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HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND

NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM

Miguel Moss Marrero

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Michael Wilson, Chair

______Adrienne L. McLean

______Robert Nelsen

______Rainer Schulte

Miguel Moss Marrero

-For my father who inspired me to be compassionate, unbiased, and to aspire towards a life full of greatness. HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND

NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM

MIGUEL MOSS MARRERO BA, MA

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

August 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Latin American transgender women and gay men are part of my family. This dissertation is dedicated to them. It would have not been possible without their stories. I want to give my gratitude to my mother, who set an example by completing her doctoral degree with three exuberant boys and a full-time job in mental health. I also want to dedicate this to my father, who encouraged me to accomplish my goals and taught me that nothing is too great to achieve. I want to thank my siblings who have shown support throughout my doctoral degree. I also want to thank my husband, Michael Saginaw, for his patience while I spent many hours in solitude while writing my dissertation. Without all of their support, this chapter of my life would have been meaningless.

During my undergraduate and graduate studies, many professors served as mentors, encouraging me to reach my goals. I want to thank my master’s committee at Universidad de Puerto Rico and

Penn State for shaping my interests in Latin American and Caribbean literature and how it can be inherently political. I also want to thank my doctoral committee, Dr. Robert Nelsen, who inspired me to write creatively as well as academically; Dr. Adrienne McLean, who taught me indelible scholars in film theory; Dr. Wilson, who stepped in as my chair in the middle of my dissertation and challenged me to go deeper and be more deliberate in my writing; Dr. Schulte, for encouraging me to work in original language texts and for his academic excellence; and

Dr. Theresa Towner for agreeing to serve on my committee after Dr. Nelsen left The University of Texas System to become president of the California State System in Sacramento.

v Finally, I want to recognize the utmost collaboration and inspiration from many good friends and colleagues. My sincerest thanks go out to Sara Cardona, Susan Barkley, Scott Branks del Llano,

Sha-Shonda Porter, and many others.

April 2018

vi HOMO-SEXILE: GAY AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES - SEXUAL AND

NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION AND FILM

Miguel Moss Marrero, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018

Supervising Professor: Michael Wilson

This dissertation is an examination of the fictional portrayals of Cuban and Argentine gay and transgender communities that often experience resistance from authoritarian dictatorships and machismo attitudes towards sexual and national identity. It focuses on three novels: Manuel

Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976), Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca (1991), and

Mayra Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena, Vestida de pena (2000). It also focuses on two film adaptations: Hector Babeno’s adaptation of Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and

Julian Schnabel’s film adaptation of Arenas’s novel Before Night Falls (2000). Lastly, it includes five documentaries: Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal’s Mauvaise Conduite (1984),

Andres di Tella’s Prohibido (1997), Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990), and Wolfgang

Busch’s How Do I Look (2006). I have chosen these works because of their historical significance vis-a-vis machismo and its relationship to Argentina’s La Guerra Sucia [The Dirty

War] from 1976 to 1983, and the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

The accounts of the Cuban revolution, and Juan Perón and General Rafael Videla’s Argentine dictatorship are pivotal historical markers of the fictional novels, their feature film adaptations,

vii and the documentary films. The gay and transgender protagonists in these works strive to become part of imagined communities that bring them together through sharing patriotic and political values, thus enabling these characters to strive towards national and sexual identities.

The models of communities that represent a space that allows for possibilities of these dual identities are prison as community, drag as community, and the dynamics of Latin American exile communities in the United States.

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..………….v

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..vii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….……….1

CHAPTER 2 PRISON AS COMMUNITY IN REINALDO ARENAS’S ANTES QUE ANOCHEZCA AND MANUEL PUIG’S EL BESO DE LA MUJER ARAÑA…………..……….20

CHAPTER 3 COMMUNITY IS A DRAG: HOWTRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES STRUGGLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THEIR ROLE IN ACHIEVING NATIONAL AND SEXUAL IDENTITIES……………………………………………………………………….…46

CHAPTER 4 LIFE IS A BALL: LATIN AMERICAN GAY AND TRANSGENDER EXILE COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES…………………………………………………..66

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………107

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..116

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...127

CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………………………………………...………...128

vii CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

While doing research in Comparative Literature during my master’s degree at The

Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) between 1995 and 1997, I began mapping out a plan to research investigate the concept of a community that enables both national and sexual identity within oppressive circumstances. Through my research, I found that various Latin American and

Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries challenged the ability of gay men and transgender women to maintain both sexual and national identities. Although many theoretical texts deal with homosexuality and exile, I noticed that none of these analyses moved beyond the fact that Latin

American political leaders historically imposed heterosexist politics. For example, in the introduction to their collection Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998), Sylvia Molloy and

Robert McKee Irwin explain that relations between nationality and sexuality “are downright problematic” (xii). Furthermore, in order for gay men and transgender women to maintain their sexual identity, exile is often the best or only option.

For my doctoral dissertation, I decided to interrogate representations of male homosexuality in Cuba and Argentina and, more particularly, to investigate the role of community as a common ground for protagonists who describe a loss of national identity in order to maintain sexual identity. Scholars have not completely overlooked this particular aspect of scholarship; my project builds on previous scholarship on homosexuality and exile in Latin

America, such as Molloy and Irwin’s volume, Amy Kaminsky’s After Exile: Writing the Latin

American Diaspora (1999), and David Foster and Roberto Reis’s anthology, Bodies and Biases:

Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures (1996). My aim is to go further by exploring

1 how Cuban and Argentine writers and filmmakers have established this common ground. I argue that the protagonists in the fiction and films strive for imagined communities that can bring together people who share patriotic and political values and who can enable gay men and transgender women to strive towards dual national and sexual identities.

There is a unique role for Latin American literature in cultural and social critiques because it is dealing with conditions of constraint between authoritarian governments and dictatorships that impose machismo as normative gender roles that men and women were forced to observe. This is not only true of a left-wing dictatorship imposed by the Cuban Revolution, but also the right-wing dictatorship imposed by the Argentine government during La Guerra

Sucia. These literary and journalistic critiques often considered both – the right and left wing governments as threatened by movements of youth taking place in the United States. Regardless of the political stance of Cuba and Argentina, in the sixties and seventies, liberal democracy concerning women’s liberation and gay and lesbian rights threatened their youth (Trento 48-41).

In the title of my dissertation, I use the term “homo-sexile.” According to Manolo Guzmán, sexile refers to “the exile of those who have had to leave their nations of origin on account of their sexual orientation” (88). Homo-sexile is the term I use to reflect the narratives of characters who leave their countries, sometimes to reside in metropolitan cities, in search of another space to freely express their sexual identities. This term indicates my methodology of examining the novels and feature films in my dissertation from a queer perspective. For example,

I am not positing a rudimentary perspective of distinguishing between normative and non- normative relations in each narrative. Instead, I closely examine the social construction of acts that are deemed sexually deviant and the representation of their impact on identity. While

2 claiming one’s sexual orientation as an attraction to a specific sex or gender, sexual identity refers to a conception of “self” and the behaviors regarding sexual acts performed by the central characters (Reiter 141). This goes beyond the general argument about one’s sexual preferences in the fictions and films I examine. In this project, I focus on gay men and transgender women rather than including lesbian and bisexual communities. Male homosexuality in Latin America, in contrast to the United States, has been primarily defined as the identity of men who exhibit feminine traits rather than the libidinal relationship between persons of the same sex (Epps 242-

243). For example, a passive formulation exhibited by a man in most Latin American countries is considered an impersonation that is a stereotype of the gendered socially constructed role of women. In other words, passive men are deemed to be women (Almoguer 255-257). Thus, the passive role of a gay man and a transgender woman define them as a maricón [homosexual].1

However, the partner who participates in the active role, known as the bugarrón [penetrator], is not considered homosexual. In fact, he is considered hyper-macho due to his ability to dominate men as well as women (Almoguer 255-257). The novels and films examined in this dissertation exemplify this dichotomous relationship between the bugarrón and maricón, which often results in a form of exile and/or censorship of passive gay men and transgender women. During my doctoral research, I also decided to investigate my definitions of national identity. I found it important to research and lay out the primary texts that address concepts of national identity before embarking on analyses of Cuban and Argentine prisons, drag, and exile communities.

This is partly due to my definitions of national identity as a socially-constructed community imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of the nation (Anderson 7). National

1 The use of the word maricón is a pejorative term. It more closely translates as “faggot.”

3 identity is important to my argument that, through fictional works that reference specific historical settings, the gay men and transgender women protagonists strive to obtain and maintain a form of national identity in unison with sexual identity. In other words, national identity is one’s sense of inclusion in his or her country of origin (Ashmore, Jussim, and Wilder

74-75). While national identity often includes feelings of interconnection and “wholeness,” which is stimulated and encouraged by cultural, social, and political traditions, I am referring to national identity as an awareness of these traditions, of not being included as part of the nation due to the psychological terms of difference, and an understanding of “we” versus “they” (Lee

29). In the following chapters, I also examine the models of community that represent a space that allows for the possibility of gay and transgender communities to strive towards both forms of identity. The models include: Cuban and Argentine prisons as community, drag as community, and the dynamics of (Latin American) exile communities in the United States. As we will see, models of community do not necessarily obtain both forms of identity, and in fact, many of the communities examined focus on one identity over the other. For example, in the chapter on exile communities in the United States, Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is

Burning (1990) portrays many African American groups of people in New York City’s drag ball scene in the early 1990s. Yet, there is another group in the documentary, Xtravaganza, there is a group of Latino and Latin American participants. While my examination of this group refers to the ways many of the ball contestants arrived to New York, my focus is instead on hierarchies and generational differences of sexuality, ideas about gender, and attitudes toward gender confirmation surgeries among the younger group members. When deciding to embark on the topic of national identity in fiction and film, it was imperative to go to the source of the meaning

4 of “nation” by looking at the etymology of the word. “Nation” comes from the Latin nation, meaning tribe, birth, or people. It also signifies species, race, class, and breed. According to the

Oxford English Dictionary, a nation is “a large body of people united by common descent, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory” (“Nation”). This simplified definition of a nation is problematic. First, the definition marginalizes groups who do not follow common cultural norms even though they share common descents and language within their particular territory. Second, gay and transgender communities often do not identify with this large body of people who share a common descent, culture, or static gender roles. Finally, gay men and transgender women who do not share common cultural and socio-political ideologies are forced to choose between sexual and national identities. Frequently, leaving a nation in order to have the freedom to celebrate sexual identity disengages a sense of national identity when choosing to go into geographical exile.

In order to take a closer look at a more complex and nuanced understanding of national identities, I turned to a chronological body of scholarship of theoretical texts. Aside from Frantz

Fanon’s post-colonial analysis of national identity in the 1950s and 1960s, until the late 1980s, many cultural and anthropological investigations overlooked Latin American and Caribbean forms of nationalism and national identity. Scholars investigated this topic after President

Alfonsín’s democracy was restored in This topic was largely investigated after democracy was restored in Argentina in 1983 and when gay rights began to be recognized in Cuba in the early

1990s. Not only did the world continue to shift in many ways through the second half of the twentieth century, so did the examination of a nation, nationality, and national identity. The

5 study of a nation, nationality, and national identity has not only developed in quantity, but also in complexity, method, and magnitude.2

Since I am focusing on fictional accounts taking place in recognizable historical settings, it is necessary to provide the history of the authoritarian government in Cuba and

Argentina. The history of the Cuban government between the 1959 Cuban Revolution to the

Mariel boatlift in 1980 and Argentina’s La Guerra Sucia between 1976 and 1983 are pivotal historical markers for the fictional novels, their feature film adaptations, and the documentary films. Both of these countries have unique histories with a variety of political experiences, from military dictatorships to communist ideologies to United States intervention. Despite their similarity of gay and transgender oppression, they did not share similar political ideologies. IN

Argentina, Castro was as much of a threat as cultural influences that took place in the United

States. I am focusing on Argentina and Cuba because of their unique histories and political ideologies that shape the themes in the literature and film that represent fictional accounts of real historical events.

Cuba and Argentina’s governments have historically led exist political values, which have caused tense relations between nationality and (homo)sexuality during their military dictatorships. They have had turbulent histories in their ongoing paths to political and cultural

2 In English alone, foundational analyses were undertaken in Clifford Gertz’s Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (1963); Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983); Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983); Anthony Smith’s National Identity (1989); Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration; and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993). These important texts provide an exceptional abundance of definitions of “nation,” “nationality,” and “national identity,” and represent a range of disciplines across the university curriculum such as anthropology, history, post-colonial studies, and gender studies.

6 maturity. In their cyclic political developments, experiencing varying degrees of democracy and authoritarianism, both nations in the second half of the twentieth century have passed through periods of state-sponsored tyranny enacted upon those who challenge the legitimacy of their regime’s rule. Alongside the general population’s oppression, The Cuban and Argentine government often persecuted several segments of society, which presented threats to the status quo. , were often ruthlessly persecuted. Outlawing differing political parties and jailing political opponents consolidated the power of regimes. When freedom of expression is curtailed to help secure the removal of public opposition, artists and intellectuals, by their questioning nature exhibited through cultural products and observation, sooner or later run afoul of the authorities.

In order to overpower and suppress both nations, the governments in power caused frustration and energy. Targets of hatred and scapegoats for social ills are found by tapping into national prejudices. Gay men and transgender women, who differ from officially sanctioned lifestyles, found themselves the victims rounded up alongside the politically motivated. In some cases, these segments of society intersect within the same individuals. Using their talents, artistic sensibilities, and analytical thinking, gay intellectuals were among those who brought to light, through their literature, film, and other artistic endeavors, the injustices in their homelands.

During the key periods of General Jorge Rafael Videla’s fascist dictatorship in Argentina and Fidel Castro’s Revolutionary Cuba, homosexuals were ostracized and denied their human rights. However, as each ruler subscribed to opposing social, political, and religious viewpoints − one socialist/communist and the other fighting against such equalities − the end results were the same for gay men and transgender women of the time. The strikingly similar methods for dealing

7 with homosexual elements suggest that cultural factors, as much as political reasons, might explain their treatment under two separate Latin American dictatorships.

The players in Argentine politics are typical of those of Latin America and other developing countries, with conservative values securing the elite’s hold on its disproportionate wealth and resources and populist movements (Bloomers 5). Political struggles often ended in violence and/or the intervention of the country’s armed forces. Argentine intellectuals have long viewed this instability as residual cultural traditions of “strongmen” ruling with an iron fist

(Szuchman 187). Many of these intellectuals supported Juan Domingo Perón, a key figure in

Argentine politics who came to the presidency in 1946 as someone truly representative of the common people. Along with his wife, Eva Perón, who would be seen as a defender of the working class, President Perón had much influence until the 1970’s. As the country teetered between military and civilian rule, the economy did improve but at the expense of political freedom (Barnard 444). After Perón’s death during a later, non-consecutive term as President, a military coup displaced his third wife, Isabel Perón, who led the presidency after his assassination and dismemberment (Szuchman 184).

During Isabel Perón’s presidency in 1974, ataques paramilitares (paramilitary attacks) against gay men and women were promoted by the right-wing government that considered homosexuals as leftist subversives. The instability of the government led to a military coup and resulted in the homosexuals’ necessity to abandon social organizations and meeting spaces due to torture as well as the disappearances of those considered being leftist subversives.3 The

3 For further information on the overthrowing of Isabel Peron by the Argentine military, see Stephen Brown’s “Con discriminación y repressión no hay democracia: The Lesbian and Gay Movement in Argentina” (2002).

8 censorship that that was instilled during the time of the military coups not only affected literature and film, it also affected sexual freedom.

Military rule from 1976 to 1983 would become known as La Guerra Sucia (The Dirty

War). Under this ultra conservative regime, many of its “enemies,” beginning with those from the extreme left, became desaparecidos (missing) by the clandestine inductions by the military junta. In the Report of the Argentine National Commission of the Disappeared, published as

Nunca Más, the repression enacted by the military junta is detailed through testimonies and personal accounts of systematic abduction, disappearance, and torture. In addition, the documents also served as a means to prevent subversion and a political weapon (9). The military government had successfully either duped or cowed the Argentine citizens. The Argentine government denied this the testimonies and person accounts. They blamed this as propaganda spread by the country’s enemies. The gruesome truth officially saw light in the report and its compilation in facts, figures, and personal anecdotes of the suffering of thousands of Argentines including the gay and transgender community.

In 1980, the Argentine junta’s reign unraveled due to a disastrous war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands. The government attempted to cover up the war as a disaster. The

Argentine public turned their anger towards the generals, as they could no longer believe what had been fed to them for so many years through official channels of information. In 1983, democracy returned with democratic elections to fill the power void (Foster 464). The new president, Raúl Alfonsín, led the nation through the pain of dealing with a means to reconcile with its past to meet the future. Despite the economic woes that have continued to hinder the

9 country’s growth, Argentina has navigated through them while still following democratic principles (Foster 477).

The United States closely followed developments in Cuba and had a vested interest in them, largely due to its close proximity to the Floridian mainland. The United States’ government initially supported Fulgencio Batista’s overthrow in 1959. However, the United

States government became increasingly concerned by the savage retribution inflicted upon Fidel

Castro n due to American economic interests (Foster 73). Faced with the United States government’s rejection and support for an invasion of exiles, Castro and his compatriots, including Ernesto Ché Guevara, declared themselves Marxist-Leninist and aligned Cuba with the

Soviet Union to guarantee its survival (Dominguez 101). Castro drew a line in the Straits of

Florida that chartered Cuba’s way through the Cold War.

For the first thirty years of Fidel Castro’s rule, gay men and transgender women quickly became the target of institutionalized homophobia. He branded homosexuals as anti-social and deviant to the new model of society. Castro removed gay men who held positions in public life and sometimes imprisoned them (Dominguez 135). This persecution escalated to the point of establishing rehabilitation camps that rounded up men, targeting gay men, and sentenced them to hard labor with no official recourse to protest (Shaw 21). Under heavy criticism, Cuba eventually abandoned such overt abuses of human rights. However, conditions remained difficult for gay men because officials could use other laws such as vagrancy could to detain them.

With the disintegration of the Communist bloc in 1989, Castro continually realigned the

Cuban nation with other nations who supported Cuba such as Europe and Canada. Other nations and found new sources of revenue and economic support (Dominguez 146). The Cuban question

10 remains controversial as those spurned by Castro vehemently opposed his rule and relentlessly highlighted human rights abuses of his supposed totalitarian rule. His supporters maintained that with basic necessities met, Cubans, while materially poor and arguably having no voice in their government, were better off than their peers in most democratic Latin American countries. For example, under Castro, ordinary Cubans had greatly improved access to education, health care, and basic necessities. However, to ensure the Cuban Revolution’s new order, the Cuban government would not tolerate gay men and transgender women. The government also dismissed those who disagreed with Castro’s visions posts. Gay men and transgender women suffered other indignities in state-sponsored UMAP camps to forcefully institutionalize the Cuban

Revolution’s new man (Dominguez 105). Many Cubans from all socio-economic and political affiliations went into exile through the second grand-exodus, the first being the exodus of the economic elite in the sixties, and later the Mariel Boatlift in the eighties.

Sexist attitudes have also been ever-present in Argentine politics and society. The

Argentine government restricted the emancipation of women and gay men/transgender women due to heterosexual male domination over the institutions of social and political power

(Bloomers 141). The early seventies in Argentina was a perilous time for all its citizens; no matter what their political affiliation or alliance, no one could remain indifferent to the struggle that was taking place. The fighting between political parties tore the country apart and eventually led to the military coup of the early seventies. This in turn led to military rulers, perceiving threats to their authority, proclaiming themselves the defenders of traditional Christian (Catholic) and family values, explicitly singling out those who did not share their values.

11 The Argentine and Cuban authoritarian governments imposed historical injustices in films and documentaries produced in both countries. The gay artists involved behind and in front of the camera, have been instrumental in coming to terms with the past and in some cases looking past the political leanings of the protagonists and delving into sociological explanations of why such atrocities have occurred. They wanted to let the Cuban and Argentine government, who claimed to define the meaning of being revolutionary, that they were part of the revolution too.

Homosexuality was not considered an official part in the Cuban Revolution. However,

Gay men and transgeder women made homosexuality revolutionary. They were pioneers of

“political thought and action, not because it has become closely, all too closely, bound to the image, especially abroad, of the revolution itself” (Epps 223). Gay men and transgender women defied their ban by celebrating their identities within their communities. Although homosexuality is not inherently tied to the Cuban Revolution, gay men and transgender women’s struggles make them truly revolutionary. As the Cuban Revolution is the staple of Cuban culture, homosexuality, therefore, has been positioned as a sub culture.

Cuba fought against a capitalist enterprise. During the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban government blamed gay men for maintaining a capitalist economy by working as tour guides and continuing prostitution for tourists who came to Cuba seeking sexual escapades. On the other hand, Argentina was a country that feared communist “subversives.” The government also blamed gay men and transgender women as the perpetrators of communism and the government considered homosexuality, in itself, a revolutionary rejection of traditional values. It is clear that authoritarian governments have historically occurred in Latin America and have mandated a

12 subordination of the individual for the collective. Such collective identities dictated heterosexist socio-political ideologies and did not provide spaces for gay and transgender communities.

Authoritarian governments, specifically those with military regimes, considered sexually- dissident communities as anti-social elements and a threat to progress (Epps 225).

Attitudes towards homosexuals in Latin America, albeit improved, tend to critically explain the treatment of gay men and transgender women under totalitarian regimes. These attitudes are fueled by a culture of “dominant and institutionalized machismo” (Bejel 79).

Machismo, while not exclusive to Latin American and Caribbean cultures, despite the Spanish linguistic origins of the word, is the validation of the stereotypical heterosexist social construct of the qualities of virility, power, and strength exemplified by men. Conversely, qualities typically assigned to women, according to traditional gender roles, are taken to be signs of weakness. Although homosexuality in Cuba, specifically male homosexuality, is distinct in its relation to the Cuban Revolution; similar concepts of defining homosexuality are prescribed throughout Latin America. The enactment of gender roles is pivotal throughout Latin America when identifying sexual orientations. For example, Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña

(Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls), and their film adaptations investigate men’s gender roles, thus their sexual orientation, and the consequences of subverting them.

