroots organizing efforts including voter registration and the publication and distribution of “Pocket Lawyers”: pamphlet guides containing practical legal advice for queer community members facing arrest or police harassment.

In 1965, the TGSF honored Sarria at the third annual Beaux Arts Ball, San Francisco’s oldest large public drag ball, crowning him queen of the event. Noting that he had already long been a queen, Sarria proclaimed instead that he accepted the title of “Her Lady, Empress of San Francisco, José I.” Sarria also called himself “The Widow Norton,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to San Francisco’s Joshua Abraham Norton, an eccentric 19th-century radical who had once declared himself “Emperor of the United States” and “Protector of Mexico.” Bedecked in a flowing black gown and veil, Sarria staged annual pilgrimages to Norton’s grave in nearby Colma, California from 1975 to 2005.

In 2007, Sarria abdicated his throne as Empress to longtime Latino LGBTQ activist Nicole Murray-Ramirez, marking the end of a 42-year reign of pioneering political activism and unforgettable queer pageantry. By the time of his passing in 2013, “Mama José” Sarria was widely recognized for his charitable work and fierce resistance to anti-LGBTQ discrimination, receiving numerous lifetime achievement awards at Pride Celebrations across the United States and appearing alongside legendary drag performers in the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

Given a funeral befitting an Empress (one attended by about 1,000 mourners including state elected officials and Imperial Court leadership), Sarria was buried with full military honors in Woodlawn Memorial Park, a place he had frequented during his life. The Empress was laid to rest in a plot at the foot of former “Emperor of the United States” Joshua Norton, the only other Bay Area monarch whose royal title had ever matched Sarria’s own.

The post “The Empress is a Man”: The Drag Royalty of José Julio Sarria appeared first on Latina.