CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay
A graduate project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts in Mass Communication
By
Eder Díaz Santillan
May 2021
The graduate project of Eder Díaz Santillan is approved:
______Professor Richard Chambers Date
______Dr. Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. Date
______Dr. José Luis Benavides, Chair Date
California State University, Northridge
ii Table of Contents
Signature Page ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Literature Review 10
Methodology 34
Findings 43
Conclusion 68
References 77
iii Abstract
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay
By
Eder Díaz Santillan
Master of Arts in Mass Communications
According to The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, (GLAAD), LGBTQ+ representation in Spanish-language programming “continues to be rare, despite some high- profile stories” (Townsend, Deerwater, 2020-2021, p. 38).1 In 2016 GLAAD released its first ever report on LGBTQ+ representation in Spanish-language media and found then that only 14 of the 516 characters examined were LGBTQ (3%), and only seven of those characters appeared in more than half of episodes aired. Of those, only one character was transgender (Adam,
Goodman, 2016). Although the report focuses on Television representation, the findings demonstrate the lack of inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities within Spanish-language media. This research looks at the marginalization of the Latinx LGBTQ+ community in Spanish-language media and answers, what happens when a community that has been marginalized by media, tells
1 LGBTQ+ is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and other sexual or gender identities that are not heteronormative.
iv their own stories? De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, is one of the first Spanish-language podcasts dedicated entirely to the Latinx LGBTQ+ community, and the first to explore how Latinx
LGBTQ+ gender and sexual identities intersect with religion and heteronormative-family values.
This paper reports on the findings of over 100 interviews and finds that safe spaces created by
Latinx content producers allow discourse to be more inclusive. This allows members of the
Latinx LGBTQ+ community to share, for the very first time in many cases, the complex intersections of their Latinx LGBTQ+ experience and how this consequently informs their Latinx sexual and gender expression. This project also exposes the emotional and physical trauma that some Latinx individuals, who self-identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, experience when raised with heteronormative family values and institutionalized religion.
Keywords: Latinx, queer, jotería, podcast, intersections, counterpublics.
v Introduction
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay [From a Small Town, Catholic and Gay] is one of the first Spanish- language podcasts exploring the intersections of Latinx LGBTQ+ stories. Latinx is used throughout this paper as a gender-neutral term for Latin Americans. Queer and Jotería are also used to refer to the Latinx LGBTQ+ community and experience. The interviews collected show how Latinx LGBTQ+ sexual and gender identities intersect with faith and heteronormative family values. The podcast was launched in May 2018, along with my application to the Mass
Communications graduate program at California State University, Northridge. The project today has over 100 interviews of individuals who identify as part of the Latinx LGBTQ+ community.
The interviews focus on the formative years of a Latinx queer person and how the intersections of religion and heteronormative family values shaped how they self-identify and self-express their identity.
The first four seasons were interviews that were conducted in-person with individuals who reside in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Most of them shared with me the memories of self-rejection rooted in the binary family values imposed on them in their childhood. In the middle of the fifth season the COVID-19 global pandemic forced me to explore ways to record the podcast from my home. The result has been over 30 interviews of individuals who live outside of the United States. Their stories added a valuable difference to the stories from the Los
Angeles metropolitan area. That differentiator was geography.
Before I expand on the stories shared on De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, via the virtual recordings done during the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to expand a little bit more on why geography is so important to this project, so much so that it is highlighted in the title. “De
Pueblo,” means from a small town. A Latinx small town is usually a construct of traditional
1 family values and in the case of the Mexican pueblo where I was born, the town is also literally built around a church. The urban design rotates around the central plaza that houses usually a government building opposite of the location’s main church. In my hometown of Encarnación de
Díaz Jalisco, la Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, [Parish of our Lady of the
Incarnation] is the physical and cultural center of el pueblo [the small town]. It stands opposite of the government building. This is true for almost every small town and every city in my home country, including México City, where El Palacio Nacional [National Government Palace] stands next to the Catedral Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México [México’s Metropolitan Cathedral].