There are two major obstacles at the core of gay identity and community-building under these conditions: one being the family structure in Latin American and Latino households and the role of machismo. Both make impossible the successes in United States in achieving open gay communities (Murray 23). Younger generations were immediately impacted by authoritarian

13 governments by positioning themselves through their sexual and national roles and identities

(Adam 132). Such positioning defines “homosexual” in relation to the Cuban Revolution as performativity of appearance and public visibility, meaning that the way one engages in sex is an indicator of whether one is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. For example. posing as either macho, regardless of sexual orientation, is revolutionary. In Informe secreto sobra la revolución cubana (1976) Carlos Montaner explains that the government only looked for appearances over reality, stating that the revolution wanted strong and masculine men, with conservatively short hair, loose-fitting pants and a jacket that a normal heterosexual would wear while understanding that this posturing may hide the gay effeminate man (93). This is a disjunction of what one appears to be and what one might “actually” be. Therefore, social constructions of gender roles are fixed and become political constructs as well.

In Argentina, men who did not “invert the active, inserted role defined as correct for their biological sex… were not marked as anything other than men” (Salessi 327). Jorge Salessi explains that by this time, sexual object choice constituted a defined identity in the United States and Europe. However, in Argentina, gay sexual orientation was considered deviant. The medical community referred to gay men and transgender women as sexual inverts and passive pederasts

(327). They were deemed defective throughout Latin America by the medical community, which asserted that homosexuality did not conform to norms of ethics, religion, or respectability; their aims mandated a cure to such a common and abysmal sexual ailment. The government continued to polarize gay men and transgender women during the reign of Perón and during the military coup through 1976 to 1983. Perón considered gay men were seen as those who subverted gender

14 roles as a threat to moral values, thus leading to communist, subversive behavior (Kiss of the

Spider Woman Disc B).

In many Latin American countries, conflicts within their borders continue to exist. In these countries, what Benedict Anderson has termed “sub-nationalisms,” which arise wherein protagonists are able to maintain sexual and national identities through multiple communities.

According to Anderson, these “sub-nationalisms” can be understood as imagined political communities (6). I argue that exile communities, within and outside of traditional nations, are recognized as limitations by their boundaries and thereby “cut off from the surrounding nations”

(de Cillia 154). This construction of imagined communities allows gay and transgender communities the ability to strive towards and share national and sexual identities. The fictions, feature films, and documentaries I discuss give a multi-dimensional view of the ways in which

“sub-nationalisms” are related to political events that took place in both countries.

In chapter two, “Prison as Community in Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca and

Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña,” I analyze prison communities in the semi- biographical novel Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls] (1992) by Reinaldo Arenas and the fiction El beso de la mujer araña [Kiss of the Spider Woman](1976) by Manuel Puig. I will also discuss prison as community as seen in the feature film adaptations of the novels: Julian

Schnabel’s Before Night Falls and Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Nestor

Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal’s Cuban documentary Mauvaise Conduite [Improper

Conduct] and Andrés di Tella’s Argentine documentary Prohibido [Prohibited]will also be used as supplemental films to support my argument that the protagonists in the fictions and films strive towards national and sexual identities.

15 The imagined communities within El beso de la mujer araña and Antes que anochezca, and their film adaptations, vary greatly. For example, we see the gay and transgender community existing within the prison population at large in both novels and feature films, wherein this prison community constitutes a safe haven because the cells for gay men and transgender women are separate. For these reasons, Puig’s and Arenas’s novels serve as the primary focus throughout my dissertation. In El beso de la mujer araña, two prisoners, Luis Molina and Valentín Arregui, share a cell in a Buenos Aires Prison. It is estimated that the timeframe in which the story takes place is between September 9th through October 8th in 1975 (Kiss of the Spider Woman).

Molina, an effeminate gay window-dresser, is in jail for corruption of a minor, while Valentín is a political prisoner who is part of a revolutionary group trying to overthrow the government. The two men, despite their differences, form an intimate bond in their cell. During their time in the same prison cell, Molina recounts to Valentin the various films he has seen in order for them both to forget their incarceration. Toward the middle of the novel, it is determined that Molina is actually a spy that is sent to Valentín’s jail to befriend him and try to obtain information about his underground organization. Molina gets supplies and food from the outside for his cooperation with the officials with the hopes of keeping up appearances that his mother comes to visit him. It is through his general acts of kindness to Valentín that the two briefly become sexually involved.

For his cooperation with the wardens, Molina is released on parole. Before Molina leaves,

Valentín asks him to deliver a message to his revolutionary group. Molina is also followed by government agents, trying to find the location of the underground group. Molina dies in a shootout between the police and Valentín's group. At the end of the novel, the reader is left in

Valentín's stream of consciousness after a doctor gives him morphine after being violently

16 tortured. In the last scene of the novel, Valentín hallucinates that he is sailing away with his beloved bourgeois girlfriend Marta. Prison thus serves as a community. The characters in El beso de la mujer araña, Valentín and Molina, create a bond that transcends their own values and allows an understanding of each other’s differences. For example, Molina ends up losing his life for Valentín’s political agenda, and Valentín learns that homosexual desire and imagination can be both liberating and revolutionary, a belief that subverts communist ideals that view homosexuality as a representation of the bourgeoisie.

While this is a fictional account of historical events that took place in Argentina during the dictatorship (La Guerra Sucia), Arenas’s semi-autographical novel Antes que anochezca is cast as a memoir pertaining to his childhood in the fifties, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and his exile and eventual death in 1990. In the film, Arenas is born in Oriente in 1943 and raised by his single mother and her parents, who soon move the entire family to Holguín. After moving to

Havana in the sixties to continue his studies, Reinaldo begins to explore his ambitions, as well as his sexuality. After receiving an honorary mention in a writing contest, Arenas is offered the chance to publish his first work. Through his work and friendships with other openly gay men

(such as Pepe Malas and Tomas Diego), Arenas manages to find himself.

The political climate in Cuba becomes increasingly dangerous, and in the early seventies Arenas is arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting minors and for publishing abroad without official consent. In the next decade, Arenas is in and out of prison, attempting and failing to leave the country several times. However, Schnabel’s adaptation of Arenas’s novel is very different from the novel itself. In the novel, Arenas makes it understood that the gay and

17 transgender community is an isolated entity, not necessarily associating with the rest of the prisoners.

Arenas’s gay and transgender characters create their own community, which vehemently opposes Castro’s regime, within the larger community of the prison. However, they do so in cells that, although safe from the prison population at large, are often the most brutal cells in the prison. The guards continually harass the gay and transgender prisoners through physical and sexual abuse. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, a different type of community is created. The cell only has two inmates and, while the protagonists’ community is large outside of the prison, the community within the prison only consists of a political prisoner and a gay man accused of molesting a minor.

In the third chapter, “Community Is a Drag: How Drag Communities Struggle to

Identify with their Role in Achieving National and Sexual Identities,” I discuss the role of female impersonation and drag culture in Cuban and Argentine fiction and film. I build on Judith

Butler’s analysis in Gender Trouble (1990, 1999) of the performativity of drag, drag as a form of subversion, and drag as a means of deconstructing the stability of identities. I use Butler’s analysis as a foundation for analyzing gender subversion and performativity in El beso de la mujer araña and Antes que anochezca. I also analyze the elements of drag mentioned above in the feature films Kiss of the Spider Woman and Before Night Falls. I argue that, while the protagonists of both novels and feature films strive for both national and sexual identities, the protagonists in the documentary Mariposas en el andamio fully achieve both forms of identity.

This is the importance of including this documentary in this chapter.

18 In Chapter four, I discuss the role of exile in the novel Sirena Selena: Vestida de Pena

(2000) by Mayra Santos Febres and the documentaries Paris Is Burning (1990) by Jennie

Livingston and Wolfgang Busch’s How Do I Look (2006). All of these works take place outside many of the protagonists’ nations of origin. For example, both documentaries take place in New

York City, a city with strong exile communities, while the drag House of Xtravaganza includes many Latin American exiles. Sirena Selena, on the other hand, is largely set in the Dominican

Republic where no such exile community visibly exists and the dynamics of the community, positioned between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, are very distinct. With the exception of Selena, who goes for the dream of finding a wealthy man within the Dominican

Republic, the protagonists in all three works confront homophobia and exilic interrelations between their respective countries and the United States.

My analyses of how both fictional and historical communities struggling with these dual identities will complicate and broaden the existing discourses regarding exile. By examining these literary and cinematic portrayals of Latin American gay men and transgender women in terms of national/sexual identities, in the following chapters I will add to and reveal the variety of the possible imagined communities and their inner workings.

19 CHAPTER 2

PRISON AS COMMUNITY IN REINALDO ARENAS’S ANTES QUE ANOCHEZCA

AND MANUEL PUIG’S EL BESO DE LA MUJER ARAÑA

Being incarcerated for not following the nations’ codes of sexual conduct was an integral part of the gay and transgender community during the height of the Cuban Revolution, between

1959 and 1990 and Argentina’s La Guerra Sucia [The Dirty War] between 1976 and 1983. The experience of national prisons was central to the persecution of gay men and transgender women.

In Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976) and Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Antes que anochezca (1992), along with the film adaptations of these literary works, imprisoned gay men and transgender women attempted to forge a community that allowed dual forms of identity, both sexual and national. Also, documentary explorations such as Andres Di Tella’s Prohibido

(1997) and Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal’s Mauvaise Conduite (1984) provide historical and socio-political information about prisons and communities during dictatorships and/or authoritarian rule. They provide a contextual map of the experiences of many people who faced persecution during the dictatorships. However, the imaginative works of Puig and Arenas and their filmic adaptations go beyond the documentaries; these fictional works demonstrate communities in prison that allow protagonists to strive towards sexual and national identity through fulfilling their identity as gay men and transgender women. Furthermore, within their communities, the protagonists attempted to overcome institutionalized machismo and strove to develop and maintain relationships that formed a solidarity in their efforts towards national and sexual identities.

20 The authoritarian governments of Cuba and Argentina did not support gay men and transgender women. They used prisons to deny constitutional rights, often without trial. Along with artists and intellectuals, gay men and transgender women were officially charged with or convicted of crimes; their guilt was determined by the institutionalization of state-defined sexual orientation as unconstitutional. The rationale of prisons was to incarcerate people who supported ideologies similar to the sexual and social movements taking place in the United States and

Europe during the sixties and seventies. Those who did not follow the common goal of the nation were often imprisoned (Prohibido). These prisons included segregated spaces, torture chambers, and agricultural camps. For example, Cuba not only had institutionalized prisons that resembled those in the United States and Europe, but also camps where gay men and transgender women were incarcerated and forced to do labor as indentured servants. Ultimately, gay men and transgender women in Cuba and Argentina, under the military dictatorship, faced a death squad whose mission was to eradicate their presence. For example, along with imprisonment, at least

18 gay men and transgender women were killed between 1982 and 1983 in Argentina (Brown

121). Unfortunately, in the 1986 Nunca Más report that meticulously compiled statistical breakdowns by age, sex, and other demographics of the victims of La Guerra Sucia, the National

Commission of the Disappearances of Persons (CONADEP) neglected to categorize the estimated 400 gay men and transgender women who are thought to have disappeared.

While the research on the incarceration of gay men and transgender women in Cuba is extensive, the research on Argentina’s LGBT communities during the Dirty War is often

21 overlooked by studies on the oppression of the arts and journalism.4 Andres di Tella’s (1997) documentary Prohibido includes interviews with literary and cinematic authors, artists, and journalists who created works that challenged the authoritarian government. They attempted to forge national and sexual identities. After democracy was restored, the interviewees in Prohibido spoke out against the Argentine dictatorship, telling the story of Argentina's Dirty War from the perspective of the arts. Many gay men and transgender women were essential to the arts and subjected to extreme violence and harmful oppression. Jacobo Timerman is perhaps the best- known person interviewed in this documentary. Other persons interviewed in Prohibido are internationally known actress Norma Aleandro, best known for her role as Alicia Ibañez in La

Historia Oficial (The Official Story) (1985) and internationally known playwright Edwardo

Pavlovsky, best known for his play El Señor Galendez [Mr. Galendez](1973). Instead of explaining an experience in prison, both, Aleandro and Pavlovsky explain their experience as exiles in Spain in order to avoid being imprisoned. In order to stay in Spain, they had to denounce their Argentine citizenship for an allegiance to Spain. By doing so, they felt that they lost their Argentine identity. The military junta persecuted Timerma for being born a Jew. His history of imprisonment as a Jew is also representative of the persecution many faced due to their expression of sexual and gender identity in opposition to the rules of conduct that the Argentine militia mandated. Timerman is an important starting point of analysis due to his immense insight into Argentina’s marginal communities and Argentine identity.

4For information on feminist studies during the Argentine dictatorship, see Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1997).

22 In Preso sin nombre, celda sin número (Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a

Number) (1981), Timerman describes his experience of imprisonment. Timerman was accused of confronting the government as a journalist and an Argentine Jew and Zionist during the dictatorship. Timerman published his newspaper La Opinion with a centralist mentality that he hoped might allow him to escape the inevitable accusations of many journalists who were not directly writing for the government (Foster). He explains that the events that took place during

Juan Peron’s second term as president created a difficult time for many of its citizens (27). No matter what political affiliations or alliances, one had to maintain a low profile to avoid attention.

The disorganized chaos among the parties fighting against each other eventually led to the military coup of the early seventies (Schoijet 29). When the military dictatorship aimed to take action against subversives, Timerman understood it was only a matter of time before he would be imprisoned or deported. If he was openly critical of the military dictatorship, he would be arrested., yet if he declared the actions of the guerillas as being wrong, he would be kidnapped.

Ultimately, Timerman was arrested, even with his attempt to stay objective about La Guerra

Sucia.

Considering his time in prison, Timerman reflects on the nature of his treatment and that of the other prisoners, including gay men and transgender women. He clearly analyzes the prejudice that one faces when attempting to maintain a dual sense of identity. For him, his identity is a syncretism of Argentine citizenship with Jewish faith. Although, focusing on his experience as a Zionist, he emphasizes that the situations in Argentina for gay men and transgender women were comparatively unique due to the syncretism of their sexuality with

Argentine citizenship. The propensity for Jews, gay men, and transgender women to become

23 hated and abused became second nature. This is largely a result of machismo that is ingrained in many Latin American countries (Smith).

Machismo was also present during the Cuban Revolution, as represented in Armando and

Leal’s Mauvaise Conduite, where exiled artists are interviewed about the pressure they faced during the revolution and its aftermath. Reinaldo Arenas was one of the subjects interviewed.

Because his writing was smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad, Arenas was confined to El

Morro prison from 1974 to 1976, accused of being a counterrevolutionary. After he finished his term in prison, he was subjected to a rehabilitation program (Mauvaise Conduite). This meant having to disavow the life he lived before being imprisoned. Arenas had to swear he wouldn’t defy the system in any way (Mauvaise Conduite). During his time in prison, Arenas’s reputation abroad was at its peak., yet he was a non-person in Cuba. Arenas explains, “I didn’t have a typewriter or a room to write in. I lived like a tramp, sleeping in a different friend’s house each night. People who asked for me were told I didn’t exist. I became a character out of Orwell, a non-person” (Mauvaise Conduite).

The attempts of Argentines and Cubans to openly fulfill their identity as gay and/or transgender is one of the primary causes for the hatred and mistreatment of gay men and transgender women by governments who exercised oppression. Ultimately, during the Dirty War in Argentina and the Cuban Revolution, the military feared gay men and transgender women were feared by the military, as “monsters of change,” who challenged the institutionalized homophobia that existed during La Guerra Sucia and the Cuban Revolution with aspirations to open a space that allowed for sexual and national identities. Gay men and transgender women forged a response to the threat of the military rule. The Argentine military-run government

24 proclaimed itself the defender of traditional, Christian (Catholic) family values. Gay men and transgender women attempted to establish an inclusive environment, yet this proved difficult because their sexual identities did not share the countries’ values.

The situation of gay men and transgender women is further illuminated by the work of fiction writer Manuel Puig. Growing up in the thirties, Puig was drawn to contemporary classic

Hollywood films when there was a major growth in Hollywood studios. Puig’s love of

Hollywood films and his desire to be a film director exemplify his fascination with the themes of films in his novels. Also, these films eventually served as a platform for the major themes in his novels; they manifested Puig’s identification with the heroines from the films that are present in his novel.

Puig identified with power struggles that women had with men in the films of the thirties and early forties. Influenced by these strong gender roles between the feminine protagonist and machismo, Puig believed that power was a tool that defined Argentine men, stating that male sensitivity had no prestige: “Men had to be sure of themselves and if you were not pushing somebody around, you didn’t have your diploma. You needed somebody underneath to give you identity. I could see nothing but betrayal and degradation. It was a sickness in Argentina” (Kiss of the Spider Woman Disc B). The struggles between the strict gender roles that defined men in that era made it practically impossible to be part of the nation as a gay man or transgender woman. Puig explains that the betrayal and degradation is the inability for sexual and national identities to coexist (Kiss of the Spider Woman Disc B). Gay men and transgender women were those who were underneath the heterosexual men who identified themselves through machismo.

25 In 1973, Puig received death threats and risked imprisonment due to the sexuality represented in his novels such as La tración de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth)

(1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango) (1969) and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the

Spider Woman) (1976). He was also threatened due to being affiliated with Argentine politics as a Peronist, a supporter of Juan Perón, and an adherent of the nationalistic and progressive sociopolitical policies that Perón espoused. The novels La traición de Rita Hayworth and

Boquitas pintadas represented the most overt Peronist ideologies. Directly after Perón’s military coup in 1973, the Argentine militia, officially censored Puig’s first two novels (Kiss of the Spider

Woman Disc B). His last novel, written in Argentina, was also censored during General Videla’s military coup in 1976. As he was preparing to leave the country in 1973, Puig learned that the government had released several political detainees from prison. He immediately met with them to record their experiences including how they survived their torture in prison (Kiss of the Spider

Woman: Disc B). Puig incorporated notes from the political detainees that gave him the thematic platform for El beso de la mujer araña. El beso da la mujer araña is one of the most important endeavors in Latin American fiction dealing with political imprisonment and the representation of communities that fight for the community where gay men and transgender women, along with the revolution, share the same analytical and theoretical space.

The submissive woman became one of the central themes of El beso de la mujer araña.

Another theme was not solely about gay political prisoners and Marxist revolutionaries; it was also about machismo, macho domination, the oppression of a patriarchal authoritarian social climate, and the role of men who identified with submissive women. Another central subject was the community that the two protagonists created in their cell that allowed for a strong sense of

26 sexual and national identity. These topics are portrayed through his literary works. For example,

Puig defies machismo and the socially constructed formulas that the nation mandates for expectations of gender roles. The story manipulates static definitions of man and woman and subversive social constructs of gender that cause speculation due to not following traditional constructs. Hardships occur for those who do not act out his or her gender roles within appropriate societal norms. This is the case between the two protagonists: Valentín, a Marxist communist, and Molina, an idealist who identifies with the heroines of his films. Despite their opposing political and sexual values, they develop a common bond. Again, the story was not about Marxist revolutionaries or political prisoners, but social oppression and the distinctions between submission and macho domination.

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell is in an anonymous prison, similar to that of the infamous Carandiru detention center that existed in São Paulo, Brazil. Both prisons are inconspicuous spaces on the northern outskirts of the city centers. Driving by, one would not particularly know these were prisons unless familiar with the area.5 During the dictatorship, themes of imprisonment in the novel and film adaptation were similar to life outside the prison that represented imprisonment. This is due to the military regime’s tyrannical acts against gay men and transgender women that resembled prison outside of prison spaces. In the novel and film, physical social space and imprisonment are experienced in the protagonists’ gender roles.

In the film and the novel, the images of represented gender constructs are literary depictions of the documented aspects of gay and transgender imprisonment. For example, gay

5 This was my experience when attempting to find Carandiru prison in May 2016 while doing field research in São Paulo, Brazil.

27 men and transgender women were housed in spaces segregated from the rest of the inmates both in these representations and in reality. Such images are not only represented in Before Night

Falls (mentioned later in the chapter), but also in the Brazilian film adaptation of El beso de la mujer araña titled Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film based on Puig’s novel and directed by

Brazilian Hector Babenco. However, while segregated spaces exist in Before Night Falls and

Kiss of the Spider Woman, the space in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shared between a man who identifies with a woman and a political revolutionary. There is much more to discuss about the images of prison in Kiss of the Spider Woman than Before Night Falls because, while Kiss of the

Spider Woman takes place in a prison and is themed on the prison experience of the two protagonists, there is only a short segment in Antes que anochezca that represents Arenas’s time in prison. In fact, it can be argued that Arenas’s series of novels in his pentagonia and his epic poem El Central (1981) dealt with Arenas’s experience in prison, both literally and metaphorically. For example, in Antes que anochezca Arenas discusses the oppression of El

Central, claiming: "Unless you have lived through it, you could not possibly understand what it means to be in a Cuban sugar plantation under the noon sun, and to live in barracks like slaves"

(129).

Not only are gay men, transgender women, and men who identify as women socially imprisoned by an authoritarian, oppressive government, but they are also imprisoned without any clear understanding of their crime. For example, the reader has no idea of the crime the transgender women and gay men committed in prison except that they are gay/transgender. In

Kiss of the Spider Woman, the accusation is that Molina had sexual relations with a minor. He is also suspect of being arrested due to his sexuality when referred to as pervert by the Wardens.

28 This insinuates that Molina’s sexual behavior is regarded as unacceptable. We see this in Antes que anochezca as well. Reinaldo Arenas was arrested because of a false accusation of corrupting a minor at Guayana Beach. Arenas explains that he and a friend had sex with two minors in the mangroves. Upon being questioned by the authorities, the minors exclaimed, “These are a couple of queers who tried to fondle us; they touched our pricks… and that night we were under arrest… a case of a homosexual committing a crime” (155). Therefore, it is arguable that Molina and Arenas are arrested due to their sexual orientation rather than the sexual proposition of young men. These propositions are also major scenes in the film adaptations, yet while Arenas’s false accusation is clear, Molina’s accusation leaves the viewer wondering if he actually did try to seduce an underage hustler.

In addition to the differences in narrative between the novel and film, three major distinctions between Puig’s novel El beso de la mujer araña and Hector Babenco’s film adaptation Kiss of the Spider Woman challenge the authoritarian government’s ability to use machismo to oppress and prosecute gay men and transgender women. First, while the novel includes a range of narrated films, only one film is represented in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Molina recounts In Her True Glory, a fictional Nazi anti-Semitic film that Puig devised. In the film, Molina paces the room and reenacts the role of the heroines of the films he describes while

Valentín initially degrades Molina with his revolutionary posturing of machismo. In the novel, in addition to In Her True Glory, four other films are described. They are Panther Woman,6 The

Enchanted Cottage (1945), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and a film without a title about a passionate reporter from Mexico City who meets a former actress who he slowly realizes is

6 Panther Woman is actually titled Cat People (1942).

29 involved with the mafia. Each of these films is entwined with the evolving intimacy between

Molina and Valentín.

Second, the intimacy between Molina and Valentín results in sexual intercourse only once in the film. However, in the novel, they have ongoing intercourse after the first encounter.

The definitions of intimacy and homosexuality become complicated with the inclusion beyond their first sexual encounter. It becomes even more complicated when Valentín entertains the idea of allowing Molina to penetrate him, stating “Look… if it weren’t for the fact that it must hurt a hell of a lot, I’d tell you to do it to me” (244). This act of the dominant partner problematizes the

Latin American definitions of homosexuality that places the submissive partner as the homosexual. For Valentín to think of being submissive to Molina, these definitions of sexual orientation based on gender roles are subverted. This is especially evident when Valentín explains that being a man during sexual intercourse does not give him any special rights.

Lastly, in the film adaptation Kiss of the Spider Woman, after Molina tells the story of

Panther Woman, Valentín asks Molina: “Who do you identify with? Irena or the other one,”

Molina responds, “With Irena, what do you think? She’s the heroine, dummy. Always with the heroine” (25). In order to bond, both eventually find a way to understand the other’s uncompromising point of view. This is a bold construct to undertake within the opposition of machismo and femininity. In the recollections of the film narratives, the discussions after the recollections, and their eventual sexual acts, both inherently accept the belief that femininity is emotional, weak, and submissive. For example, Molina and Valentín argue:

MOLINA: Yes, It’s just the way I am, I’m easily hurt by some things. And I cooked this dinner, with my own provisions, and worst of all, mad as I am about avocados I gave you half, when I

30 could have easily have had the other half for myself tomorrow. And for what?... For you to throw it right back in my face about how I’m teaching you bad habits.

VALENTIN: But don’t act like that, you’re oversensitive…

MOLINA: So what am I supposed to do about it? That’s how I am, very sentimental.

VALENTIN: I’ll say. It sounds like a…

MOLINA: What are your stopping for?

VALENTIN: Nothing.

MOLINA: Say it, I know what you were going to say Valentín.

VALENTIN: Don’t be silly.

MOLINA: Say it, like a woman, that’s what you were going to say.

VALENTIN: Yes.

MOLINA: And what’s so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can’t be sensitive too, if he’s got a mind to?

VALENTIN: I don’t know, sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man’s way. (28-29)

In order for Molina to maintain a sense of national identity, it is imperative for him to fight for the philosophical freedom that is denied for those who did not confirm to the authoritarian government of Juan Perón.

On one side, Molina believes that a world run by a feminine force would not be so violent. This is represented through a question Valentín has for Molina as stated:

VALENTIN: Only one question, which intrigues me a little.

MOLINA: What?

VALENTIN: You won’t get annoyed?

31 MOLINA: Depends.

VALENTIN: I’d be interested to know. And afterwards you ask me if you want.

MOLINA: Let’s have it then.

VALENTIN: Who do you identify with? Irena or the other one?

MOLINA: With Irena, what do you think? She’s the heroine, dummy, Always the

heroine. (25)

At this point of the novel, the reader sees a crossover between Molina and Valentín. Molina, however, subverts this construction of submission by ending up the revolutionary when, like his heroine, he is killed while attempting to send a message that would undermine the oppressive government. The unfolding of this plot brings about the sense of community that Molina and

Valentín develop throughout both the novel and the film. Through their continual dialogue and discussion of the films, they forge a deeper understanding of the other. When Molina finds out that he is leaving the prison on parole, he explains:

MOLINA: Valentín, you and my mom are the two people that I’ve loved in the world.

VALENTIN: …

MOLINA: And you, are you really going to remember me?

I learned a lot from you, Molina…

MOLINA: You’re crazy, I’m just a dope.

And I want you to go away happy, and have good memories of me, like I have of you.

MOLINA: And what it is you’re supposed to have learned from me?

VALENTIN: It’s kind of hard to explain. But you’ve made me think about so many

things, of that you can be sure…

32 MOLINA: I promise you one thing, Valentín…that whenever I remember you, it will

always be with happiness, like you taught me.

VALENTIN: And promise me something else…that you’re going to make them respect

you, that you’re not going to allow anyone to treat you badly, or exploit you. Because no

one has the right to exploit anyone. Forgive me if I’m repeating this to you, because the

last time I said it, you didn’t like it.

MOLINA: …

Molina, promise me you won’t let anybody push you around.

MOLINA: I promise you. (261)

Understanding both sides, machismo and femininity, Molina and Valentín allow for a tolerant and peaceful existence despite their social paradigm.

In Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña and Babenco’s film adaptation, the community develops between a revolutionary and an apolitical transgender woman. For example, Valentín gives Molina advice on what he could do after being released from prison:

VALENTIN: …When you’re out of here, you’ll be free, you’ll be with people. If you

want, you can even join up with some kind of political group.

MOLINA: That’s ridiculous and you know it; they’d never trust some faggot.

VALENTIN: But I can tell you who to go see…

MOLINA: Not on your life, never, you hear? Never, never tell me anything about your

comrades.

VALENTIN: Why? Who would even figure you’d go to see any of them?

33 MOLINA: No, I could be interrogated or something, and as long as I don’t know

anything I can’t tell anything.

VALENTIN: Anyway, there’s a lot of different types of groups for political action. And

if you find one that appeals to you, join it, even if it’s a group that just does a lot of

talking.

MOLINA: I don’t know anything about that stuff…

And don’t you have any close friends?... good friends?

MOLINA: Oh, I have silly girlfriends like myself, but just in passing, good for a laugh

once in a while, and that’s all. But as soon as we start getting a little dramatic… then we

can’t stand the sight of each other. Because… you see yourself in the other ones like so

many mirrors and then you start running for your life.

Things could change for you once you’re outside. (215).

Molina ends up losing his life for Valentín’s political agenda, and Valentín learns that homosexual desire and imagination can be both liberating and revolutionary. Through this bond, they are able to forge an imagined community in the prison cell, understanding what it is for a man to identify as a woman and still be a revolutionary. This is portrayed in the last conversation between Valentín and Molina:

MOLINA: Valentín…

VALENTIN: Tell me, what is it?

MOLINA: You have to give me all the information… for your friends…

If you want.

MOLINA: You have to tell me everything I have to do.

34 VALENTIN: -Valentín – Okay.

MOLINA: So I can learn it all by heart… But one thing, and this is very, very

important… Valentín, are you sure they won’t interrogate me before I leave?

VALENTIN: I’m sure.

MOLINA: Then I’ll do whatever you tell me. (263)

This portrayal of the relationship between a transgender woman and a rebel challenges the communist ideals. The experiences of Puig’s works are often considered as autobiographical because of his experiences of ostracism from the Perón presidency. Puig identifies with the horione of all of his novels.

The fictional writings by Reinaldo Arenas are also autobiographical because they represent his own experiences within the protagonists in his stories. One of the most notable literary works that challenged the Cuban government, prior to the lessening of restrictions towards gay authors, is Arenas’s Antes que Anochezca. This was one of Arenas’s last works prior to his death. It is an autobiographical view of his life, full of cynicism against Fidel Castro.

However, the novel is not purely about the political aspects of prison as is Puig’s novel. Arenas’s life in prison is a minor part of his autobiography. Arena’s literary work is his personal account of the government’s resistance towards homosexuality and transgender identities during the

Cuban revolution.

Arenas begins his autobiography/novel with the last chapter of his life. He also ends the book with a letter to others who were imprisoned due to being in the margins rather than part of the nation. This is a letter to his friends, many who shared anti-Castro sentiments. Antes que anocheza begins:

Dear friends;

Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me

not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my

life. During the past few years, even though I felt very ill, I have been able to finish my

literary work, to which I have devoted almost thirty years. You are the heirs of my

terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free. I am satisfied to have

contributed, though in a very small way, to the triumph of this freedom. I end my life

voluntarily because I cannot continue working. Persons near me are in no way

responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro.

The sufferings in exile, the pains of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and

the diseases contracted in exile would probably never have happened if I had been able to

enjoy freedom in my country.

I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as the Island to continue

fighting for freedom. I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued

struggle and of hope.

Cuba will be free, I already am.

Arenas explains that the letter is written for those who were not allowed the chance to maintain as sense of sexual and national identity in a country that controlled their own destiny. Arenas writes the letter as his last vendetta against Fidel Castro. Arenas ultimately blames Castro for his full blown AIDS that he claims he would not have had if he were not forced into exile to avoid further prison sentences. He blames his sense of sexual identity on conditions created by Castro.

36 Despite Arenas’s short life and the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work. For example, he wrote significant short stories and poetic efforts such as Arturo: La estrella más brillante (The Brightest Star) (2001) and El Central (The

Central) (1981) both that illustrate Arenas’s life in a Unidad Militar de Ayuda a la Producción

UMAP[Military Unit to Aid Production] camp. Through these two works, Arenas wanted to forge a community that allows for sexual and identity. Arturo, La estrella más brillante places the protagonist in the margins within his gay peers in one of the UMAP camps. Arturo, La estrella más brillante is probably Arenas’s most autobiographical story and depicts Arena’s experience working in a sugar-cane field to rehabilitate his anti-revolutionary accusations. This is a poetic story, similar to his personal accounts of imprisonment in Antes que anochezca. It could be argued that the protagonist Arturo is Arenas himself.

After his mother attempted to shoot Arturo when she found a lover in his bedroom,

Arturo ran away from home and was eventually detained by the military and sent to a UMAP camp. Rather than joining the other gay men and transgender women in the group, Arturo avoided them with sharp disapproval. First, he criticized them for their mannerisms: “them, with their endless, stupid conversations, with their exaggerated, effeminate, affected, artificial, gross, grotesque gesturings, and posturings, pulling everything down to their own level…cheapening and corrupting everything, even the authentic rage of the man who suffers terror” (52). He continued to critique them for their mannerisms, focusing on “shrill laughter, the rhythmic fluttering of their batted eyelashes, a hand held limp like a broken wing, the vulgar parody of some classical dance” (52). Last, he broke away from their community by rejecting “them, painting their fades with whatever came to hand, weaving wigs from strips of palm fronds and

37 agave fibers, sewing miniskirts out of burlap sacks sneaked from the guarded storerooms” (53).

Even when joining them at times, Arturo’s only choice he gave himself was to isolate himself and eventually try to escape. He felt that, even though they acted superior through their communal embraces, he was actually the one who acted superior to the community of gay men and transgender women prisoners inside the camp. He disengaged himself from the community of prisoners who were attempting lift themselves out of the margins of sexual and national identity by eventually giving sexual favors to the soldiers. This is documented as:

[T]he same soldier who watched him chopping all day would make that same gesture, and the two of them would go out into the cane field, where Arturo would painstakingly dedicate himself to producing pleasure, yet even when he felt the violence and the delight of that body spending itself on his body, in his memory the vine in the breezeway, the shimmering colors of flowers in the strong evening sun, and even their perfume, the sweet scent of millions of flowers creeping up over the roof of the house, those pictures refused to be clouded over with this now. (56)

This repetition of assault from the soldiers is in exchange for moments from working in the cane fields. Arenas often explains such sexual favors in his works of literature among many of the prisoners who are placed in their own quarters. However, not only are they removed from their community, but they are also subject to a vulnerable bareness. This also allows the soldiers power and weakens the gay and transgender community’s ability to make every effort towards a space for sexual and national identity.

38 After Arenas finished his eighteen month sentence in El Morro prison in 1974,7 he was also confined to a UMAP camp prior to writing his autobiography. Arenas was first accused of breaching Article 72 that forbids conduct that is in contradiction with norms of socialist morality.

In other words, Article 72 warrants any crime the government deems fit to incarcerate can be conducted without a clear sense of the crime (Gay and Lesbian Themes73). In his article “Life

Under Castro,” Richard Cohen explains that Arenas was arrested on accusations of being a social misfit in the parlance of the regime (A27). First, Arenas was gay. Second, he was a writer who insisted on having his works published. Similar to Molina, Arenas was singled out by the regime by being accused of molesting a child. After further investigation by the authorities, Arenas was also guilty of smuggling and publishing his censored literature abroad.

In 1965, he won the National Literary Award for the novel, Celestino antes del alba

(Singing from the Well). His Pentagonia is a set of five novels that comprise a secret history of post-revolutionary Cuba. It includes Celestino antes del alba, Arenas’s only novel published in

Cuba. The novel recounts the history of a young child, arguably Arenas since it follows his upbringing as illustrated in Antes que anochezca, growing up in the province of Oriente.

Celestino antes del alba was about a child who was ostracized by his family because of his literary talents (he claimed that he would write on trees and in retaliation his grandfather denuded the forest).

In his autobiography, interviews, and in some of his fiction, Arenas draws explicit connections between his own life experience and the identities and fates of his protagonists.

7 Due to international outrage over the sub-human conditions in El Morro prison vocalized by the intellectual community, the prison was closed in 1979.

39 Important aspects of oppression and metaphorical forms of imprisonment are evident, and as critics such as Francisco Soto have pointed out, the child narrator in Celesino antes del alba,

Fortunato of El palacio de las blanquisimas mofetas (Palace of the White Skunks) (1984), Hector of Otra vez el mar [Farewell to the Sea] (1982), The triply named "Gabriel/Reinaldo/Gloomy

Skunk" character in El color del verano [The Color of Summer] (1982) and the a repressed homosexual in El Asalto [The Assault] appear to live progressive stages of a continuous life story that is linked to Arenas's own experiences.8 As mentioned earlier, Arenas wrote El Central

8 Arenas’s second novel, El palacio de las blanquisimas mofetas focuses on an adolescent, Fortunato, who was raised in a house of frustrated aunts, a primal grandmother and an emasculated grandfather. The novel is set during the 1959 Cuban Revolution and follows the main character as he clumsily joins the rebels. The third novel, Otra vez el Mar, tells the story of a married couple on a six-day vacation on the Cuban coast. The first half is a prosaic stream-of- consciousness narrative of the troubled wife demonstrating her love and inability to understand her husband, Hector. The latter half of the novel is composed of six poetic cantos sung in silence to the sea by Hector, a poet who is no longer allowed to write and who has been compelled to enter into a sham marriage to avoid the charge of homosexuality. It is a story of a marriage of two people who, while sharing genuine affection, are so different and incompatible that they not only cannot communicate, they fail to speak in the same form, one in prose and the other in poetry. In the fourth novel, El color del verano, Arenas appears as three characters: Gabriel, the dutiful “straight” son; Reinaldo, the expatriate author; and Skunk in a Funk, the "picaro" – faggot – who seeks merely to live and work as an artist in Castro’s Cuba while engaging in anonymous sex. The novel is set during a Carnival celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and breaks many, if not all of the norms of narrative story telling (the “Foreword” appears on page 252). In that foreword, Arenas states that the novel is a "grotesque and satirical (and therefore realistic) portrait of an aging tyranny and the tyrant himself." He adds that the novel “is not a linear work, but circular, and therefore cyclonic, with a vortex or eye – the Carnival – towards which all vectors whirl." The fifth novel, El Asalto (The Assault) (1982) is a dark and Kafkaesque vision of a future Cuba, where homosexuality is punishable by death, told by a repressed homosexual turned government agent for the "Bureau of Counter Whispering" as he searches to destroy all whisperers, homosexuals, dissidents, and most particularly his own mother.

40 (1981), a poem depicting the working conditions in a sugar-cane plantation. This poem directly challenges the inability to maintain a sexual and national identity. Instead of following the rules of conduct in the prison, the gay and transgender inmates create a bond through pageantry and festive parties. They use household goods to decorate themselves and their ward during these festivities. Instead of partaking in the gay and transgender existence in the prison, Arenas − and his protagonists − are innocent onlookers. These elements are represented and incorporated into

Schnabel’s film adaptation. In the commentary for the director’s cut of the film Before Night

Falls, Schnabel explains that this scene was created from Reinaldo Arenas’s experience portrayed in El Central, yet this innocence was in direct contrast to the sexual escapades that he describes in Antes que anochezca,

After serving his time in prison, Arenas returned to his residence to get his hidden manuscripts that the Cuban government censored.; however, he was not able to enter his apartment to get them. He later realized that the military junta confiscated his manuscripts.

When Arenas got out of prison, his reputation abroad was at its peak (Mauvaise Conduite). The literary works that he smuggled to France were translated into multiple languages. Yet he had no identity in Cuba. Previously, Arenas helped Castro in the guerilla war because he believed

Castro’s platforms, which addressed the concerns of the majority of Cubans. Arenas explains that official homophobia was illogical in the sixties. He states in Antes que anochezca:

There was never more fucking going on than in those years, the decades of the sixties which was precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecution started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the ‘new man’ was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted. (133)

41 Shortly after, many intellectuals complained about the brutality of the work once performed by slaves and, after slavery was abolished, by indentured servants. The name UMAP was erased from the camps in 1968 to avoid continued external pressure.

Following the closing of the UMAP camps, political prisoners and dissidents of the revolution in Cuba were held in other prisons. There were three prisons in Havana. Arenas explains in Antes que anochezca that it was too shocking for many Cubans and tourists that one of Havana’s most sordid prisons was in Havana, at the entrance of the port, where all the ships passed by, explaining that Morro Castle “is a dank place, sitting atop a promontory…The building is of medieval construction, with a drawbridge that we had to cross to get over. We walked through a long, dark tunnel, then the portcullis, and finally entered the prison cell” (177).

He claims that it was almost like a tourist attraction (Mauvaise Conduite). Another prison he names is La Cabaña was built between the 16th and 17th century. Arenas explains that it is one of the most sinister political prisons in Cuba, known for shooting people…When anyone was sent to La Cabaña, we felt he felt that he would never see them again (Mauvaise Conduite). The last prison he names is Combinado del Este.

When Arenas was imprisoned in El Morro between 1974 and 1976, he was assigned to

Ward 7. This was the ward for prisoners who were incarcerated for various crimes. For example,

Arenas’s conviction was due to ideological deviation and publishing his censored manuscripts without official consent. Later, Arenas was placed in the ward of gay men and transgender women. Arenas describes the strong knit gay and transgender community that defied the institutionalized homophobia in the prison:

42 They had not lost their sense of humor. With their own sheets they made skirts and with

shoe wax obtained from relatives, they shadowed their eyes; they even used lime from

the wall whitewash as makeup. Sometimes when they were allowed on the roof of El

Morro to get a bit of sun, they made it into a real show. The sun was a rationed privilege

for prisoners; we would be taken out for about an hour once or twice a month. The fairies

attended as if it were one of the most extraordinary events of their lives, which it almost

was… The fairies would dress up for this occasion in the most unusual ways and wear

wigs out of rope, which they obtained from God knows how. They wore makeup and

high heels fashioned from pieces of wood, which they called clogs. To be sure, they no

longer had anything to lose; maybe they never had anything to lose and therefore couldn’t

afford the luxury of being true to their nature, to act queer, to make jokes, and even to

express admiration for a soldier. (122)

They lived in the basement of the prison, which was dark, wet, and below sea level. He also deemed the gay community as having the strongest connection with each other so that they could survive the harsh homophobic and sexually solicitous injustices they endured from the guard and their fellow inmates. Even though Arenas criticizes their posturing, he understood that the gay men and transgender women were the tightest knit and most gregarious group in the prison.

The military accused men for being gay by their gender expressions that they considered properly belonging to women. One of the reasons Arenas was not placed in the ward of gay men and transgender women could have been that he, like Arturo in his short story, did not particularly affiliate with nor emulate “feminine” qualities. After his release, Arenas remained respectful of the gay and transgender community in El Morro because they survived in such

43 squalor. Even though Arenas explained that they did not have the ability to be true to their nature, the festivities were the very act that forged the imagined community that allowed them to celebrate their sexual and national identity. They took every act of repression and transformed into a reason to celebrate. As Arenas explains: “Sometimes when they were allowed on the roof of El Morro to get a bit of sun, they made it into a real show. The sun was rationed privilege for prisoners; we would be taken out for about an hour once or twice a month. The fairies attended as if it were the most extraordinary events of their lives” (Antes que anochezca 181). Also, according to Arenas, any author who was not working for the good cause of the Cuban

Revolution was subject to persecution. The authoritarian governments did not view gay men and transgender women as fit for “the cause.” For example, Arenas claims: “Gays were not treated like human beings; they were treated like beasts” (182).