How geography affects Latinx queer identities and queer expression is reflected in the interviews of this podcast. Almost every Latinx queer individual interviewed in Los Angeles has access to safe spaces where they can fully express their identities. Most of them have access to resources that help them or have helped them overcome the self-rejection experienced early in their life. The stories that were added from outside the United States showed a different reality. I have to be very careful not to generalize, but overall, the stories were not the same. The new interviews from outside the United Sates described more hostile social environments. They spoke of limited resources, for mental health, sexual health and even limited access to safe spaces. I also encountered a couple of individuals who had been tricked into faith-based conversion therapy that had been disguised as just clinical therapy. While Spanish-language legacy media both in the United States and in Spanish-speaking countries continue to underrepresent the Latinx LGBTQ+ community, the work of Latinx queer podcasters exposes the narratives that have been left out.2
2 Legacy media refers to print and broadcast media that existed before digital media.
2 Before I produced this podcast, I was the Senior Producer of the highest-rated Spanish- language morning radio show in Los Angeles. I was also on-air talent for KLVE 107.5 FM, a property of Univision Radio. I am also an openly gay man to my family and friends. I knew, from a personal point of view, that stories like mine were absent from Spanish-language media as a whole, but I also knew that as a content producer for a top radio show, I was partly responsible for my community being underrepresented. Around September 2017, I brought up the possibility of me “coming out” and sharing my story with our listeners as a gay man.3 I wanted to do it on October 11th, known as National Coming Out Day. It is an annual awareness day for the LGBTQ+ community and the impact their visibility can create. According to The
Human Rights Campaign the date was established in 1988, and it lands on the anniversary of the
1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The date seeks to empower individuals who feel safe, and willing to do so, to come out of the closet. “We first observed
National Coming Out Day as a reminder that one of our most basic tools is the power of coming out. One out of every two Americans has someone close to them who is gay or lesbian. For transgender people, that number is only one in 10” (Kahn et al, 2018, National Coming Out
Day).
The hosts of the show, who had the last word on what went on the air responded to my request to come out on-air by saying, “no, we don’t talk about that on this show, our audience doesn’t want to hear that.” It broke my heart, I think because as a trained producer for that show and for that radio station, a part of me agreed. When I became a radio producer, I myself was actively not including the stories of Latinx queer individuals. I had been trained to believe that our story was not something people wanted to hear about. As a queer individual, I was still doing
3 Coming out is a colloquial phrase used to describe when someone from the LGBTQ+ community self- discloses their sexual or gender identity.
3 everything in my power to hide my queer identity. The first time I ever recorded my voice, a production manager heard my demo and said, “whoever that voice is, do not use him again because he sounds like a faggot.” It took me years to feel confident recording my voice again, and to this day, if I feel I do not sound “masculine” enough when I record, I feel I did my job wrong.
When I was 28 years old, I moved to Las Vegas to host my first full-time radio show. The station was owned by Univision Radio, it was KRGT 99.3 FM. At the time, I was out to my friends and family, but I was not out as an on-air personality. The radio station that was considered our direct competition in the market, a station who I would rather not name, created a promo that outed me as a gay man in a derogatory way. They placed the 30-second promo on high rotation, meaning it was played many times within an hour. The first time I heard it, I was driving my car and I pulled over to the side of the road and cried. I felt naked and embarrassed. I felt that I was going to be rejected by my colleagues and asked to resign. More importantly, I feared what could happen knowing that everyone who listened to that radio promo, now knew I was gay. That moment was a turning point for me as a radio producer and radio personality. I realized that I needed to help change the Latinx queer narrative in Spanish-language media, even if that meant that I could lose further job opportunities. To help contextualize what it felt like to be me back then, Ricky Martin had just publicly come out in 2010,4 two years before I had moved to Las Vegas. The United Sates Supreme Court had not yet ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right in every U.S. state, that happened until June of 2015. Luis Sandoval had not yet come out in the morning broadcast of Univision’s Despierta America. That happened
4 Ricky Martin is renown Puerto Rican singer, songwriter, actor, author and producer.
4 five months after this podcast was launched, and according to Sandoval, there were many reasons that led to that decision, and this podcast was one of them.
Through my own personal experience as a Spanish-language media content producer, I felt a personal urgency to create change. I feel some of that same guilt as I write my story on this academic paper, a guilt that stems from a part of me that is used to hiding or silencing the parts of my identity that I was raised to believe people don’t want to hear about. My entire being contributed to my work in radio, my entire being has contributed to my work in academia, and my entire being has been largely marginalized by both institutions. This is why now my story is woven into all of my work, because everything I am elevates and contributes to everything I do.