The Cuban Revolution and La Guerra Sucia did not allow gay men and transgender women the opportunity to develop a solidified community and struggle for a sexual and national identity in these literary and cinematic works. In conclusion, these accounts of prison experiences, although historically and politically accurate, comprise only a few of the examples of gay men and transgender women’s experiences in static historical eras of oppression. This analysis does not constitute an entire socio-historical and political climate of Argentina and Cuba or, in fact, Latin America and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean. While the documentaries provided factual documentation of many gay and transgender men’s experiences, the fictional literary works of Puig and Arenas dramatize the key struggle to create imagined communities that allowed for sexual and national identity. The common themes and methods of both authors’ literary works are similar even though the protagonists’ experiences in Arenas’s novels and their

44 film adaptations are dissimilar to those of Puig’s protagonists. For instance, Arenas positions his protagonist as an isolated oppositional force against Castro. He consistently links his individual narrated life to the historical experience of a generation of Cubans as shown in his letter. Arenas desired a community that would have allowed him a strong sense of sexual and national identity, but he proclaimed his hatred of Castro for stripping him of both identities. On the other hand,

Puig’s literary works place the protagonists in a battle to overcome oppressive sociopolitical constructs despite their differences. Developing a common bond between his protagonists allowed Manuel Puig to overcome his own obstacles of exile and create a prison community that not only maintained sexual identity, but also an attempt to forge themselves as an integral part of the nation. This was not the case for Arenas and his protagonists.

45 CHAPTER 3

COMMUNITY IS A DRAG:

HOW DRAG COMMUNITIES STRUGGLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THEIR ROLE IN

ACHIEVING NATIONAL AND SEXUAL IDENTITIES

Machismo, strongly practiced in Latin American society, places emphasis on expectations of strict gender roles, leaving no space for gender ambiguity. Anything between the roles that does not apply to what constitutes a “man” and a “woman” causes speculation and, often times, hardships for those who do not act out his or her gender role appropriately. Within such confines of appropriate gender roles, gay and transgender people have been oppressed, rejected, imprisoned, and sometimes killed.9 Drag, as a form of play with such gender norms, subverts the political tensions present in Cuba and Argentina. Transgender women’s voice is given to drag communities and how these communities are represented in Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña and Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca. I am also examining the film adaptations of

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by Hector Babenco and Before Night Falls (2000), directed by Julian Schnabel. The cinematic adaptations arise from less culturally and politically immediate contexts than the literary works; they were not produced within the cultures portrayed in the films and they sought a largely international film audience. However, the film adaptations also allow for a greater depth of representations regarding drag communities and the larger communities that are not offered in the literary works. The documentary film Mariposas en el

9 The act of imprisonment is discussed in Chapter 4.

46 andamio [Butterflies on the Scaffold] (1996), directed by Luis Felipe Bernal and Margaret Gilpin demonstrates the problems drag communities face under authoritarian governments.

The first attempt to forge a space for sexual and national identity is through art forms such as pageantry and the act of the diva. Drag communities often play the role of diva through modern definitions of the opera soprano. In the communities represented in literature and film, the drag queens lip-sync and wear clothing made out of any raw materials they can find.10

The attempts to maintain these dual forms of identity are through the artistic customs of drag performances, the spaces often forged by drag communities, and the political ramifications and response to communities that celebrated the pageantry of drag. Drag communities operate in distinct ways from gay communities. Drag communities (in the above literary works, film adaptations, and docuentary) attempt to forge a space for gay and national identities despite the

Argentine and Cuban authoritarian governments’ attempt to eradicate men who represented physical and mental traits that did not follow the gender norms followed by machismo and the larger society as whole.

Born in General Villegas, Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig grew up with aspirations to be a film director. His love of Hollywood films eventually served as themes of film in his writing.

However, one of the most important personal endeavors in Latin American literature was Puig’s dealings with political exile. Representations of community as well as homosexual identity and the Argentine Revolution prior to the 1976 La Guerra Sucia was Puig's primary focus. Both

10 In fact, as we will see in all the literary, cinematic, and documentary works, they are extremely creative in their use of horse manes for eyelashes, black plastic bags and sheets for dresses, wooden blocks for clogs, and wigs made out of human hair, for example.

47 shared the same analytical and theoretical space. This focus led to the creation of El beso de la mujer araña. David Foster states that “El beso de la mujer araña is Puig’s most important legacy to the development of gay subjectivity in contemporary Latin American fiction” (342). Foster continues by explaining that Puig proposed a new sexual order, undermining the homosexual’s role in a “utopian vision of the world without sexual barriers and oppressive gender fictions”

(324).

Manuel Puig’s novel is primarily a dialogue between Molina and his cell partner

Valentín. There is nothing in the scene that is described visually; however, Babenco transposes the story with images that try to visually convey the novel’s ideas. In the novel, for example, there are seven narrative reproductions that the two prisoners share to pass the time in their cells.

Six of the narratives are Molina’s and one is Valentín’s. The prisoner’s recitation of the films were in lieu of more direct dialogue and the recollections of the primary events. The movies that

Molina provided set the tone for the entire novel because the novel is altogether cinematic. The novel’s content and style appeal to the reader’s visual perception. There are no author’s digressions or abstract concepts that are dispersed to the reader’s visual perception (Burke 110).

Furthermore, there are no digressions of abstract concepts, which often intersperse these novel’s texts. Puig and Arenas’s main concern is what people do and say; when they reveal what they think, it is through visual, cinematic images rather than words. On the other hand, in the film adaptation, the layers of political resistance are complicated. For example, the viewer is able to see both sides of the spectrum of gender roles through Luis Molina and Valentín Aregui. These complications are partly due to the noble and caring nature of the fascists within the film,

48 especially Lieutenant Werner, the Nazi German lieutenant that the heroine Leni falls in love with.

In the beginning scene of the film adaptation Kiss of the Spider Woman, the viewer only hears Molina’s voice narrating the plot of a movie that he is sharing with Valentín. This first difference between the novel and the film is that, in the novel, Molina begins with a dialogue about the protagonist Irene Dubrovna Reed from “Panther Woman.”11 In the beginning of the novel, Molina states; “Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others” (El beso 3). This sentence is also stated at the beginning of the film. In the novel, Molina continues to describe the protagonist from Cat People. However, in the film, he continues by describing Leni, the protagonist from In Her True Glory, a film Puig devised in order to develop a submissive diva that he envisioned. Puig explains that the Nazi film was invented because he could not find any Nazi films that served his purpose or portrayed a female character of his liking. 12 The invented storyline contains small pieces of Nazi propaganda films and Puig created his own female characters, including Leni La Maison, a French cabaret torch singer who sings Quand la amor se moque de moi, a campy French version of From This the

World Will Not End. Leni is also a resistance spy who is a Nazi collaborator and Molina’s favorite character. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina describes Leni:

She seems all wrapped up in herself, lost in a world deep inside her; but surrounded by a world of luxury, all quilted in satin, all in chiffon drapes. From her window, you can see the Eiffel

Tower. Suddenly, the maid brings over a gift wrapped box from an admirer. She’s a cabaret star

11 “Panther Woman” is titled differently than the actual film. The actual film is Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur. 12 This information is found on Disc B of the DVD of Kiss of the Spider Woman (2000).

49 of the highest rank. She opens the box. It’s a diamond bracelet. But she sends it back. Men are really at her feet. She’s known a few, but not the one she’s been waiting for all her life: a real man. Her maid has prepared her a foam bath. The star takes out a towel and wraps it around her hair, like a turban. Her fingernails painted a rosy peach. She unfastens her taffeta nightgown and lets it slide smoothly down her thighs and to the tile floor. Her skin glistens. Her petite ankles slip into the perfumed water, then her sensuous legs until her whole body is caressed in foam.

But she’s a ravishing woman, you know what I mean? The most ravishing woman in the world.

In the meantime, while Molina describes Leni, the camera pans across the prison cell. As the novel does not go into detail about the cell, the film objectively visualizes a grim cell. However, the cell also has images of pop art and pictures of movie actresses like Greta Garbo and Rita

Hayworth. When Molina later asks what Valentín thinks of the film, he responds; “it passes the time. It doesn’t help any great cause.” Here is the first main observation about the protagonists.

Even though the metaphor of the novel and film is imprisonment due to Argentina’s violent culture and authoritarian government, Puig asserts the construct of the machismo based on power dynamics that are men over women and dictatorship over state. However, kitsch art, such as the films described by Molina, passes the time and eases the pain he and Valentín are suffering.

Throughout the film, there are references to Molina’s identification with the “diva.” Valentín’s transgender friend also performs Quand l’amore se moque de moi [When Love Makes Fun of

Me] in a gay trashy bar while popping the balloons attached to her as a dress. This theme of the

B-rated drag show also represents a drag show that unsuccessfully attempts to represent an art form while also forging a space for Molina when released from prison.

50 The second attempt to forge a space for sexual and national identity is through creating spaces, often forged. As mentioned earlier, in El beso de la mujer araña, Puig focuses on two men in prison who, at first, appear to have no mutual ideologies., yet they share the same prison cell some time during the political dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Luis

Molina is a homosexual who has been accused of sexually molesting a minor. Molina is, at first, viewed as superficial in his dramatic reenactments of Hollywood B films, one that is a Nazi propaganda film. His cellmate, Valentín Arregui, is a political activist who is part of an underground revolution against the dictatorship. At first, Valentín is presented as a radical extremist who plays the role of a martyr while spouting Marxist slogans. Although different in their political and sexual ideologies, due to their close quarters, Molina and Valentín have little to do except speak to each other. In El beso de la mujer araña, narrative defines homosexuality in Latin American terms, involving machismo, which is important when analyzing Molina’s prison sentence, as well as discussing the relationship between Molina and Valentín.

It could be argued that Molina’s prison sentence is fallacious, just like Reinaldo Arena’s sentence. Both are sentenced for corrupting a minor; however, both allegations are questionable.

There is no real evidence that they actually molested minors. Also, looking at the narrative footnotes in El beso de la mujer araña, that are mostly articles concerning Freudian analysis, it is arguable that pederast is actually categorized as a gay man. The accusation could simply be that

Puig and Arenas are imprisoned for being gay. Due to their influence on youths, they are accused of corrupting a minor. The reader automatically envisions the feminine attributes of Molina, playing the heroine of the movie, dressing the role, and acting out the parts of the Hollywood films as he reenacts the story in detail to Valentín. The characteristics of a Latin American value

51 system on homosexuality presents effeminate Molina with attributes of physical and mental weakness. These stereotypical weaknesses place Molina in a space next to Valentín. Molina is bribed with early parole to get information about Valentín and his organized movement to overthrow the government. There is a multi-dimensional identity between Molina and Valentín in El beso de la mujer araña, which does not appear in Antes que Anochezca. There is never a space created for Arenas’s sexual identification within the Cuban Revolution.

Within the examined literature and film, sexual and national identities are largely maintained through the understanding of the harmony of each, despite traditional norms of machismo that pose a struggle for sexual and national identities to coexist. The novels and films are not pinned down by being transgendered, gay, or political. It is a collaboration of all of these categories of identity. This collaboration is a formula for national identity within the margins of sex and politics. These literature and films are based on human experience and the political ramifications, which are addressed when subculture drag communities pose a threat to societal norms due to a homophobic nation instigated by oppressive politics. These literary works and film adaptations show how the protagonists negotiate being part of the nation that is respectful towards obtaining these dual forms of identity.

Drag communities challenged societal norms in Argentina and Cuba whose governments historically displayed the importance of masculinity. Also, masculinity was largely used to define sexual orientation. Drag also delineated how masculinity was used as an integral component towards the government’s struggle towards social, political, and economic progress.

Drag communities often defied patriarchal policies that characterized one’s contribution towards

52 such progress. The identification of gender roles by transgender women within these drag communites ndermined the social constructs that establish what it means to be man or woman.

In El beso de la mujer araña, Puig created Leni to represent the plight of the submissive woman. As a subservient woman, she could only gain control by being manipulative. Molina plays the role of the submissive woman as well. He manipulates the wardens for groceries while they are trying to get him to gather information on Valentín. The wardens’ goal was for Molina to be the seducer and entrap Valentín in his web. Then, Molina’s role is to report the information he gathers to the wardens so that they can undermine Valentín’s attempts to overthrow the authoritarian regime. This is a direct reference to the title of the novel and film. In “Odd

Coupling: A Posthumous View,” Jonathan Tittler explains that Molina set out to spin his yarn by drawing Valentín into the stories of his favorite movies. The wardens promise to let Molina out on early parole if he successfully provide them with all the names, contact information, and other pertinent information to enable them to defeat Valentín’s underground movement. Each narration that Molina provides is to weaken Valentín’s resistance to provide information. However,

Molina’s attempts to entrap Valentín were unsuccessful because he falls in love with him. Like

Leni, he attempts to manipulate the wardens by holding back any information Valentín provides

“more because of his passion toward Valentín than a conversion to the revolution” (Burke 110).

Later in the novel, Valentín becomes frustrated with Molina as he describes himself as sentimental. Valentín says that “it sounds like a…” then he stops himself. Molina asks “What are stopping for?... Say it. I know what you were going to say, Valentín… Say it, like a woman, that’s what you were going to say” (Puig 33-34). While Valentín’s macho image in the novel is not as powerful as in the film adaptation, he belittles Molina for his softness. He is so sensitive to

53 Molina’s questioning of Valentín’s revolutionary cause that does not allow him to be fully human. As a result, their attempt to share sexual and national identity is unsuccessful.

As the novel progresses, Valentín and Molina strive to share each other’s sexual and political views. This is especially apparent in Valentín’s attempt to accept Molina’s sexual orientation and his connection with the heroines in the films he narrates. At first, Valentín was unable to understand Molina’s identification with women. Later, Valentín begins to understand

Molina’s desire to be a caregiver. Molina also begins to understand Valentín’s revolutionary ideologies, which opens Valentín up to Molina through a sexual encounter. This scene is complicated because Valentín never identifies with being homosexual. Valentín initially believed that definitions of gay sexual orientation was in unison with men portray the roles of women.

The man, by definitions portrayed in the novel, is not considered gay. Valentín is the bugarrón

(the role of the man/the penetrator). Ultimately, the kiss between Molina and Valentín parallels the “kiss” of the spider woman. Instead of Molina’s attempts to engulf Valentín in order to pass on information to the wardens for early parole, he decides to provide secret information to

Valentín’s clandestine group. This is the hope by Molina to add national identity to his already formed sexual identity.

In the novel, Puig also includes a long series of footnotes on the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality. The footnotes act largely as a representation of Puig's political intention in writing the novel: to present an objective view of homosexuality. The footnotes include both factual information and that given by the fictional Anelli Taub (Tittler 51). The footnotes tend to appear at moments of misunderstanding between Molina and Valentín (Levin 258).

54 The audience can read the novel as an indictment of a disengaged aesthetic perspective in the context of a world where people have to take sides. Valentín, the Marxist protagonist, has risked his life and willingly endured torture for a political cause, and his example helps transform his cellmate into a citizen, someone who will enter the world. Likewise, Molina's love of aesthetics and cultural life teaches Valentín that escapism can have a powerfully utopian purpose in life; escapism can be just as subversive and meaningful as overt political activity.

Through the novel, the reader sees that Molina takes on Valentín’s revolutionary role.

Valentín also takes the caring role possessed by Molina. As Leni manipulates the French resistant’s movement by seducing Werner, Molina manipulates the wardens by having them provide groceries in order to encourage Valentín to open up about his revolutionary group. This exchange of understanding is sealed with a kiss. This is their closest attempt toward sharing a sexual and national identity through an understanding of each other’s rationales of identifying with the heroine within movies and fighting for the revolution. Puig’s story ends with Molina attempting to pass information to Valentín’s underground movement. Molina dies while attempting to pass information to Valentín’s revolutionary group, like Leni dies due to denying to pass on top-secret information to the French resistance movement.

Examining gender constructs in drag communities is a poststructural phenomenon. The central idea of poststructuralism is that discourse creates meaning. This is a particularly important discernment of the necessity of voice among drag communities. Poststructuralist queer definitions of sexuality and gender often serve as launching points towards analyzing drag identities. In “(Trans)forming Gender: The Social Change and Transgender Citizenship,” Sally

Hines argues that traditional distinctions between sex and gender often hinder feminist

55 observations of making gender distinct from sex. Within the arguments of these distinctions,

Hines explains that definitions of gender as separate from sex contribute to “the potential for a greater diversity of masculinities and femininities and is important for a sociology of transgender that takes account of a multiplicity of gendered identities and expressions which are unfixed to the ‘sexed body’” (50).

Within the practices of drag (a man posing as a woman), gender challenges the natural reinforcement of gendered identities. The importance of poststructuralist central ideas is the necessity of drag communities to mandate their communities to be an integral part of the larger community that constitutes a nation. These commands attempt to forge national identity while subverting the conventional social constructs of gender. This is especially evident in countries with authoritarian regimes that emasculate groups who do not adhere to a proscribed masculinity, especially when it asserts control of nationalistic institutionalized homophobia.

Unlike gay men who do not wear women’s clothing, drag queens often times subvert gender constructs and do away with as many masculine qualities as they can. They subvert gender roles by wearing makeup, wigs, false eyelashes, and women’s clothing. They also subvert gender through their role in sexual acts and define iconic stereotypes of women’s roles in society. Often times, drag queens accentuate their sexuality by mimicking and performing conventional images of women. A drag queen tends to emasculate himself through pageantry: singing, dancing, and/or lip-synching popular tunes. In “The Man Who Would be Queen: The

Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism,” Michael Bailey explains that drag queens tend to dress in theatrical, glamourous matter, and “all drag queen and transsexual communities of any size produce conspicuous entertainment forms, and the most appealing occupations to the

56 members are entertainment-related [primarily singing, dancing and acting]” (136). Many times this is considered how a drag queen explores his opportunities of fitting in and becoming successful in a type of work that he may enjoy. Baily points out that transgender women often work in occupations that are traditionally viewed as female or “gay,” such as prostitution, hair styling, sewing, housekeeping, or manicuring (136). However, this is merely a one-dimensional definition of transgender communities and drag queen culture. It eliminates the ways one identifies as a person with drag.

Reinaldo Arenas describes the pageantry that took place in one of Havana’s most sorted prisons:

With their own sheets they made skirts and with shoe wax obtained from relatives they

shadowed their eyes; they even used lime from the wall whitewash as makeup.

Sometimes when they were allowed on the roof of El Morro to get a bit of sun, they

made it into a real show. The sun was rationed privilege for prisoners, we would be taken

out for about an hour once or twice a month. The fairies attended as if it were one of the

most extraordinary events in their lives, which it almost was. From the roof we could not

only see the sun but the sea as well, and we could also look at the city in Havana, the city

of our suffering, but which from up there seemed like paradise. (207)

Arenas specifically highlights the performativity of the drag queens and explains that the transgender women would dress up for parties they created with ropes made into wigs. Their high heels were made from wood boards, calling them “clogs.” Arenas states; “To be sure, they no longer had anything to lose, maybe they never had anything to lose and therefore could afford

57 the luxury of being true to their nature, to act queer, to make jokes, even to express admiration to a soldier” (207).

The descriptions here are only presented through Arenas’s narrative. However, Julian

Schnabel’s film adaptation allows the drag community a voice of their own. The goal of

Schnabel’s Before Night Falls is to create a visual community to represent Arenas’s narrative. A pivotal role in the community is portrayed by Bon Bon, the drag queen played by Johnny Depp.

Schnabel takes liberty in creating this character who is not present in the novel. In fact, Schnabel takes a lot of liberties in the film, adding images from his Pentagonia (mentioned in Chapter 2).

The true nature of the art of drag is exposed in the first shot taken on the roof of the prison. The prisoners are taking in the sun and many are playing cards and dominoes in drag. As Bon Bon enters, the camera pans to his buttocks. She is delicately wrapped with a Boa and attire made of bed linens that covers her anatomy proportionately as that of a transgender prostitute with the aims of looking more like Marilyn Monroe than a second-rate drag queen made of reproduced materials. She sports a garter belt on her right leg; her hair is carefully tossed, and she gracefully struts in a pair of five-inch heels. She glides straight ahead, angling to the left in between several tables, greeting everyone as she passes. She makes her way towards an area where there is a view of drag queens dancing. All the while, her presence is acknowledged by all the prisoners who are giving Bon Bon their approval with their smiles, whistles, and cheers as Arenas, played by Javier Bardem, comments in awe: “She’s so glamorous that when she walked by she made anyone feel like they were going to the movies.”

Significantly, Arenas’s characters refer to Bon Bon as a woman. Bon Bon seductively seeks the attention and approval from the men in the prison. Embodying a woman, she, like Leni

58 and Molina, is also manipulative to get his ways. In the film, Bon Bon’s character places

Arenas’s manuscripts in her anus in order to remove them in the bathroom, where someone is waiting to smuggle them to France. Bon Bon is also the essence of a diva, like Leni and Molina’s drag queen friend, Greta His presence is unequivocal pageantry. Moments later, as Bon Bon makes her way to an empty table, she leans slightly to wipe her face. At the moment, the camera pans to a close-up view of her buttocks with one side protruding from her underwear more so than the other. She sways her back-side to arouse the men behind her. The camera moves up her body slowly as she glances over her shoulder like she knows someone is eyeing her down, like she is looking fabulous. With her flawless lined lips filled with red lipstick bought on the black- market, gaudy eyelashes made out of a horse’s mane, pink headband, and an expression of

Marilyn Monroe, Bon Bon glides past Arenas’s character again and seductively teases him. Bon

Bon knows that she is the beauty drag queen of his imaginary pageant. Her sexuality is exposed as she represents all the drag queens of her drag community.

In Antes que Anochezca, Reinaldo Arenas explains that when he was placed in El Morro prison, in order to be safe, he would stay in the wing with transgender men and men in drag. He calls this wing one of the worst wings in the entire Morro prison. He adds that the locas, the men who portray themselves as women, resided in the most central area of hell, as stated:

Gays [transgender and men in drag] were not treated like human beings, they were

treated like beasts. They were the last ones to come out for meals, so saw them walk by,

and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly. The soldiers

guarding us, who called themselves combatientes, were army recruits sent here as a sort

of punishment; they found some release for their rage by taking it out on the

59 homosexuals. Of course, nobody called them homosexuals; they were called fairies,

faggots, queers, or at best, gays. The ward for fairies were really like the last circle of

hell. Admittedly, many of those homosexuals were wretched creatures whom

discrimination and misery had turned into common criminals. Nevertheless, they had not

lost their sense of humor. (206)

Despite their ill-treatment, however, drag queens were able to forge a space through parties and festivities throughout the prison ward and when let outdoors.

In the novel Antes que anochezca, Reinaldo Arenas expresses a viewpoint of drag queens that were in prison. Unlike the examination of prison as community in Chapter Two, drag queens developed a community that allowed for them to express their sexual and gender identities while surviving in a culture that denied them a space to be a part of the Cuban Revolution. Even in a place of extreme torture and constant ridicule, the gay men and transgender women still lived and created a bond with each other. They were segregated into an entire wing, away from other inmates. Transgender women and drag queens lived in one of the poorest wings of the prison.

The prison guards hustled the gay men and transgender women in their ward and punished those who did not comply with their sexual advancements. Yet despite their living conditions, drag queens were not only able to forge a space that allowed them to create a community with their prison inmates through drag, they also created a space that allowed them the freedom to express themselves inside their prison ward. Also, despite being stripped of their national involvement toward the progress of the Cuban Revolution, the drag community was able to maintain a sense of national identity, reconstructing it on their terms.

60 In Gay Cuba Nation, Emilio Bejel explains that when a man is on stage dressed as a woman, he is enacting a complex performativity of gender. He also performs a national icon that encompasses both gender and national identity. The drag queens of these communities share their personal stories within their community with other drag queens. This is on the stage as well as within La Guinera. Bejel also explains that their performances lack in originality and are like any drag show within the Western world (196). However, he fails to point out that, unlike the

Western world, these drag queens are facing legal adversity and have to create alternatives to makeup and costumes that are not readily available in Cuba. Again, these costume alternatives are represented in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Before Night Falls. They are further represented among the drag queens in Mariposas en el Andamio.

Armando, played as Mandy, presents his new silver dress with pink feathers on the shoulder and explains that it is made of dyed goose feathers. The dress has all the modern commodities such as a sequined torso and tulle and black gabardine skirt. However, the crinoline, tulle, and plastic, are normally made out of garbage bags. Also, another person being interviewed who goes by the stage name Lola, claims that his eyelashes are made of acetate, explaining that real eyelash glue was not available in Cuba. Most of the drag queens use horse or wig hair to create their eyelashes. Since Lola cannot afford either, he makes eyelashes out of carbon paper from the office where he works. Last, another person interviewed who goes by the stage name Cristal, says that he uses baje, a glue typically used on shoes, to adhere her fake fingernails. He explains that the drag community in La Guinera started at the bottom. They did not have any resources. He also explains that, like the drag queens in El Morro, they used sheets for fabric and did not have any of the luxuries of sequins or makeup. Their dressing room was

61 first in the bathroom and then moved it to the back yard for more room and air. Paloma, Frida

(Miss Gay), Susi, Marie Antoinette, Sandra, Cassandra, and Imperial are just a few of the other drag queens that comprise their drag community. They explained that outside of La Guinera, they also wanted to be artists in the larger community even though they had already been asked to perform at special events as well as in Bellas Artes. Having established channels, they started cross-dressing as an art form. Through their sexual, drag identity, this enabled them a sense of being part of the nation.

The documentary begins with a song, “[s]pring butterflies, garden soul wandering through the gardens of my illusions like a sigh of fleeting love. Spring butterfly, garden soul. If you see her, tell here to return to the gardens of my illusions, perhaps she’ll never come back.”

The setting is in La Guinera in Havana, Cuba, a working community that was a rural shanty town that was developed as a residence area for factory workers and their families. A medical doctor explains that La Guinera was a relatively homogeneous community. After the revolution until the late seventies, the community was a marginal area with “a high incidence to delinquency which luckily were eradicated” (Mariposas en el andamio). The government started developing these shanty town communities to bring families in from the more rural areas and provide housing, medical care, and schooling for the children while their parents worked at the factories in the area.

The general conception of the drag queens who performed in La Guinera was not well received when the drag troupe first attempted to perform there. The cultural levels in La Guinera were very low in the late seventies. In addition, Enrique Piñeda, a Cineasta filmmaker describes the entire country as prejudiced against homosexuals when drag shows were attempting to be

62 accepted. He further explains that people with hidden homosexual tendencies are often the most prejudiced, which not only affects the about sexuality, but also politics. Piñeda declares that

“[w]e don’t seek tolerance. Tolerance is a smug and arrogant. The problem isn’t to tolerate, it’s to accept that the world and its people are diverse. Not everyone has to be, dress, sing, or think like me. If they did, the world would be very boring” (Mariposas en el andamio). The performances were part of the plan to take place in the new cafeteria in the community. Fifi, the construction chief, rebelled against allowing the drag queens to perform there, exclaiming, that she was not accustomed to running around with this class of people. Fifi stated: “it seemed to me

I wasn’t doing my duty to society. I said, ‘no, keep them away. I don’t want to hear about people who run around with a double façade.’ The workers brought me ‘one’ to show me. I said ‘no please, I can’t be around you guys. I wouldn’t be doing my duty to society” (Mariposas en el andamio). However, the congresswoman of the community rebuffed Fifi’s protest, allowing the drag queens to forge the space to perform at the cafeteria due to the level of entertainment they would give to the community. The drag troupe forged a space by threatening to perform at a private house instead. They eventually performed in a house that belonged to Mandy, a cafeteria worker. Mandy invited her co-workers from the dining room and loved the show. Eventually,

Fifi agreed to allow drag performances to take place as part of a cabaret in the worker’s cafeteria.

Most of the drag queens had never performed in a public space. Fifi reassured them, saying “Do it, face them, you’ll see, nothing will happen.”

In La Guinera, there is a currently a strong drag and transgender movement. Despite strong homophobic sentiments, the drag performers influenced a tolerance by the citizens who, as a family, attend all the shows. La Guinera created a space for the drag community to perform

63 shows that create an outlet for entertainment for the whole family. The audience included grandmothers with rollers in their hair as well as young children.

Gender roles are dependent on society and each member of the drag communities intersects the drag community with national identity. Within the larger community, the drag queens embody that which is stereotyped as a woman. However, outside the drag community, the drag queens exemplify accepted constructs of gender. The drag community, therefore, is always in a fluid space to perform, especially when examining their more natural gendered existence. Furthermore, the drag community subverts gender through an ability to shift between man and woman. For example, the drag community of La Guinera defies machismo and intolerance throughout Cuba. Drag communities also challenge homophobic attitudes throughout

Cuba. The drag community parallels sexual identity and the larger community parallels national identity. Therefore, the ability for the drag community to coexist with the larger community enables both sexual and national identity, with social acceptance as an integral part of society.

When the message of their performances got out, the conditions for and the acceptance of the drag queens became more pronounced. They were able to forge a space to perform not only in La Guinera, but also at Bellas Artes in Havana. A member of the audience states: “I think the drag movement has [also] grown among homosexuals because it their way of expressing who they are and of gaining respect. The movement has flourished here because they need to come out of the closet and this is the way to do it” (Mariposas).

In conclusion, it is clear that gender roles are dependent on how social norms and members of the drag communities intersect. Within the drag communities, the drag queens embody that which is stereotyped as a woman; outside the drag community, the drag queens

64 conform to the “norm.” Drag communities, therefore, are always in a fluid space to perform, especially when examining their acceptance of performing as women. Furthermore, the drag communities subvert gender through their ability between playing the gender norms of a man, yet shifting to enacting the role of a woman. Not only are they able to shift, but they are also able to do it in an art form that allows them to forge spaces despite the political ramifications. For example, the drag community of La Guinera defies the machismo and the image of intolerance within Cuba and outside their community. Also, the drag communities challenge the notions of homophobia in Cuba and Argentina. The drag community also parallels (homo)sexual identity and the larger community parallels national identity. Thus, the ability for drag communities to live within both, the gay and larger community, enables both sexual and national identity. They are forge a space within which the transgender person can be accepted as an integral part of society.

65 CHAPTER 4

LIFE IS A BALL:

LATIN AMERICAN GAY AND TRANSGENDER EXILE COMMUNITIES

IN THE UNITED STATES

In the previous chapters, I have examined communities of gay men and transgender women who attempted to create a community that enabled both sexual and national identities within their community and nation of origin. In this chapter, I am focusing on transgender women who are often exiled from their nation of origin and strive towards sexual and national identities. When in exile, these transgender women often face the loss of a sense of national identity in order to maintain a sexual identity. Furthermore, their open gender identity often results in their decision to go into exile, whether forced or voluntary.

There are important differences between the relationships between an individual’s choice to go into exile versus exile being forced. There are also significant experiences transgender women encounter within exile communities once they have gone into exile.

While exile is often-times defined as the banishment from a country as a form of expulsion, I am referring to exile as the condition of being physically separated from one’s country or home voluntarily or by force. These forms of exile are circumstances of oppression due to not adhering to the nation’s norms of constructed gender roles (what it means to be a man or a woman). While self-exile is a reality for many people who suffer within their country, I am, instead, focusing on geographical exile as the experience of Latin American transgender communities who migrate to and live in the United States. The transgender community I am

66 focusing on is comprised of individuals with various backgrounds who share a common experience. Often times, Latin American totalitarian governments, where the transgender women I discuss originate, mentally and physically incarcerate those who do not proscribe to static gender roles. When in exile, the necessity of a transgender community as a space that shares common experiences is often an important way a transgender person is able to maintain a national identity.

Exile is also an important theme in Latin American studies.13 This is mostly because of the turbulent histories and political tyranny of authoritarian governments, along with the works—literature, film, and history—that represent the Latin American experience. As exile is a major theme in Latin American studies, there is little research by scholars of Latin American studies who have examined transgender exile communities in the United States and the hierarchies of these exile communities in relation to transgender subcultures. For example, in

Nestor Almendros and Jorge Jimenez Leal's Improper Conduct, examined in previous chapters, the only exiled transgender woman who was interviewed is Caracol. Caracol is the transgender woman who migrated to New York after arriving to Miami on the Mariel boatlift. Of the many transgender women who went into exile through Mariel due to the draconian measures against gay and transgender Cubans, only one is represented in this documentary. This specific group of marielitos were often in fear of being denied entry into

13 For more discussion on themes of exile in Latin American studies, please refer to Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger’s The Politics of Exile in Latin America (2009) and Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich eds. Exile and the Politics of Exclusions in the Americas ( 2012).

67 the United States due to their transgender identity. This was due to the McCarran-Walter Act that implemented a product of McCarthyism as a reaction of the "Lavender Scare" that took place in the 1950s, over a decade prior to the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969

(Douglas 102). Also, in 1980, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) considered homosexuality as grounds for prohibiting many transgender Cuban exiles from seeking asylum in the United States (Capo 93). I will examine the positional hierarchy system in a chronological order by first examining the experiences of the marielitos, followed by examining two documentary films: Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) and

Wolfgang Busch's How Do I Look (2006). Lastly, Mayra Santos Febres's novel, Sirena

Selena: Vestida de Pena [Sirena Selena: Dressed in Pain/Sorrow] (1997) is integral to my argument because, unlike the previous works, Sirena Selena seeks the Dominican Republic as a place of exile rather than New York City.

In this chapter, I also use theoretical frameworks of exile to examine how community shapes one's national and sexual identity. While self-exile is a reality for many people who suffer within their country, my assertion is that geographical exile can include the experiences of transgender communities who move and live outside of their country of origin. It is important to address how the definitions of exile differ among scholars who are experts in such theoretical frameworks. Self- and geographical exile, even when defined, are always shifting and, often times, challenge each other. These forms exile are often-times the only way transgender women avoid oppression during many countries' movement towards progress. To expand the dialogues of identity that determine a common goal of transgender exile

68 communities, I choose to examine the gender construct from a queer perspective.

In analyzing the conventional forms of exile in Paris Is Burning, How Do I Look, and

Sirena Selena, I note the common themes of how positional hierarchy systems tied to

(im)migration and/or displacement, the emergence of generational differences and conflicts, and the distinctive social structure of transgender communities. Focusing on these themes, I explore the exile experience from one’s individual Latin American country to a transgender exile community in a metropolis, namely New York City.

Before embarking on the analyses of transgender communities in the United States, it is important to look at the operating definitions of a few of the scholars who focus on exile as a major theme in historical, aesthetic, and literary works. While agreements on definitions of exile are not always true within social and academic arenas, I am setting up definitions by scholars on exile who provide examples of its different forms, namely geographical. First,

Michel Foucault, in his analysis of space and time in "Des espaces autres," suggests that, in various spaces, we must learn to live in close quarters and in multiple scenarios (14). For example, while in exile, transgender populations must choose between multiple scenarios for those that best suit themselves. This allows them to shift into multiple combinations of national and sexual identity and define themselves despite their individual circumstances.

This is evident in the history of Cuban exiles, Paris is Burning, How Do I Look, and Sirena

Selena: Vestida de pena. First, in the barracks that the transgender marielitos were mandated to live in when first arriving on the boatlift, they experienced strict rules on the consequences of defying their roles as men. The marielitos challenged these rules of conduct despite the similar individual circumstances of Cuban machismo they faced in Cuba

69 as well as in their new homeland in the United States. Also, the migration that the Latin

American protagonists in Paris Is Burning, How Do I Look, and Sirena Selena experience requires them to find and understand the necessary rules of the close quarters of the houses they are invited to live in. They must also understand the multiplicity of roles they must fill when with their new family in the houses, along with the pageantry and competitions of the ball categories they aim to win. It is also necessary to explore the experiences of migration and the safe-spaces obtained within the communities of these new arrivants, a term used by

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, to define exiles who have been displaced voluntarily or involuntarily

(Brathwaite np).

Many U.S. cities contain international exile communities. Their ports of entry are historically unique spaces that served as sanctuaries for those deemed by society and the government as foreigners/aliens. These national and sexual, along with racial and ethnic diversities, interact with a continual shifting of social hierarchies and structures. Despite main comforts that these cities offer for exiled transgender women, the loss of their nation and sense of national identity enable them to experience a sense of sexual freedom despite their loss.

This feeling of loss when in geographical exile is also described by Myriam Chancy. In

Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), Chancy describes exile as being in the margins of their nation of origin that is often a result to leaving one’s homeland. This expulsion often causes exiles to feel a consistent, continual displacement. This is clearly seen in my examination of the marielitos. However, this consistent, continual displacement through leaving one’s homeland isn’t clearly illustrated in Paris Is Burning and

70 How Do I Look. Febres’s Sirena Selena inverts Chauncy’s claim by mocking the experience of exile as a type of vacation full of luxuries as exemplified in Chapter Ten, when Sirena explains that she feels like a movie star in “the most luxurious hotels la Selena had seen in her life” (47).

In addition, Chauncy explains that without a sense of community, an exile is subject to the radical uprooting of all that one is and stands for (1). This is often considered when forced to leave one’s country of origin. Developing and maintaining the strategies for survival as an individual in exile is often a result of becoming part of a community that strives for a common goal regardless of class, sexual orientation, or gender identification as seen in all four products of historical documents, documentaries, and the novel examined.

Exile communities, especially gay and transgender communities, are often combating a sense of homelessness. Fleeing persecution in their homeland, queer migrants are among exiles who find that a sense of belonging and finding common goals are difficult to acquire in the place where they are exiled. In addition, there is often a lack of knowledge of the freedoms one can experience through national and sexual identities. It is this lack of knowledge that renders the experience of exile as a loss, as Chauncy claims, “for what one has lost is carried in this forced nomadism from one geographical space to another, all that one has lost remains 'over there,' in that place once known as home” (37). Again, these definitions of exile are geographical in contrast to forms of self or “conventional” exile that is challenged in Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look. Self-exile often results in intimidation and fear that come from a system of brutality by authoritarian governments that attempt to control society and its cultural values. For example, Fidel Castro instituted a censorship

71 block of anything that did not represent the Cuban Revolution and, in Argentina, General

Rafael Videla led a military coup in 1976, explaining that subordination is not submission.

In this case, intimidation forced obedience. This is due to the awareness of the draconian authority and supreme mission of both authoritarian governments to enforce new rules to oppress Cuban and Argentine citizens (Prohibido). This forceful act of intimidation not only resulted in this full awareness of authority, but also led to forcing internal and geographical exile. My term “conventional” exile refers to the forms of expulsion many of the ball participants experienced from their biological families. This form of exile isn’t a fleeing from one’s country. Nevertheless, it is an expulsion from their familial community to a conventional community of shared sexual identities. While sexual identity is clearly illustrated in all of the examined works, national identity is not necessarily present in the ball communities even though their protagonists are able to understand the circumstances of their racial and ethnic identities. Therefore, there is a sense of displacement among the protagonists in the documentaries and Serena Selena that is considered as a form of

“conventional” exile rather than an exile that pinpoints the sense of a loss of a national identity.

Self-exile and self-censorship paralyze anyone who questions the new “rules” of the nation with fear (Prohibido). This sense of paralysis was clearly understood by Manuel Puig and Reinaldo Arenas and was represented in the protagonists in their novels. Puig and

Arenas’s exile was internal prior to being forced to leave their countries to save their lives.

72 Prior to leaving their homelands, their effort was the struggle to hold free agency. 14 The censorship of their literary works in their countries of origin, Argentina and Cuba, are examples of this struggle.

The first construct I examine is the positional hierarchy systems of exile communities. For example, these systems of hierarchy in the Cuban exile community are defined by the year Cuban exiles fled to the United States. In this case, there is a clear positional hierarchy between the marielitos and those who entered the United States after

Batista fled Cuba and Fidel Castro took over, between 1959 and 1962. This hierarchy was due to the understanding that, compared to the class of Cubans who fled to Miami in the early sixties, these marielitos were only allowed entry to Key West and Miami in 1980 as a means of cleansing Cuba of undesired Cubans. In the Mariel exodus, the Cuban marlielitos were placed in a camp until they were sponsored by Cuban-American immigrants who settled in Miami. Yet the extreme conservatism of wealthy Cuban exiles who lost all of their material possessions and fled to Miami shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, implemented a hierarchical system of Cuban immigrants also based on the order and social status they held in Cuba. These Cubans, who immigrated first, were considered to be of a higher socioeconomic class with a better education

(Rothe and Pumariega 250). Furthermore, there was also a hierarchical system between the marielitos; they divided between those who fled due to the constraints inflicted by the Cuban government on those with alternative sexual/gender orientations and those who fled for other

14 For more information on the biographies of Manuel Puig and Reinaldo Arenas, refer to the commentaries in the Hector Babenco’s DVD Kiss of the Spider Woman and Julian Schnabel’s DVD Before Night Falls.

73 reasons. Even though they were pejoratively viewed by the exiles of the early sixties, the transgender exiles were scorned by the Cubans who fled between 1959 and 1962 along with the heterosexual Cubans who fled during the Mariel exodus.

Ostracized by Cuban exiles in Miami, many gay men and transgender women chose to move to gay and transgender communities in other areas of the United States, namely New York

City. This move to New York had more of an impact on Latin American transgender communities in New York City than expected. One of the impacts of a Latin American migration was the institution of a Latin American house, The House of Xtravaganza, in a predominantly

African American ball community15. After the Mariel exodus, the migration of gay men and transgender women from Cuba to Florida often led to another migration to New York City. The role of a positional hierarchy system, mainly focusing on a positionality of older generations versus younger generations, is also represented in documentaries, Paris Is Burning and How Do I

Look and Febres’s Sirena Selena. Both Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look are documentaries that are filmed in New York City while Sirena Selena is a novel that takes place in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, with memories and aspirations of New York.

With the skyline of Manhattan as the first scene of Paris Is Burning, the spectator enters the life of the drag balls. The Operator/Spectator relationship in Roland Barthes'

Camera Lucida serves an example of how the ways that Livingston and Busch appropriate roles of the ball community throughout their documentaries are examined (Barthes 8). Both

15 The ball community is part of the drag balls originating in New York City. It began to receive mainstream attention in the 1990s.

74 directors capture the way the ball community forges and identifies themselves out of a displacement of the transgender community from American society at large.

The documentaries function as a metaphor for the experience of the ball community living between the real and fantasy worlds and the opportunity for the ball community to recreate alternative definitions of self. In order for Livingston and Busch to represent the ball community in New York City, they each turn from photographs to filming with the camera. Both film directors are what Barthes refers to as the Operators of the camera. The audience of their documentaries are the Spectator, those observing the images. Livingston and Busch are responsible for the construction of a vision; the audience reacts to these images portrayed in their films. Barthes claims "the person or thing photographed is the target, or referent... a kind of simulacrum in front of a lens" (9). He also states "a photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only for certain the shot has been" (9). This is true for both directors' documentaries because it historically chronicles the development of transgender exile communities in the face of the AIDS epidemic and advances in sexual reassignment surgeries. The images in both films provide glimpses into the true nature of the ball community and the ways the contestants deal with the current events in the outside world

Composed primarily of African American and Latino LGBT men and women, members of the ballroom community traditionally form "houses" which serve the dual purpose of providing a surrogate family structure, and competing for trophies and prestige in community organized balls, Houses are traditionally formed in a family-like structure, with

75 a house "mother" and/ or "father" who oversee and direct the group. In keeping with the ballroom community tradition, members take the house name as their surname, House members compete or "walk" in balls in various categories including representations of dance, fashion, costume design, runway modeling, and gender impersonation. The dance style known as "voguing," which went on to be popularized by Madonna's 1990 song

"Vogue," is perhaps the mostly widely-recognized stylistic form to emerge from the underground ball scene.

These houses comprised a community, similar to a stereotypical urban, low-income family structure with a single mother and her children. This dynamic is a stereotype of households in urban projects of African and Latin American cultures (Rangelova 83).

Despite opposition, wealth, and pigmentocracy (the ways that skin color defines social class), the growth of these houses and spaces inside and outside the ballroom make an integral existence for exile communities. Newly arrived immigrants face rejection within their homeland and again in the United States due to racial division, class structures, and prescribed gender roles. These new transgender “arrivants” are conditionally admitted into the ball community even though they are not typically admitted into mainstream American society. Restricted from acquiring full citizenship status, transgender exiles are marginalized subjects. They join other transgender communities to overcome feelings of inequality and to take control of the circumstances that result in exile. The houses allow these individuals to identify with their nationality and the balls are spaces for the houses to express their sexuality.