My work and my story prove that while media and academia can marginalize certain communities, community and localized storytelling, as counterpublics hold a power to revolutionize and liberate my identity. This research looked at the lack of Latinx queer stories in
Spanish-language media and build a podcast archive of stories in order to answer, what happens when the Latinx queer community, after being marginalized by Spanish-language media, is able to tell their own stories? It also answers the question, is Latinx queerness something we are not willing to talk about?
I left my job with Univision Radio in 2017, largely influenced by the lack of support to be openly gay to my audience among other reasons. I launched De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, along with my application to graduate school. I should add here that after the podcast and a break from radio, I was offered to go back to a nationally syndicated show with Univision Radio again, and this time I did as an openly gay man in the summer of 2019, but I left shortly after in December, again by choice. Since then, Spanish-language media has evolved. On October 11th, 2018, Luis
Sandoval, correspondent and producer for Univision’s television national morning show,
5 Despierta America came out as a gay man. In 2019 the segment of him coming out on National
Spanish-language television won a GLAAD award. (Katz, 2019). Although he was not the first gay man to work in Spanish-language television, nor was he the first to come out publicly,
Sandoval’s coming-out made international headlines because of how rare it continues to be, to hear a gay man speaking openly about his queer identity on Spanish-language media.
Luis Sandoval shared his story in De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, the same week that he came-out on national television. The podcast has provided individuals like Luis the opportunity to tell their story in extensive detail, in a way that broadcast commercial media cannot. His interview was published on October 11th, 2018. It is 41 minutes long. His coming out segment on
Despierta America, Univision’s morning television show, was less than 10 minutes. The podcast format allows a public to be formed across geographical barriers. The interviews of De Pueblo,
Católico y Gay, reach over 90 countries. The podcast format allows the episodes to reach anyone in the world on demand, that is why Ilse was able to discover the podcast. I recorded with Ilse in
April of 2020; she lives in her birth-state of Oaxaca in México. She shared with me that she had come out to her family shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic started, in part, inspired and empowered by the stories she heard on this podcast. She shared that when I took a hiatus in
December of 2019, she thought the podcast would no longer be produced, she said:
Pensé igual y ya se acabo y ya no existe, y me puse a llorar… y en eso vi en Instagram
que subiste una historia que ya ibas a subir el intro de la cuarta temporada. Yo llore, yo
quedaba feliz, así súper bien, no estoy sola, todavía están ahí… y van a hacer más
podcasts para que yo no me sienta sola. [I thought maybe it’s over and it doesn’t exist
anymore (the podcast), and I started to cry… and then you posted on Instagram stories
that you were about to upload an intro to the fourth season. I cried, I was happy, super
6 good, I’m not alone, they’re still there… and they will continue making the podcast, so I
don’t have to feel alone.] (Díaz Santillan, 2019).
What I found recording stories during the pandemic was an international community that had been built thanks to the reach of digital media. Every Monday when I release an episode, my listeners are waiting for the episode to show up on their device. Each episode has about 500 downloads, on average, in the first 6 hours after its release. This shows the immediate connection that the audience has to each episode in this project.
For most of the listeners living abroad, this podcast is their only safe space. They have shared with me how it teaches them language to self-identify with, it exposes them to the internalized homophobia and transphobia that is often hard to recognize in the self, and that is rooted in the religious and family values Latinx LGBTQ+ individuals are raised with. The podcast-format has allowed for this community to grow because it allows the audience to tune in with privacy. Most of the people who I have interviewed, tell me that they hear the episodes through headphones either at night when they’re in bed, at work or while they commute in their daily life. The fact that these stories are accessible via their personal smartphone and with the privacy of headphones protects them from being exposed for interacting with queer content.
This is the reason I am leaning on the work of Michael Warner and his expansion on the theory of publics and how counterpublics, inform queer spaces for discourse. My project was born from a need to create a space for stories that the larger Spanish-language media spectrum often ignores. A space unlike any before it, to give full agency to queer individuals to share their stories. The goal was not to romanticize the story, to frame it, or to dramatize it, the goal is also not to stereotype them, but to just tell as many stories as possible, as in depth as possible exploring the many intersections that an individual can experience, and to create a
7 comprehensive archive of the Latinx LGBTQ+ experience. What happened almost immediately was an instant connection with an audience that had never seen their story reflected in media.
Individuals began volunteering to share their own stories, inspired by the episodes they were hearing, they were motivated to share their own. I have only invited a handful of those who have been featured, including my father, my mother and my grandmother. Many of those self- volunteered guests say a variation of this sentence, “this is the first time I tell my story, and I am here because I was inspired by what I heard.”
I am passionate about storytelling, especially in the form of audio because before we learned how to write or how to visually record ourselves, we learned how to speak and how to listen. Sharing our experiences through our own words is the most accessible and familiar form of communication. Digital platforms today allow the stories we tell with our voice to have global reach. They have made the magic of conversation storytelling accessible to a virtual community.
For queer storytellers this is providing something that was unattainable before. The power to tell our own stories and to hear the stories of others without having to be in the same room, in the same city or in the same country. The community interacts with the same content but not at the same time, an individual listener can pause, repeat an episode or simply wait to hear it for as long as they please. My father says that one of his earliest childhood memories growing up in rural
México, is of people gathering around a portable radio device to hear a sports broadcast or a radio-novela [radio soap opera]. I think of the podcast listener as a similar collective experience, except each listener is in a different location, date and time. In De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, the audience is participating not just in the growth and consumption of the podcast, they are participating in the creation of content itself. They are telling the stories and then they are listening to the stories told.
8 The under representation of queer stories in Spanish-language media matters, it matters for those who do not identify as part of the Latinx LGBTQ+ community, but especially for those who do and do not get to see themselves represented in the mediums they consume. In their
2020-2021 report Where We Are on TV, The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
(GLAAD) did a survey with Netflix, they polled adults in México and five South American countries and found that “a majority of respondents (68 percent) said they had watched a show or film that gave them a better understanding of the LGBTQ+ community” (Townsend, Deerwater,
2020-2021, p. 04). GLAAD says sharing stories from the LGBTQ+ community in entertainment, news, and digital media accelerates acceptance (GLAAD, 2021). De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, has generated more than 350,000 unique downloads, it is heard in more than 90 countries and was ranked as one of the 100 most listened-to podcasts in its category for all of 2020 in México’s
Spotify charts. Most importantly, it has had a profound impact on individuals who had otherwise not seen themselves represented before in a Spanish-language medium, and it has motivated many of them to tell their story for the first time.
9 Literature Review
To first understand how Latinx queer content creators are using podcasts to create messages that are rejected by mainstream media, this review of literature will introduce the theoretical framework of Michael Warner’s counterpublics. It will also review Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles, and how it grew from being a counterpublic itself when it was first emerging in the United States, to becoming the medium that now establishes the behaviors and priorities that dictate what is acceptable. This review is also informed by Jotería Studies, or the closest Spanish-language term for Queernes. Before this paper summarizes the theories and frameworks, I want to take a moment to acknowledge all the stories of Latinx queers like myself, all the stories told and all the ones that remain untold. Thank you to all who grew up to understand your identity pushed past the limits that heteronormativity imposed in media and other institutions including religion, family and academia. Thank you, to those doing the work academic work alongside me, either visibly or in the privacy of their identity. Thank you to all who live and express your Jotería in your own way. The work is immense and with a complexity that I am not capable of explaining.
Theory of Counterpublics
Michael Warner says the notion of a public came to be in the beginning of the 18th century. A concept that explained who a publication was addressing. The message in order to be publicized is crafted by highlighting and using what will allow strangers to be co-involved. The message is crafted by omitting everything that makes us unique for the publication to be successful. It is what inspired books to be written, what built the radio broadcasts and what digital media thrives on, what unites us all. Whoever is producing the message for the public, will leave out all the parts of their identity and expression that do not fit in with the public.
10 Warner says history contextualizes a public as a, “privilege that requires filtering or repressing something that is seen as private.” (Warner, 2005, p. 23). To better understand how the public is formed, we should analyze how the publication or broadcast is produced. If the publication or broadcast carries a message crafted for a dominant audience, it already understands that the public is first the social totality. Our entire potential reach is the public. If the message reaches a majority of the social totality with something they all have in common, they go from being complete strangers to intimately relating to each other because of the message.