Latino transgender exile communities became aware of The House of Xtravaganza, the most

76 publicly recognized '"house" to emerge from the New York City underground ballroom scene and among the longest continually active, The House of Xtravaganza family and the collective group are recognized for their cultural influence in community activism.

In ballroom culture, houses are relations among individuals that are made by social groups rather than biological groups. Houses serve as a home for transgender individuals. In these houses, there are "mothers" or "fathers." Their goal is to provide a structure for their

"children." In the section of the film titled “Houses,” Dorian Carey describes the houses as families and of humans having a mutual bond (Paris Is Burning). Mothers of the houses perform some of the same "motherly duties" such as cooking, cleaning, and being nurturing.

Anglie Xtravaganza describes her role as a house mother, explaining that she fulfills the roles of the mother by offering guidance and advice when necessary. She states that “as far as what I know and what I have been through in gay life… I know how to survive in gay life and being part of the ball community… It’s hard” (Paris Is Burning). For the most part, the division of labor for house mothers is very much alike to heteronormative gender roles.

Both of the documentaries and the novel have similar formulas of hierarchical systems.

The formation of houses and socially constructed families that are created among transgender women in all three works place the “mothers” above the “children” of the houses. In the documentaries, the mothers are comprised of the older generations of ball contestant winners from the ball scene that took place in New York City and the children are expected to learn and win the ball competitions to bring fame (and money) to the houses (Paris Is Burning). Ultimately the houses are comprised of alternative families of ball competitors (Hilderbrand 11).

77 The balls are described by Pepper Labeija (the mother of the House of Labeija) as “more or less our fantasy of being a superstar, like the Oscars or whatever, or like being on the runway as a model… In a ball, you can be what you want to be… right here, right now, and you won’t be questioned. I came, I saw, I conquered. That’s a ball!” (Paris Is Burning). The goals of the contestants are to become legendary. Freddy Pendarvis, a child of the house of Pendarvis, explains that “being legendary, while others are not, feels good to them. It’s like an Oscar.

Becoming legendary and winning an Oscar is the same thing” (Paris Is Burning). Being legendary has been the title given to contestants that eventually become mothers; it is also the goal of the children of the houses. Being legendary is the meter that controls the hierarchical system inside the ball community. The hierarchical system between the ball community and the outside community is much more complex and is among debate.16

The hierarchical community in Santurce also plays a recurring theme in Febres’s fiction. Febres, a Puerto Rican author who grew up in the Santurce neighborhood, wrote the novel Sirena Selena: Vestida de pena in 2000, stating in English that the protagonist is

“living in sorrow.” It is not a mistake that Sirena Selena has references to the Ball community. For example, while the novel doesn’t address Paris Is Burning and How Do I

Look directly, clear references of the Ball community are made at the beginning of the novel. One of the main references is through one of the main protagonists, Martha Divine,

16 More discussion of the discussion of hierarchical systems between the ball community and the outside community are discussed in Lisa Henderson’s “Paris is Burning and Academic Conservatism” (1992) and Christian Gregory’s “A Performative Transformation of the Public Queer in Paris is Burning”(1998).

78 who once made her living performing at La Escuelita, an underground club in New York

City, closely linked to the Ball community, with other transgender girlfriends as stated “She once did shows at La Escuelita on Thirty-ninth Street in New York City” (2). The story mostly revolves around Martha. who is the mother of a transgender boarding house and makes a living by discovering young, effeminate boys off the streets of San Juan (95-97). To summarize, her goal is to train them to entertain as drag queens at nightclubs in Santurce

(4). She soon discovers Selena. Selena has the "voice of an angel" singing in the alleyways.

As his agent, Martha takes him off the streets and trains him to perform in the Dominican

Republic at an elegant hotel. Ultimately, Martha transforms Selena into a breathtaking transgender diva. The hierarchical dilemma is that, while Martha’s goal is to raise enough money off Selena’s talents in order to have a sexual reassignment surgery, Selena's goal is to seduce a wealthy Dominican businessman by herself to pocket the money to fulfill her dreams in New York City as a Puerto Rican drag ball celebrity.

In the novel, Febres challenges the migratory patterns of Puerto Rico being the

Dominicans’ stopping point to migrate to New York City. Instead, she makes the Dominican

Republic the stopping point for the same migration. This is a reversal of migratory patterns for two reasons. First, it challenges the historical understanding of the hierarchal conflicts between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and Cuba and the United

States. All four of these countries have an extreme sense of nationalism despite their migratory patterns of exile. Second, this sense of nationalism raises the questions of national identity in works that don’t directly address leaving one’s country of origin, such as in the documentaries

79 How Do I Look and Paris Is Burning.

Santos Febres also subverts the stereotypes of the relationship between the

Dominican Republic and the perceptions of Puerto Rico. These subversions are in light of more powerful sources and persons that are present in the novel: the promoters, upper/middle class spectators, tourists, and the local and global drag circuits (Cruz-Malavé

60). For example, Migueles, from the Dominican Republic claims that, in Puerto Rico, there is no poverty. He states, "[t]here’s a lot of room for progress on that island... they are used to being gringos. Don't you know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States? Over there they don't have the corruption or the poverty that we have here" (156). The hierarchical stereotype of wealth and work ethics are largely due to Puerto Rico’s ties with the United

States. Migueles explains that there is no work ethic in Puerto Rico, and making money is easy, claiming that his cousin started working for a Puerto Rican, stating “they don't like to work... Puerto Ricans don't know what real work is" (156). Migueles's overall perception is that Puerto Rico is where the money is. This stereotype of wealth in Puerto Rico is its

“colonial legacy” (Cruz-Malavé 58). It is an island perspective that, underneath the relationship between Puerto Rico as a territory of the United States, the Dominican Republic and Cuba’s geographical exile is also a migratory pattern for the entire Spanish-speaking

Caribbean archipelago.

These positional hierarchical systems are present in each of these texts. The hierarchy among Cubans is largely dependent on their date of arrival after the Cuban Revolution. Yet some subsets of the positional hierarchy system also included the heteronormative attitudes

80 towards sexual identity. This resulted in the transgender marielitos as the lowest echelon of the hierarchical system of Cuban exiles. On the other hand, the positional hierarchical systems in the documentaries Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look are between mothers and children in the transgender houses that resemble a heteronormative Latino inner-city and single-parent home. The mothers in these transgender houses already reached a legendary status ball participation in their younger years and took the place of mothers of their house before them. The children are now the younger performers and they are expected to not only bring fame to their house, but also monetarily support the house from their prize money. The hierarchical roles in Sirena Selena are similar to those in the documentaries. There is a hierarchy that is also created between mothers and children. The mother Martha depends on

Selena to bring her money and fame. Serena is expected to bring money through performing in lavish hotels in the tourist district of Santo Domingo.

In addition, while sexual identity is clearly present in all three of the works discussed, national identity is never fully addressed within the positional hierarchy systems.

First, in the case of the marielitos, transgender women who came to the United States through Mariel were not accepted by the already established larger Cuban community.

Many of them continued their journey from Cuba to New York City. Caracol and Reinado

Arenas are perfect examples of this experience of moving from Cuba to Miami as a marielito and then from Miami to New York City. In addition to national identity, even though the documentaries discuss the House of Xtravaganza as the first Latin

American/Latino transgender ball community/house, notions of geographical exile and

81 national identity are never discussed. Rather, the documentaries focus on the hierarchical relationships between transgender women who were often ostracized and expelled from their biological household. This could be partly a result of the multiplicity of nations that became part of the House of Xtravaganza, along with the large black American population within the ball community at large. Last, due to extreme opulence and Martha’s identification with her experience in New York, national identity and geographical exile are never addressed... The trip from San Juan to Santo Domingo is merely expressed as a business trip. Also, throughout the novel, Selena only fantasized about New York from

Martha’s dream-like monologues of memories of her experiences of New York City.

Aside from positional hierarchy systems, generational differences and conflicts are another major theme portrayed throughout the works that I am examining. For example, as mentioned earlier, there are differences of opinion between the marielitos who fled to

Miami from Cuba shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and those who went into exile in the United States through the Mariel exodus in 1980. There are also generational differences between the mothers in the ball community and their children. Last, there are generational differences and conflicts between Martha Divine and Selena in Sirena Selena.

Before analyzing these differences and conflicts, I return to Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communities explores aspects of visual representation in nationalism, reminding us to attend to the subjects who are documented, real and fictional, and the different spaces they occupy. The Latin American transgender community often refuses to accept fixed categorizations or to conform to societal norms that are imposed by the larger

82 community of the nation. The larger society's notions of acceptable behaviors in Latin

America historically objectified transgender women as men whom challenged the nation’s goals towards progress (Nesvig 722). The films and literature I examine provide the characters a voice that removes them, if even only temporarily, from the margins of society.

There are generational differences within the Mariel exodus since it forged many changes in perceptions of the marielitos and the necessary reconsideration of laws due to the exodus. Even though the term for gender identity was under study as early as the late fifties, the Mariel exodus took place during a time that the reference for transgender identity was categorized as either a homosexual who dressed like a woman, or an effeminate homosexual. However, in Cuba, they were categorized simply as social deviants (Lewis 84).

In a 1984 review of the Improper Conduct in The New York Times titled “Exiles Indict

Castro Regime,” Vincent Canby referrs to Caracol as "One of the many... fluffy haired transvestites who now entertains as La Escuelita in New York who says he was repeatedly arrested and beaten. Yet in passions between the beatings, he would dress up with sheets.”

This rhetoric towards the transgender community of marielitos followed the same vocabulary that the Cuban government historically defined transgender women; as either gay or effeminate men who act like women. As I discussed in the introduction, these definitions of homosexuality in Cuba were geared to men who did not follow macho traits, socially and sexually.

The definition of homosexuality in Cuba clearly marked transgender women as homosexual. For example, the men who do not follow proscribed masculine gender norms

83 or are passive in bed are simply considered as playing the role of the female and, therefore, deemed gay or maricón. However, the men who follow proscribed masculine gender norms and are active, penetrating other men, are not considered gay or bugarrón. In fact, they are considered hyper-masculine since they not only penetrated women, but also men. This plays a crucial role in the homosexuals who were not allowed to leave Cuba, due to being considered gay, on the Mariel boatlift. Reinaldo Arenas verified institutionalized homophobia that banished transgender women from Cuba. Among those who left Cuba on the Mariel exodus, Arenas read a poster while in line to leave Cuba that stated,

"Homosexuals get out; scum of the earth, get out" (Arenas 280).

In "Behind Barred Doors in Havana, Would-be Emigres Wait in Fear," Jo Thomas explains that homosexuals were encouraged, and even forced, to leave. Arenas explained that his identification as a homosexual expedited the process of receiving the papers to leave the country, stating, "Since the order of the day was to allow all undesirables to go, and in that category homosexuals were in first place, a large number of gays were able to leave the

Island in 1980" (281). Like Arenas and Caracol, many transgender exiles from Cuba moved to New York due to being marginalized by many conservative exiled Cuban families who settled in Miami. As explained in Vice News’ “How Fidel Castro Dominated Miami’s

Politics for Decades” Miami Cubans supported Republican platforms that fought against homosexuals to be able to stay in the Unites States, in addition to fighting to end communism in Cuba (Alvarado).

Cubans who immigrated to the United States through the Mariel boatlift were the

84 third wave of mass migration. During the first, about 2,000 Cubans fled to Miami between

1959 and 1962. This immigration was composed of Cuba’s elite who were largely

Caucasian, had extensive education, and were bilingual (Rothe and Pumariega 249). Due to these advantages, this group of exiles easily assimilated to the middle-class American mainstream. They never experienced communism directly and believed in the capitalist model. The second wave of Cubans left between 1965 and 1973 through the Port of

Camarioca (Rothe and Pumariega 250). This second wave of immigration was mostly part of the bourgeoisie who lost their small businesses due to the government’s elimination of private property during the communist reorganization process. Nearly 250,000, these exiles were encouraged to leave in order for Cuba to eliminate the middle class (251). Many had connections to those who left before communism became institutionalized, so they received support to establish themselves in the United States, mostly in Miami. Even though they didn’t have the same foreshadowing of Cuba’s challenges after Castro took power as the

Cubans who left between 1959 and 1962, they joined together to create a large presence in

Miami, sharing the same conservative values and goals to overthrow Castro and repossess

Cuba (Bethell 115).

The Mariel boatlift in 1980 was the third wave of refugees who sought political asylum. This was a result of a bus driver driving through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy, followed by thousands of Cubans who entered the grounds with a request for help to leave

Cuba. After receiving international political pressure, Castro criticized the refugees as scum

(escoria) of the earth (252). Rothe and Pumariega explain: “The Mariel exodus had the

85 lowest proportion of Whites (77%) [125 out of 96,250 marielitos] and was more representative of the racial composition of the island as a whole” (251). This included mulattos, Blacks, and many who were born or raised under the Cuban communist system.

The Cuban exiles who fled Cuba prior to 1989 viewed the marielitos as undesirable.

Marielitos were rejected by the older generations because they were in fear of them ruining the “excellent reputation that the Cuban exiles had enjoyed until then [the arrival of the marielitos]” (253). In many ways, the migration of transgender Cuban marielitos is distinct from U.S. born transgender Cubans in that the historical progression of generations and the experiences of transgender Cubans who were not subjected to Cuban laws against them, allow for shifts in attitudes of sexual and national identities. Cuban transgender exiles experienced an oppression by the Cuban government that Cubans born in the U.S. never experienced. The U.S. Cubans argue that overthrowing the Cuban government will not override the more than half a century history of the struggles Cuba has overcome. Many of them think their older generation's ideas that Cuba is still the same as it was in the first half of the twentieth century is outlandish, Also, Cuban-Americans are often more interested in

U.S. politics than the political situations in Cuba.17

Currently, concepts of sexual identity have shifted from the Mariel exodus to the present. The transgender marielitos fought for their lives to flee Cuba. In the U.S., they are a minority (transgender) within a minority (Cuban immigrants). In contrast, the younger

17 Interview with Manny Fernandez, PhD, a Cuban Studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, January 2017.

86 generation is often more interested in joining the larger community of transgender

Latinos/Latin Americans and new perceptions of sexuality. They are also more interested in transformations that have taken place regarding advances in transformations on sex, including sexual reassignment surgery. The experiences between marielitos and U.S.-born

Cubans are vast, especially those concerning national identities. The national identity of marielitos is much stronger than the succeeding generation due to their experiences in Cuba.

The younger generation’s commitment isn’t towards attaining national identity. They are more interested in the larger community of transgender individuals than an allegiance to a

Cuban transgender community. This also the case in Paris Is Burning, How Do I Look, and

Sirena Selena.

Nancy Frasier, in “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution of the Critique of

Actually Existing Democracy,” claims that there is a dialectic between the mainstream public and countercultural groups. In identity politics, the protagonists of Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look, are at odds with the mass public (61). Yet they are at odds with each other as well when emulating this mass public culture’s white privileged standard of living.

The protagonists are also at odds with each other and the director of Paris Is Burning. Jennie

Livingston, being a privileged, Ivy-League educated white woman, is seen by many scholars as a voyeur and an outsider who objectified the ball community participants in Paris Is

Burning. She was blamed by bell hooks for filming a formula of white-picket-fence privilege as the goal of the ball participants. Hooks’ argument is that it resulted in the consequence of despair of the persons of color in the ball community by a white, privileged film audience

87 (151). Also, the history of the balls became more complex at the change of each generation as seen in How Do I Look. In addition, there were distinct differences among the participants in the films and novel in perceptions of gender.

During the filming of Paris Is Burning, drag balls were in their third generation in

New York City (How Do I Look.). Drag balls were a recreation of the extravagance in Marie

Antoinette's balls (Cunningham). The drag balls in New York City began as early as the

Gilded Age of the late 20th century. However, these only took place a couple of times a year. They originated by gay men and transgender women who staged fashion shows in clandestine gay bars. These balls eventually attracted marginal African American, along with exiled and displaced gay and transgender youth (How Do I Look). In these balls, members of the ball community were chosen to judge those who created the most unique and outrageous costumes. In "The Slap of Love," Michael Cunningham explains: "Black queens sometimes showed up, but they were expected to whiten their faces" (n.p.). This was another perception of the attraction of historical representations of while privilege within the ball competitions. The rise of ball culture took place in the 1920’s. In Gay New York:

Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, George

Chauncey explains that, despite being illegal, the drag balls served as a place for gay men to gather (xii). 18

18 At the end of Chancye’s “Acknowledgements,” there is an image of a transgender woman titled “Beau of the ball” from 1927.

88 In the sixties, African American and Latin American transgender women left the predominantly white underground gay bars and created their own secretive events in Harlem,

Cunningham vividly explains these drag balls as:

heights undreamed of by little gangs of white men parading around in frocks in

basement taverns, in a burst of liberated zeal, they rented big places like the Elks

Lodge on 160 West 129th Street, and they turned up in dresses Madame Pompadour

herself might have thought twice about. Word spread around Harlem that a retinue of

drag queens was putting together outfits bigger and grander than Rose Parade floats,

and the balls began to attract spectators, first by the dozens and then by the hundreds,

gay and straight alike... As the audiences grew, the queens gave them more and more

for their money. During this time, drag balls consisted of two competing groups: "The

House of Ladies" and "La Shanelles." (How Do I Look)

The zest of these balls created a movement of more ball participation.

In the seventies, houses emerged. The first house was "The House of Labeija," an

African-American house comprised of a mother and her children. By the early eighties a few other houses popped up, including the emerging house, "The House of Xtravaganza," a

Latino/Latin American house mainly consisting of Latin American transgender women who settled in New York from the Mariel exodus.

The House of Xtravaganza was founded in 1982 by Hector Valle, a gay man of Puerto

Rican descent as stated by "Voguing and The House Ballroom Scene of New York City

1989 - 1992," Valle was discovered for his mastery of voguing (n.a. 32-35), While Valle

89 was familiar with the ballroom scene, he himself did not belong to a ball house, In the summer of 1982 he decided to create an all-Latino ballroom house, in response to what was a nearly exclusive African American gay subculture (Valenti n.p.). One of the first to join

Hector in the new venture was a transgender teen of Puerto Rican descent who came to be known as Angie Xtravaganza and would assume the role of "house mother" (Cunningham),

Mother Angie quickly became the dominant leader of the House, the outsider status as a

Latino house within a primarily African American scene fostered a fierce family bond among the Xtravaganzas, and that closeness forged a recognizable distinction from many of the other houses (Paris Is Burning).

In 1985, the founder and house father Hector Valle died of complications from

AIDS, later that year, Angie Xtravaganza recruited a young up and coming star of the ballroom scene named David Padilla to leave the rival House of Ebony and become father of the House of Xtravaganza, David Padilla had admired what the House of Xtravaganza had accomplished since the inception of The House of Xtravaganza. Being a Puerto Rican exile,

Padilla felt a kinship to the Latin American house (62-64).

Each generation continually shifted by adding on to the competitions held by previous generations. Prior to 1990, the balls shifted from focusing on showgirl and female vocal dynamics in the seventies to white fashion and movie stars from the television shows like Dallas and Dynasty in the 1980s. Again, white privilege was the vision of success, as shown in advertisement and television shows of the seventies and eighties.

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ball performances began to focus on

90 hip-hop music and fashion that exemplifies the ball transformations that require more

complex and acrobatic movements. The nineties were riddled with tags of performance

categories such as "Butch Queen," "Vogue," "Femme," "Student," and a myriad of other

categories. For example, voguing consisted of five features: hands, pantomime, holding a

pose, spins and dips, and hitting the floor with legs spread out (How Do I Look). The last

feature is called dipology. A member of the House of Diabolique explains:

There is more to the ballroom scene than ‘chopping,’ ‘mopping,’ ‘fierceness,’ and ‘shade;’

there is more to voguing than ‘striking a pose.’ Drag is a form of control. By looking good,

one can feel good. By looking powerful, one can feel powerful. One can be powerful.

Therefore, beauty begets control. Artifice equals power. Then again, it may just be a bunch

of bitches competing for trophies. Either way, it's fun. There is of course a distinction

between the casual runway that would erupt at a ‘normal’ club, and a formal runway of a

ball, where there are judges and prizes and actual voguing. (Paris Is Burning)

The complexity of the historical changes among the balls challenges the perceptions of

younger generations' positions on "whiteness" and its relation to privilege. The perceptions

of transgender and transsexual identities as a way to feel fully human is also challenged in

the documentaries as well as in Sirena Selena.

When looking at generational differences, what stands out is that Paris is Burning was

shot during a pivotal point when the older participants of the balls had a generational

identity much different than the younger participants. Dorian Carey and Pepper Labeija had

distinct opposition to their "children's" desire to find sexual and national identity through

91 sexual reassignment surgery rather than a transgender actuality. In Paris Is Burning the perception from the older generation of the ball community challenged the younger generations' disregard of transgender identity by seeking sex transformations through male to female sexual reassignment surgery. Pepper LaBeija explains that he’s been a man and a man who emulated a woman. While he could never say how a woman feels, he understands how a man who acts like a woman or dresses like a woman feels. He continues by explaining that having sexual reassignment surgery is taking it a little too far because it is not reversible once it is done. He responds by telling the younger generation that “women get treated badly… they get beat, robbed, they get dogged. So having a vagina doesn’t mean you’re going to have a fabulous life. It might, in fact, be worse… So, I’ve never recommended it and I, myself, would never get one” (Paris Is Burning). Still, there is no dialogue in the documentaries that is specifically about how many transgender exiles immigrated from Latin America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Three points of view were expressed about gender continuation: transgender identity, transsexual identity, and third-gender identity.

In the documentary, Octavia St. Laurent argues that having a male to female (M to

F) operation and getting a vagina in place of a penis means, to the younger generations, that they have succeeded in the stereotypes and dreams of living their lives as women, along with being able to get married and adopt children. Octavia also had these fantasies when she was younger. She explains that she wants to live a normal, happy life, such as marriage and the adoption of children in a heterosexual marriage constructs, whether it's

92 being married and adopting children. She states; “Sometimes I sit and look at a magazine. I try to imagine myself on the front cover, or even inside. I want so much more. 1 want my name to be a household product I want everyone to look at me and say 'there goes Octavia"'

(Paris Is Burning).

Brooke Xtravaganza rebukes Pepper Labeija's of gender confirmation sugery claiming; "In '84, I've had a nose reconstruction job. I've had my cheek bones risen.

I've had a chin implant and breast implants... I'm no longer a man. I'm a woman... I feel like the part of my life that was a secret is now closed... I am my own special creation" (Paris Is Burning). Brooke Xtravaganza is the first person interviewed in the

House of Xtravaganza to have a full gender confirmation surgery,

In response to the positive and negative commentary of Livingston's Paris is

Burning, the ball community decided to create another documentary directed by

Wolfgand Busch, a member within the ball community. Produced more than a decade after Paris Is Burning, How Do I Look addresses the evolution of the ball community from the 1990s up to 2006. It also allows the children of the houses from Paris is

Burning the opportunity to discuss sexuality and sexual designations.

With conflicting attitudes regarding sexual reassignment, the question raised is what happens when the next generation takes power as the mothers of their groups? For example, the younger generation such as Carmen Xtravaganza and Octavia St. Laurent, once kids of the ball community, are now mothers of their houses. Most of the newer generations beyond Carmen Xtravaganza and Octavia St. Laurent have had full sexual

93 affirmation surgeries. However, in the middle of the binary oppositions between transgender and transsexual realities, there is another life as a third-sex.

Carmen Xtravaganza and Octavia St. Laurent are considered third-sex because they had castrations, breast augmentations, and necessary plastic surgery to pass as women.

Octavia St. Laurent explains that third-gender is basically that she and Carmen Xtravaganza were born with more female hormones than male. She explains: "You don't have to do anything to make yourself look like a woman because only God knows you are a man, but you look just like a girl" (How Do I Look). Carmen responds by claiming: "I started taking hormones at sixteen and, at eighteen, I got castrated. You go through electrolysis and once you get castrated, everything falls in place. So, if you're a skinny boy who looks feminine and you're castrated, you're basically a woman" (How Do I Look). While Puerto Rican members of the House of Xtravaganza discuss sexual identity, there is no dialogue about their national identity. Also, when Carmen Xtravaganza and Octavia St. Laurent were growing up, there were very few transsexuals and many third-sexuals. At the time of their interview, there were very few third-sexuals due to the AIDS epidemic. The AIDS epidemic hit the gay and transgender community hard during a time that monetary excess and transgender identity thrived.

When looking at (dis)illusions of living an alternative life of wealth, one question is whether the younger generation in Paris Is Burning is subverting or internalizing the standards of whiteness. With femininity playing a large role, how might this question be reflective within generational differences and sexual identity? Pepper LaBeija addresses wealth, or the lack thereof, of the younger generation's resources to succeed in a largely

94 white-centric society. In fact, LaBeija also presented his idea of not being able to feel comfortable about being poor. He compared the excess of forty-two room mansions to his three rooms. He asks; "Why did they get to have it and I didn't. I felt cheated. I always feel cheated out of things like that" (Paris Is Burning).

Within the younger generation, many wanted to be wealthy and famous which is tantamount to whiteness. For example, Octavia St. Laurent had an obsession with being a supermodel and idolizing models such as Paulina Porizkova and other women who were

"real women who posed as real women" (Paris Is Burning). This is something she subconsciously knew she couldn't fully be. Venus Xtravaganza, on the other hand, had disillusioned obsessions of a stereotyped fantasy. She fixated on the imaginary comfort she would have by being taken care of by a wealthy husband and having children and a washing machine. When pressured about her work as a hustler, she referred to it as "giving favors."

She evaded questions about her work, hustling on the piers.

Then she compared her work to that of a housewife, explaining that receiving favors from anonymous men is like housewives having to use sex as a tool for getting what they wanted. So, as the film might aim at subverting standards of whiteness and femininity, these standards appear to be more internalized. Even though Pepper LaBeija attempts to rationalize his perspective of viewing wealth, he fails when attempting to compare his wealth to a television series that represents unrealistic opulence. This raises the question of how successful the film was in encouraging the ball community to identify their nationality and the balls as spaces to express their sexuality.

95 In response to her viewing of the film, bell hooks presents a scathing critique of

Livingston and her debut as a director, as a white, Ivy-League-educated director of a film dealing with a subculture of people of color. In "Is Paris Burning," an article from Black

Looks: Race and Representations, hooks traces representations of the black male from the specter of the "powerful rapist" to the "emasculation of the black male as spectacle," critiquing the white assumption of a neutral gaze in visual culture (145). hooks explains that, within white supremacist and capitalistic patriarchy, the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, "has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness.

Just to look at the many negative ways the word ‘drag’ is defined reconnects this label that is seen... as retrograde and retrogressive" (148). hooks's opinion is that a man to appear as a woman is always viewed as a loss, a source of ridicule.

bell hooks stresses the disempowerment of these ball communities and the ways a racist white patriarchy has appropriated black men as silly and childlike. She accuses

Livingston of creating a portrayal in Paris Is Burning that misrepresents the black experience. Livingston is accused by hooks of not producing an authentic representation of the ball community, creating a fictive representation of whiteness and a sexist idealization of white womanhood as more important than her subjects' experience of community and of crossing the boundaries of gender at the balls. In addition, hooks claims that, within the culture of drag, Livingston fails in representing this idea of femininity embodied by whiteness, explaining that people of color are "daily bombarded by powerful colonizing

96 whiteness that seduces that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation of whiteness" (150). hooks also blames Livingston for oversimplifying the responsibility and accountability for an unprogressive awareness of the politics that are necessary when representing the black community. In response, Livingston explained to

Georgia Brown in the Village Voice that she is not presuming the role of an expert on the gay black experience. After the interview is published, hooks later attacks Livingston's comment as a position of cultural arrogance.

In response to hooks's article, Judith Butler uses the documentary as a foundation of the subversion of gender as a social construct in (Bodies that Matter 126). For example,

Butler questions black culture when Venus Xtravaganza passes as a white woman. She ultimately challenges what is factual in the balls, stating that the ball participants like

Venus’s desires are "the phantasmatic promise[s] of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimization" (387). The attempts of rescuing oneself from these inequalities raises the question of the differences within the generations within the ball community and their existential ties to one of New York's subcultures. The generational differences of the subversion of gender as a social construct is also addressed in Mayra Santos Febres's protagonists in Sirena Selena.

Sirena Selena is a fictional account of Sirena and Martha Divine. Honduran-born

Martha is one of many Latin American exiled transgender women in the seventies – eight years after the Stonewall riots – who immigrated to New York City and made a living by performing at La Escuelita and had ties to the ball communities (92). Like Dorian Carey, a

97 transgender woman in the New York City ball community, Martha was famous for impersonating Barbara Streisand and Bette Midler, even though she claims to identify with her Latina roots (22). When Martha moved to Puerto Rico, her husband paid for her breast augmentation and hormones (53). He also put her up in a condominium in El Condado, San

Juan. She left hustling in order to sing at the Blue Danube that she eventually owned (3-4).

She eventually opened a boarding house to bring young hustlers off the streets of Santurce.

One of the young youth she saved from a brutal beating is Selena. She quickly recognized her signing talent. At 15 years old, child labor laws prevented Selena from performing in

Puerto Rico. Hence, Selena planned to go with Martha to perform in the Dominican

Republic in order to make enough money to move to New York and become part of the ball community (5).

Like Carmen Xtravaganza, Martha had a growing anxiety of having male anatomy and being discovered as transgender (10-13). Before she boarded the plane with Selena to go to Santo Domingo, she thinks, "that someone, in the middle of the takeoff, might point a finger at her and shout, 'Look at that. That is not a woman.' And they would turn the aircraft around and force her from it, throwing her suitcases to the ground. Her bags would open, suddenly spewing high heels...The captain himself would deplane to insist that she had no right to enjoy... traveling" (10). She had plans to have gender confirmation surgery from the money she made as Selena's agent, stating: “The operation would liberate her from her worst fears… Never again, the fear of being kicked off an airplane in the middle of takeoff.... Then she could finally turn herself into a real lady; have a single body, and

98 moneymoneymoney” (11). The novel is also about Selena's desire to become a famous bolero singer and to make it big in New York. Like Octavia St. Laurent, she had dreams of becoming a household name. In the novel, Selena explains that she had always wanted to have anatomical characteristics that were delicate and slender and that her penis was an anatomical mistake. These desires were almost a carbon copy of Octavia St.

Laurent and Venus Xtravaganza's desires to become a household name and have the belief that her penis is an anatomical error. In fact, the fiction of Selena resembles the unrealistic ideas that were posed by Octavia and Venus. For example, Luisito, a drag queen from

Puerto Rico had dreams to be an exile in New York. Martha describes him as a performer who had desires to be like super models and would emulate them "because that made her divine, splendiferous, opulent too, in her fantasy—a Caribbean loca trying to be something else" (22).

Martha has this shared dream of being someone else who walks down Fifth Avenue and to deny their "miserable reality" (26). Like the transgender community in Paris is

Burning and How Do I Look, Martha and her transgender community wanted to "invent a new past, dress ourselves to the hilt, head out, and be someone new, among the spotlights and the dry ice, mirrors, and strings of lights, to start out fresh, newly born" (26). In fact, Martha has disillusioned ideas of how transforming from a transgender woman to a transsexual would shift her from a fragmented transgender woman to a whole person. The generational

99 difference in the novel is that Martha believes that she is entitled to have control over Selena because she's been to the top:

Selena had better not come to me with her attitude and bad manners. Who does she

think she is? Who does she think she's dealing with? Miss Martha has earned all the

wrinkles on her taut implants, she has earned her stripes as a businesswoman and her

elegant walk on every island on the planet. She has earned the poise needed to speak

to the businessmen who need to be spoken with in all the hotels. She has finally

earned the right to rest, free from the weight of so much toiling, so many years of

selling herself for crumbs and pretending to love for even less. So don't mess with

her; she knows what she is capable of. Just ask her Honduran husband what she

is capable of. If Selena puts on too many airs, Miss Martha can very happily put

her back in the trenches, find another talented loquita, and start the promotional

work all over again. Miss Martha knows better than anyone that the gutters are filled

with beautiful loquitas desperate for the rest of the world to know how beautiful they

are. (92-93)

Martha has been to New York to perform at the gay nightclubs. She has been in a house of other

Latin American transgender communities in New York. Yet Selena has crossed boundaries with

Martha by beating her at her own game. Instead of Martha using Selena as a means of getting money to pay for a gender confirmation surgery, Selena uses both Martha and hotel owner Hugo

Graubell III who is paying for her to perform to not only get money, but to also fulfill the desires

Martha has to have the same white-picket fence and washer/dryer as Venus.

100 These documentaries and the literary work, many questions raise many questions. How do these texts suggest that marginalized people of color deal with racial, class, sex, and gender in adverse circumstances? How does the central circumference of the white, privileged, and heterosexual men affect others’ chances towards equality instead of being marginalized? How does the community represented give transgender exiles the power to face such challenges? How do transgender exile communities define heteronormative conventions such as gender, sex designations, and family? It is possible that the narratives of the marielitos and of Paris Is

Burning and How Do I Look, along with literary works such as Sirena Selena, give these figures, both real and fictional, a voice that enables transgender exiles to strive towards strong transgender communities that allow for both, sexual and national identities. The tools of community structures help argue these questions.

The sense of self-exile within a transgender community during the Mariel exodus was largely held by the gay men and transgender women who made the journey from their nation in order to fulfill their hopes of a better future. In order to maintain national identity, they formed a bond despite their individual histories. They continued to form a bond in the barracks at Fort

Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, where the marielitos were housed. In a photograph (Figure 1) provided in Julio Capo's article "Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S.

Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978-1994, there is a warning on the transgender marielitos' door that advises them to not portray transgender effeminacy. It states

"Important Warning: By order of Colonel Melnyk, it is categorically prohibited to dress up in women's clothing, use makeup, eye shadow, lipstick, and other such things. Whoever is caught

101 committing immoral acts, either inside or outside the barracks, shall be imprisoned by the military police. Military General Staff” (79). In Figure 2, there is a group of transgender women posing for a picture in front of the "Important Warning." One is wearing a dress made out of sheets. Another is wearing curlers. This was their way of challenging military orders that prohibited transgender men from participating in women's traditional behaviors. This act of posing in women's attire and haircare was a way the marielitos forged a space that allowed for national and sexual identity, despite the military warning posted on the door. Their national identity was clear since the marielitos were sharing a barrack as Cuban exiles. The sexual identity was asserted with their defiance of the military orders posted outside their barrack door. Also, despite the challenge against the advisory, there is no record of any of the transgender women facing punishment for their actions (Pefia). Defiance against traditional gender roles is also evident in the documentaries Paris Is Burning and How Do I

Look as well as a fictional account of the Puerto Rican transgender community in Santos

Febres's Sirena Selena.

The opening shot of the World Trade Center in Paris Is Burning shows a universally- recognized centerpiece of the Manhattan skyline prior to 2001. As Sirena Selena is set specifically in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Paris Is Burning documents the fragmentation of a specific socio-economic class in the United States. It represents an endeavor towards equality that is a piece of the imagined American Dream. Jennie

Livingston states, "The drag balls themselves are sort of a glorious poem about the

102 possibilities of transformation, a poem set in dance and costume and verbal with that is akin to something by Walt Whitman or Langston Hughes" (Waters 72-73).

When questioning whether Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look portray the ball community as copying or challenging the mainstream culture, it is important to understand that these two documentaries provide the transgender ball community with a voice. This happens even though they can be perceived as reinforcing mainstream concepts of gender identities and their attempts to subvert them, even when subversion becomes secondary to internalizing whiteness and femininity. The more recent haute couture names of the houses, such as "The

House of St. Laurent" and "The House of Dior" are also questioned as mainstream constructs of the houses. Haute couture is the designing and making of clothes by leading labels. This is closely linked to "realness," a theme in the documentary that explains that a category of fashion reflects the daily existence of the ball community and how the houses are organized (Paris Is

Burning and How Do I Look). An example would be the class distinctions of representations of white-privilege; those who wear business suits and carry briefcases to work. This is a daily experience for many men in the larger communities in Manhattan. The haute couture distinction of privilege would be a man who wears an "Armani" suit. This would also be a mandatory task in the category of "realness" in ball competitions. The contestant would either need to obtain an Armani suit or create one if they cannot afford to go out and buy it.

Due to many of the contestants' inability to purchase an Armani suit, their only option is to steal (mop) or make an Armani-looking suit. The attempts to represent white-privilege often results in the art of making haute couture-looking outfits that resulted in many of the houses

103 going by a haute couture name (Paris Is Burning). This proved the houses' "realness." The fulfillment of sexual and national identities is challenged through this artifice. Rather than the transgender community’s focus on transgender identity, the focus is the attempt to be successful. The fulfillment of this success overshadows their real identity. This is also seen in Sirena Selena.

The storyline of the Sirena Selena shows that Martha and Selena attempt to fulfill white- privilege and luxuries even though both are left unfulfilled by wanting to transform their sex through gender confirmation surgery. The role of community is composed through the correlation of Martha's experience with the ball community, Santos Febres makes a distinct point to make the narrator show how the protagonists reinforce mainstream constructs of gender identity. This is represented at the most basic level of Martha emulating Barbara Streisand and

Bette Midler rather than a Latina in her drag performances and Selena singing traditional male- composed boleros (56). The representation of community in Sirena Selena also parallels the two documentaries comparatively. The distinction between the documentaries and the novel is that, while the houses in Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look place an emphasis on competing in the balls, the mothers of houses - particularly Martha - look for ways their children can provide them economic gain. Instead of ball houses, Martha had drag houses. Selena was the product of one of the kids in Martha's house who would have provided Martha the most economic gain she could have imagined.

In conclusion, geographical exile, even when defined, is always shifting and, often times, challenge each other in ways that leave exile as the only way to survive the

104 oppression that transgender women face in the name of many countries' strife towards progress. Some of the common themes represented in the history of the marielitos, the documentaries Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look, and the novel Sirena Selena: Vestida de Pena are hierarchical cast systems tied to (im)migration, generational differences within transgender communities, and the distinctive social structure of transgender communities.

Cuban exiles often migrate directly from Cuba to the United States where many of their exile family members reside (Lawrence xxvi). As an American territory, island-nation

Puerto Rico is often considered a stopping point between the Dominican Republic or Cuba and the United States. Like Caracol, a Cuban exile who made it to the United States through the Mariel exodus, many transgender women have aspirations to live in New York and perform at gay nightclubs like La Escuelita in Hell’s Kitchen. These migratory patterns to the United States from the Caribbean that I examine challenge national identity as la frontera, the border. National identity is merely represented on the borders of Cuba, the

Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. These Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries’ geographical migratory patterns are often the diaspora that leads to geographical exile.

From one’s individual Latin American country to a transgender exile community in a United

States metropolis, namely New York City, geographical exile allows the experiences of transgender communities who move and live outside their country of origin. It also allows a community for gay and transgender youth who are displaced from their biological homes and find acceptance in the same communities that share common national and sexual identities.

105 It isn’t questionable how a Puerto Rican or a Honduran-born transgender woman cannot achieve a full sense of national identity. This is largely due to all of these above references of

Sirena Selena and the documentaries that only analyze the attempts to successfully achieve a strong sense of sexual-identity. We see that national identity is often ignored in these works. For example, for both the community of the protagonists in Sirena Selena and the community of

Puerto Rican and Nuyorican ball contestants in the documentaries, Puerto Rican nationalism is a struggle between the binary oppositions of Estado Libre Asociado. This governmental form places Puerto Rico in a political definition of state-hood with the United States and freedom from the United States in the same sentence, thus dividing the country into those who wish to become a state and those who wish to break ties with the United States, to become independent. In addition, both of these ideologies ignore the need for exiled transgender women to celebrate a national identity as an integral part of Puerto Rico’s nationalism. We also see this among the marielitos who fled – often for their lives – from Cuba to the United States during the Mariel

Exodus. However, there are distinct differences between the Cuban exiles from the Mariel exodus and those in New York City. The marielitos stayed in close quarters upon their arrival to the United States and maintained a sense of sexual and national identity.

As Cuban refugees, the transgender community among marielitos was able to maintain their national identity by living as Cubans in opposition to non-gay and transgender marielitos.

Also, by way of living together in these camps, they forged sexual identity through their strong sense of community. Once they migrated to New York, communities shifted into a sexual communality rather than national. This is largely due to a multiplicity of countries where transgender women went into exile due to the country’s opposition to their sexual identities.

106 CONCLUSION

In my introductory first chapter, I discuss the spaces of prison, drag, and exiled communities in the United States, Cuba and Argentina. Gay men and transgender women struggled to maintain both sexual and national identities in both countries. My aim is to re-open the dialogue concerning Latin American identity politics and expand it to examine how gay and transgender communities strove for national and sexual identities within oppressive situations, namely prison, within their respective countries, and in exile. In order for gay men and transgender women to maintain their sexual identity, exile is the fictional protagonists’ safest option but is not solely voluntary. I explore how Cuban and Argentine writers, Puig and Arenas, and filmmakers, di Tella, Babenco, Schnabel, Gilpin, Livingston, and Busch, establish these communities in order for their protagonists to share a common ground and to strive toward these dual identities together. However, as I argue, the protagonists do not always succeed in attaining both identities and must choose one over the other.

In the second chapter, “Prison as Community,” I analyze prison communities in Arenas’s

Antes que anochezca and Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña. I also examine prison as community in the film adaptations of these novels and in the documentaries Mauvaise Conduite and

Prohibido: here, I supplement real-life situations to support the readings of these novels and film adaptations. These novels and their film adaptations address the experiences of gay men and transgender women within historical draconian governments during Argentina’s La Guerra

Sucia and the Cuban Revolution.

Obtaining and maintaining dual forms of identity were not fully successful for the protagonists. For example, in Beso de la mujer araña and the film adaptation, Kiss of the Spider

107 Woman, Valentín is dedicated to his national identity through his political philosophy. The authoritarian government under Perón oppressed any ideas that were not part of national struggle towards progress. Yet Valentín also believes that anything outside of the struggle is contrary to his attempts to undermine the government. On the other hand, Molina chose to maintain his sexual identity by identifying with the heroines of the films he reenacts.

The common construct of Arenas’s novel Antes que anochezca and its film adaptation,

Before Night Falls, is not necessarily found in forging a space for national and sexual identities.

Rather, Arenas isolated himself even further by being sequestered from the revolution. Arenas set up a personal vendetta against Fidel Castro, due to the atrocities that become the subject of his writings, and smuggle them out of the country to be published without censorship.

In the third chapter, “Community is a Drag,” I argue that gender roles and drag performances are rituals that enable drag as a community. Keeping in mind Puig and Arenas’s protagonists’ experiences of drag communities in prison, I also examine Felipe and Gilpin’s documentary Mariposas en el andamio. In the documentary, members of the drag community explain how they subverted gender roles through their transformation from men to women. They ultimately defied machismo and forged spaces in houses owned by members of the drag community. Their eventual acceptance of their drag performances and sexual identity in La

Guinera and throughout Cuba allowed them to become an integral part of the Cuban nation, allowing for national identity.

In the fourth chapter, “Exile Communities in the United States,” I discuss the role of exile in Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena: Vestida de Pena, and two documentaries, Livingston’s Paris Is

Burning and Busch’s How Do I Look. Geographical exile allowed the protagonists, immigrating

108 from various Latin American countries to the United States, the attainment of sexual identity that is not tolerated in their Latin American countries of origin. Transgender communities also serve as a space for displaced gay and transgender youth who choose sexual identity over their biological family unit. While both children and adults share many of the same transgender communities, they also have differences according to positional hierarchy, generation, and distinctive social structures. I explore these constructs chronologically by first examining the marielitos, followed by the documentaries, and then by Santos Febres’s novel; in all of them I find the hierarchical, generational, and social structures that differentiate their experiences while striving to maintain dual identities: sexual and national.

Many gay and transgender marielitos were among those who fled Cuba during the Mariel exodus and maintained their sexual identity. Their sexual identity was the reason they were able to immigrate to the United States through the port of Mariel. In addition, moving together and living in close quarters when detained in the United States, the marielitos inadvertently maintained their national identity due to their shared experiences and oppression by the Cuban government. Therefore, the marielitos were able to possess both forms of identity. However, the documentaries Paris Is Burning and How Do I Look, and the novel Sirena Selena: Vestida de

Pena only portray attempts to successfully maintain their sexual identity without considering their national identity.

My analysis complicates the histories and tyrannies in Cuba and Argentina. However, the movements of progress concerning gay and transgender rights has greatly improved in the succeeding decades. Arenas’s fictions were censored in Cuba beginning with his second novel,

El mundo alucinante, in 1969. His only book published in Cuba was Celestino antes del alba

109 (1967). His autobiography. Antes que anochezca, was published after his death in 1990. The film adaptation, Before Night Falls, was released a decade after his death. Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña was censored in Argentina upon its publication in 1976 and was subsequently published in

Spain (Levine 258). The film adaptation of Puig’s novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, was released after democracy was restored in Argentina.

Both countries have made significant progress in recent decades regarding gay and transgender rights. In the case of Cubans, the Mariel exodus in 1980 was the first event to make international news concerning human rights abuses of Cuban exiles, including gay men and transgender women (Victoria 133-134). Four years later, the exodus was followed by a scathing documentary, Mauvaise Conduite, about the abuses of Cubans, many who fled to the United

States during Mariel.

Thirteen years after the exodus, Tomas Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio’s film

Fresa y Chocolate [Strawberry and Chocolate] (1993) was featured at the Havana Film Festival in December of 1993. The film is loosely adapted from Senal Paz’s novella El lobo, el bosque, y el hombre nuevo (1991). Paz also wrote the film-script. Originally supported by the Instituto

Cubano el Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC), Fresa y Chocolate challenges social, political, and historical themes during the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Set in 1979, Fresa y Chocolate takes place one year before the Mariel exodus. It represents the discrimination against gay men (and transgender women) that took place during the sixties and seventies in

Cuba. The film focuses on two men. David is a naïve member of the Unión de Jóvenes

Comunistas [The Young Communist League] at Universidad de Havana who secretly aspires to be a writer. Diego is a gay intellectual who befriends David despite their differences of opinion

110 on sexual, gay identity. David mostly views queer identity as a social and psychological disease.

The film also describes how Diego was barred from teaching due to his sexual identity and his support of an exhibit of anti-revolutionary religious sculptures that his friend Germán created.

David and Diego’s first encounter is at Coppelia, an ice-cream parlor famous for gay cruising.

Diego pursues David on a bet with his friends that he would be able to lure David to his apartment. Diego approaches David at Coppelia and tells him that he has pictures of him walking out of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Because it was an anti-revolutionary production, Diego succeeds in luring David to his apartment to get the photos, thus marking the beginning of their shaky relationship.

Not unusually stylistic in form, but rather following the conventions of mainstream realist cinema, Fresa y Chocolate uses representations of Cuban music and revolutionary political ideology as current events of Cubanidad in the late seventies that impact the friendship between

Diego and David. As Diego attempts to mount an exhibit of German’s religious sculptures,

David tells his militant roommate, Miguel, about the maricón’s suspicious conduct. Miguel convinces David to investigate Diego in order to frame him for his attempts to exhibit the sculptures. The tension provoked by David’s homophobic indoctrination adopted by the UJC is represented throughout the film. However, towards the middle of the film, David begins to realize that Diego is a mature and cultivated man who conducts himself differently from David’s perceptions of gay men. At the beginning of their friendship, David turns down Diego’s invitation to partake of his imported whisky, tea, and china. However, he eventually accepts his invitation. David is also curious about Diego’s imported music and realizes that Diego is also a lover of Cuban literature, represented by his homage to José Lezama Lima (1910-1976). Diego

111 also listens to Cuban music, namely Ignacio Cervantes – and prays, albeit humorously, to a

Cuban altar that resembles Santería. Their friendship strengthens when Diego offers to read

David’s writings and teach him about the architecture and artistry of Havana. David later realizes that he and Diego have the same dreams and desires for Cuba. However, with Diego’s activism against Cuban officials concerning the exhibit, he is stripped of all rights to fulfill his intellectual capacity as an artist and teacher and is forced to leave Cuba.

Gutiérrez Alea uses Cervantes’s music to foreshadow Diego’s future. The title of

Cervantes’s composition “Illusiones Perdidas” [Lost Illusions] refers to Diego’s loss of illusions concerning his rights within the revolution. The most important dialogue in the film is between

David and Diego. David, at first, blames Diego’s parents for his sexual orientation, stating that it is their fault for not taking him to a doctor. David believes that his sexual orientation is a result of a disease of the glands. Diego replies that his sexual identity is perfectly normal and that it doesn’t affect his ability to be decent and patriotic. David replies, “But not revolutionary.” Diego responds, “Who says I’m not revolutionary? When I was 14, I volunteered for the Literacy

Campaign. I wanted to become a teacher… and what happened? This is a thinking head; but if you always say yes, or think differently, you’re ostracized.” Diego then asks David what he believes in and David exclaims “Cuba.” He then tells Diego that nobody can take him seriously because of his gay posturing. Diego then responds:

I think about men when I need it… like you do about women! And I don’t posture and

I’m not a clown. Of course, to you, anyone different is. Because a macho on the street

corner saying ‘hey man, what’s up?’ is normal to you. But I am not. To accept me, they

have to say I’m sick. Fuck it, I’m not!... I’m part of this country… and I have the right to

112 work for its future… Without me, you’re missing a piece, you stupid shit! (Fresa y

Chocolate)

The film opened up a dialogue about the inclusion of gay men and transgender women’s roles during the revolution and the years that followed. For example, this scene is included in Sonja de

Vries’s documentary Gay Cuba (1996).

Gay Cuba portrays Cuba's most controversial human rights issues concerning the lesbian, gay, and transgender communities since the Cuban Revolution; it addresses three decades of conflict and the personal experiences of family, society, political institutions and culture. The one-hour film contains a scene shot at the Cuban Film Festival in which Cubans who viewed

Fresa y Chocolate are interviewed. University students, the military, and residents of Havana discuss their shift in attitudes towards gay men and transgender women. In this way, Fresa y

Chocolate forced Cuban society to challenge its inherent prejudices (Bejel 77).

During the 1990s, Cuba progressed in its attitudes towards homosexuality, which is revealed by a news report from CBS4.com on a new soap opera that features openly gay characters. The Hidden Side of the Moon appeared on a government-controlled TV channel in

2006, and had an open bisexual character (Ravsberg). Moreover, Mariela Castro (Raúl Castro’s daughter) is heading the Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX) [National Center for

Sex Education]. She has headed support for transgender rights, anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, and the support of insurance-covered gender affirmation surgeries. She is also currently heading a movement for legislation of same-sex marriages (Voss).

Argentina has also seen major changes in gay and transgender rights since democracy was restored in 1983. Now a democratic republic, Argentina has moved from the abuse of civil

113 rights suffered during military rule (Lavers). Buenos Aires, Argentina, is among the cities with the most advanced gay and transgender rights in the western hemisphere. In fact, the city hosted the fourth Gay Football Cup, attracting 500 athletes from four continents (“Argentina team”).

The city was chosen over other South American countries because of its tolerance towards the gay and transgender community. Although machismo still exists, there are encouraging signs of acceptance throughout Buenos Aires (Brown 134).

Cuban exiles often migrate from Cuba to the United States. Like Caracol, a Cuban exile, who was interviewed in the documentary Mauvaise Conduite about his immigration to the

United States as a marielito, the patterns of migration challenge a person’s ability to maintain national identity when fleeing their country of origin. Yet the transgender community among the marielitos allowed them to hold both forms of identity just as Diego does when confronting

David about his allegiance to the nation even though he was about to leave Cuba due to questioning the results of the revolution while maintaining his sexual identity.

When human rights are not respected by a government, no matter what its political persuasion, gay men and transgender women are among the first people who suffer. In Cuban and Argentine history, homosexuals – as a group – were not involved in a political struggle against authoritarian rule. Yet they found themselves the targets of violent programs designed to eliminate the so-called gay epidemic, along with striving towards national and sexual identities.

At present, Argentina and Cuba still have differing political systems. Due to their cultural maturation, both have become more tolerant of sexual diversity and allow for gay men and transgender women to have and maintain dual identities, both national and sexual. And this is reflected in their cultural products.

114 I consider the contribution of my dissertation to be the reopening of the dialogue concerning identity politics. Not only do I introduce a rigorous review and reevaluation of the existing interpretive approaches to the subject of Latin American gay and transgender communities, but I offer an innovative reorientation of a very topical subject matter.

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126 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Miguel Moss Marrero was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1989, Miguel entered The

University of Texas at Austin. After completing his BA in Government/Political Science with a minor in Philosophy with a focus on Latin American Studies in 1993, Miguel attended the

Universidad de Puerto Rico: Recinto de Rio Piedras and received an MA in English with a focus on Caribbean Literature in 1996. He then went on to attend The Pennsylvania State University and received another MA in Comparative Literature with a focus on Latin American and

Spanish-Speaking Caribbean Literature in 2001. He then entered the doctoral program in Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas. Miguel has been a full time English faculty member at Richland College since 1997.

127 CURRICULUM VITAE

Miguel Moss Francisco Marrero

Richland College School of World Languages, Cultures, and Communications English Department 12800 Abrams Rd. Dallas, TX 75243 972-238-6997 [email protected]

Education

Ph.D. (ABD) University of Texas Dallas: Defense Spring 2018 Arts and Humanities: Literary Studies, Aesthetic Studies and History of Ideas Mexican Am./Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Focus Dissertation Title: Homosexile: Homosexuality, Nationality, and Imagined Communities in Latin American Fiction and Film.

MA 2000 The Pennsylvania State University Comparative Literature: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English Mexican Am./Latino, Latin American and Caribbean Focus. Women's Studies minor. Thesis Title: Representations of Exiled Communities in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Literary Adaptations of Film and Theater.

MA 1996 Universidad de Puerto Rico: Recinto de Rio Piedras English: Latino and Caribbean Literature Thesis Title: The Protagonists' Quest Towards Identities in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Maryse Conde's Tree of Life.

BA 1993 University of Texas at Austin Government and Minor in Philosophy: Latin American/Mexican American Studies

Research Interests Mexican American/Latin American/Latino Film and Literature, Caribbean Film and Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, Film and Performance Theory and Criticism, Cultural Studies: Including, Peace, Border and Global Studies, Gender Studies, and Latin American Gay/Lesbian Studies

128 Research Experience 2011 Universidad de Puerto Rico: Recinto de Río Piedras. Independent Research on Mayra Santos Febres and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature. 2009-2010 CIEC Universidade de Rio de Janeiro Independent Research on Queer Brazilian Literature. 2004-2005 Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) Independent Research in Mexican Literature 1999 - 2001 University of Texas at Austin Benson Latin American Collection Independent Research in Mexican American/Latino Studies. 1996 Summer Institute for Intensive Luso-Brazilian Language and Culture University of Pittsburgh Bobby Chamberlain, Ph.D. (Director) 1995 Summer Institute Institute for Intensive French Language and Culture The Pennsylvania State University, University Park Thomas Hale, Ph.D. (Director) 1995 Summer Institute for Literature of the Americas The Pennsylvania State University, University Park Earl Fitz, Ph.D. (Director)

Teaching 1997-present Faculty: Richland College English: School of World Languages, Cultures, and Communications Cultural Studies: School of Humanities History: School of Humanities

Duties 2006 DCCCD Board of Mexican American Studies Articulation 2005-present Coordinator of Study Abroad Program to Guanajuato, Mexico 2005-present Facilitator of Intercultural Competence 2005 Texas State Board of Education: Mexican American Studies Articulation 2003-2006 Coordinator of Center for Mexican American/Latino Studies 2000-2004 Coordinator of League for Innovation Student Literary Competition 1997-2003 Assistant Coordinator of Honors and Global Studies

Courses

English 1301: Composition I (Special Topics). Multi-Cultural Issues. Chicano Culture Global Studies Peace Studies

English 1302: Composition II (Special Topics). Mexican American/Latino Literature and Culture Caribbean Literature and Culture Representations of Latin American Dictators in Film

129 Peace Studies

English 2326/2342: Sophomore Literature Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Film and Literature Literature of the Americas Latin American Gay and Lesbian Literature Mexican/Mexican American Literature and performance Caribbean and Latin American Women Writers

Cultural Studies 2370: Identity in American Culture Sexuality and Exile in Mexican American, Latino and Latin American Culture Shifting Identities Peace Studies

History 1302: Mexican American History Mexican American History: Cesar Chavez and the Teatro Campesino Movement

Honors and Awards 2010 Excellence in Teaching – Full Time Faculty Nomination: Richland College 2007 Excellence in Teaching - Full Time Faculty Nomination: Richland College 2006 Excellence in Teaching - Full Time Faculty Nomination: Richland College 2006 Rotary Group Study Exchange (GSE) Scholarship: São Paulo, Brazil 2004-2005 Fulbright Fellowship: Teacher Exchange: Puebla, Mexico (Benemérito Instituto Normal del Estado) 2002-2003 Graduate Student Association Vice-President: Department of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas Dallas 2001. Honors and Global Studies Professor of the Year. Richland College 1996 The Pennsylvania State University Departmental Grant: The Department of Comparative Literature for Studies at Coordenação Interdisciplinar de Estudios Culturais (CIEC) 1996 United States Department of Education from Cornell University to Study Luso- Brazilian Portuguese at University of Pittsburgh 1995-1997 Committee on Institutional Cooperation Fellowship (CIC) 1995 The Pennsylvania State University Departmental Grant to Study Intensive French 1995 The Pennsylvania State University Departmental Grant to Study Literature of the Americas 1993-1996 Student Honors Fellowship: College of Humanities, Universidad de Puerto Rico

Journal Articles In preparation "Community is a Drag (Queen): Lady Di, Madam Satan, and Sirena Selena's Performance in Seducing the Macho Man. Manuscript in preparation for Gay and Lesbian Quarterly.

130 2008 “Literature and Art: Chicana Representations of La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen. Submission to Interdisciplinary Studies September 10, 2008 2004 “Cinematic Grand Narratives: Spectatorship and Identity Politics.” Atanea. XXIV: 4 (December 2004), 135-146 1994 “Protestantism in the Obeah and Rastafarian Doctrines: Afro-Caribbean Religion in Wide Sargasso Sea and Brother Man.” Caribbean Studies, 27: 3-4 (July-December, 1994), 458-461

Proceedings 2007 "Queer Love: (Homo)sexile and Identity Among Latin American Gay Male Protagonists" Latin American Studies Association (LASA) National Conference 2006 “Nation and National Identity among protagonists in Latin American/Latino Literature.” Latin American Studies Association (LASA) National Conference 2004 “Homo-Sexile: Homosexuality and Exile in Latin American Literature and Films.” Latin American Studies Association (LASA) National Conference 2004 “Chicana Identit(ies): Reconstructing La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen.”National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies (NAHLS) National Conference 2001 “Homosexuality and Prison as Community in Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca and Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña.”Community College Humanities Association National Conference (CCHA)

CONFERENCE PAPERS March 23-2, 2012: “Get Out of My House! Get Out of My Country! Homosexual and Transgender Communities in Exile.” College English Association: Caribbean Chapter. Arecibo, Puerto Rico. March 14, 2011: Lecture on Latin American Studies in a Community College Setting. McNeese University. Lake Charles, Louisiana. March 12, 2009: Lecture on Representations of Heart Transplantation in Film. Cleveland Clinic. Cleveland Ohio. September 5-8, 2007: "Brazilian Gay Identity in Silviano Santiago's Stella Manhattan." Latin American Studies Association (LASA) National Conference. Montreal, Canada March 15-18, 2006. “Nation and National Identity among protagonists in Latin American/Latino Literature.” Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico October 27-29, 2004. “Homo-sexile in Latin American Literature and Film.” Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference. Las Vegas, Nevada February 15-19, 2004. “Chicana Identit(ies): Reconstructing La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen”, National NAAAS/NAA Conference. Houston, Texas October 30-November 1, 2003. “Multiculturalism in the Classroom and the Classroom as a ulticultural Space,” National CCHA Conference. Sante Fe, New Mexico October 24-27, 2001. “Homosexuality and Prison as Community in Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca and Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña.” National CCHA Conference. Portland, Oregon.

131 1996 Summer Institute for Intensive Luso-Brazilian Language and Culture University of Pittsburgh Bobby Chamberlain, Ph.D. (Director) 1995 Summer Institute Institute for Intensive French Language and Culture The Pennsylvania State University, University Park Thomas Hale, Ph.D. (Director) 1995 Summer Institute for Literature of the Americas The Pennsylvania State University, University Park Earl Fitz, Ph.D. (Director)

Teaching 1997-present Faculty: Richland College English: School of World Languages, Cultures, and Communications Cultural Studies: School of Humanities History: School of Humanities

Courses

English 1301: Composition I (Special Topics). Multi-Cultural Issues. Chicano Culture Global Studies Peace Studies

English 1302: Composition II (Special Topics). Mexican American/Latino Literature and Culture Caribbean Literature and Culture Representations of Latin American Dictators in Film Peace Studies

132 English 2326/2342: Sophomore Literature Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Film and Literature Literature of the Americas Latin American Gay and Lesbian Literature Mexican/Mexican American Literature and performance Caribbean and Latin American Women Writers

Cultural Studies 2370: Identity in American Culture Sexuality and Exile in Mexican American, Latino and Latin American Culture Shifting Identities Peace Studies

History 1302: Mexican American History Mexican American History: Cesar Chavez and the Teatro Campesino Movement

133 Journal Articles In preparation "Community is a Drag (Queen): Lady Di, Madam Satan, and Sirena Selena's Performance in Seducing the Macho Man. Manuscript in preparation for Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. 2008 “Literature and Art: Chicana Representations of La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen. Submission to Interdisciplinary Studies September 10, 2008 2004 “Cinematic Grand Narratives: Spectatorship and Identity Politics.” Atanea. XXIV: 4 (December 2004), 135-146 1994 “Protestantism in the Obeah and Rastafarian Doctrines: Afro-Caribbean Religion in Wide Sargasso Sea and Brother Man.” Caribbean Studies, 27: 3-4 (July-December, 1994), 458-461 Conference. Sante Fe, New Mexico October 24-27, 2001. “Homosexuality and Prison as Community in Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca and Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña.” National CCHA Conference. Portland, Oregon. October 24-26, 1997. “Brava and Sistren: A Comparative Approach Towards Identity in Mexican American and Caribbean Community Education.” American Women Writers of Color Conference. Ocean City, Maryland April 18-21, 1997. “The Jamaican Jewel: Tourism, Satire, and (mis)Representation in Trevor Rhone’s Smile Orange.” African Literature Conference. East Lansing, Michigan April 10-13, 1997. “Reclaiming Historical Spaces in the Works of Maryse Condé and Michelle Cliff.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference (ACLA). Puerto Vallarta, Mexico April 1-4, 1997. “Sisters are doing it for themselves: Sistren’s Sweet Sugar Rage and the Approaches Towards Community Education.” Representations: Voices and Visions: 16th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. Miami, Florida October 24-26, 1997. “Jamaica Talk: Trever Rhone’s Smile Orange.” Across Languages and Cultures: Creative Writing in English by Non-Native Speakers - Focus Africa. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania October 10-12, 1996. “American Women Writer’s of Color: The Quest for Self-Identity(s) in Maryse Condé’s La Vie Scèlérate and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven.” Sixth Annual Women Writers of Color Conference. Ocean City, Maryland September 12-13, 1996. “Where is the Phallus? Feminist View of Marxism, Psychoanalysis and (post)Structuralism in Clarice Lispector’s A Hora da Estrela.” Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania March 4-8, 1996. “The Caribbean Protagonist’s Quest Towards Identity(s).” Ancestry: 15th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. St. Augustine, Trinidad March 9-11, 1995. “Trevor Rhone’s Smile Orange: Identity in Text, Performance, and Film.”Migrations: 14th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. St. John’s, Antigua April 13-17, 1994. “Protestantism: Obeah and Rastafarianism in Caribbean Literature.” 13th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico October 9-10, 1993. “Santería Represented in Cuban Literature.” College English Association: Caribbean Chapter. Bayamón, Puerto Rico

134 SERVICE

University of Texas at Dallas: Served as Vice-President of the Graduate Students Association

Richland College: Member of Honor Committee since August 1997 Member of the Global Studies Committee since August 1997 Member of the Cultural Studies Committee since August 2000 Member of the Peace Studies Committee since August 2001 Chair of the Mexican American/Latino Studies Committee 2003 – 2008 Member of the Mexican American/Latino Studies Committee since 2003 Brazilian Studies Curriculum Development for BRIC initiative. 2010 -2012

Community: Volunteer for Community in Schools, participating in reading programs for schools with majority Hispanic populations since August 1997 Speaker on Organ Donor Awareness in Dallas schools, hospitals, and community functions since November 1999. I have also served on media presentations on the Tomas Laundry Baylor program on donor awareness, the Defensive Driving video on donor awareness, a Spanish Language video on donor awareness for Latino communities throughout Texas, and on several talk shows - including La Vida, a talk show that represents Latinos in the Dallas area. Vice President of Teatro Dallas Board of Directors. Member of the Dallas City Council Board of Commissioners. Member: Hispanic Advisory Committee for former State Representative Harryette Ehrhardt.

Professional Memberships National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies (NAHLS) Modern Language Association (MLA) American Studies Association (ASA) Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA

135