Warner adds that a public is also a concrete audience in a common space and time. An audience attending a concert, the faithful listening to a priest, the students at a lecture. They are all a public. This is probably the only public that can be visibly quantified. We can see who is there, we can see who leaves, we can see if anybody walks in halfway. They are all the public that have something in common, space and time, but also an acknowledgment that the message is for them. Warner says that a message in public speech has to be broad enough so that it isn’t an address to a specific person, so that there is room for strangers to also consider a speech addressed to them. This will allow the public to grow, it will allow new members to find the speech engaging. Both a defined attendee of a public speech as well as an undefined stranger to the speech should find something in the message that speaks or relates to them, “public speech must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers. The benefit in this practice is that it gives a general social relevance to private thought and life” (Warner, 2002, p.
418).
This private thought and life are the agency we all possess to determine if we are part of this message, if we are the public. This is what allows us the agency to decide if this speech is meant for us and why or why not. If it is, then we engage and we feel familiar to all those who
11 are engaging with the message as well. If it is not, then we retract. “It seems more to the point to say that publics are different from persons, that the address of public rhetoric is never going to be the same as address to actual persons, and that our partial nonidentity with the object of address in public speech seems to be part of what it means to regard something as public speech”
(Warner, 2002, p. 418).
Warner talks about a third public that is different from that of a public speech in that its medium is not defined by a unifying moment, space or time. This is the public that now chooses when and how to engage, and Warner puts his own writing as an example,
If you are reading (or hearing) this, you are part of its public… Of course, you might stop
reading (or leave the room), and someone else might start (or enter). Would the public of
this essay therefore be different? Would it ever be possible to know anything about the
public? (Warner, 2002, p. 413).
Essentially Warner says that the public of his essay can be first the social totality.
Second, his public can be a concrete audience with a defined location, date and time. You can see the public; you can quantify it. Warner when discussing public speech says, “we might recognize ourselves as addressees, but it is equally important that we remember that the speech was addressed to indefinite others, that in singling us out it does so not on the basis of our concrete identity, but by virtue of our participation in the discourse alone, and therefore in common with stranger” (Warner, 2002, p. 418) The third public is not linear in space or time, instead it comes and goes when it pleases. The public has the freedom to never come and engage with the message; or to come and never leave. Warner says that a public “exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, websites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed” (Warner, 2002, p. 413). If this last statement is
12 true, then it is also true that all messages and mediums exist only if and when publics chose to engage.
This relationship of the message validating the public and the public validating the message is essential for the medium to exist. Warner then expands on why it is important to belong to a public, and to feel seen and to be represented because not having that representation as a public can have a consequence.
This is especially true for people in minor or marginal positions, or people distributed
across political systems. The result can be a kind of political depressiveness, a blockage
in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie,
forgetfulness (Warner, 2002, p. 413).
The opportunity for a public to see their story and hear their story has an adverse effect, one of willingness to participate and to engage, which results in improved narratives. More importantly this agency redefines what has been institutionalized, this is the agency that draws individuals to challenge the institutions and the framing of mass-media to create their own platforms and to tell their own stories, otherwise Warner says, “imagine how powerless people would feel if their commonality and participation were simply defined by pre-given frameworks, by institutions and law” (Warner, 2002, p. 414). It is through this participation and engagement that redefine pre-given frameworks institutions and laws, that the public grows into its fullest form. It is through that participation that the address of a public happens. “Texts themselves do not create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public.” (Warner, 2002, p. 420).
13 Now that the ways in which a public can exist have been established, we must now understand why they exist. A public will engage with a message and a medium only when it feels that they are the target audience either directly or indirectly. According to Warner, publics require attention to exist. “Attention is the principal sorting category by which members and nonmembers are discriminated” (Warner, 2002, p. 419). This is a very important distinction of a public, the concept of “being addressed,” either directly or indirectly. Space and time of the address, and the medium of the address are not as important as the acknowledgment that you as a public exist. The public must have perceived or explicit invitation to the event, venue, gathering, ceremony, speech, broadcast or writing. The public first has to be told directly or indirectly; this message is for you. The public can at any moment walk away, remove themselves from the message by leaving the venue, closing the book, turning off the radio, leaving the church service, etc. and at any moment they can return, and they were always a public, and will continue to be a public. The message, in contrast, has to always acknowledge the public and continue to invite the public to participate. It is this attention that Warner says dictates when the public starts and when it ends, “publics, by contrast, lacking an institutional being, commence with the moment of attention, must continually predicate renewed attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer predicated” (Warner, 2002. p. 419).
The public exists in direct contrast to the private. The dominant public exists in direct contrast to a frail private. Historically, men have visibly held the positions power and women have been for the most part been kept private. In highlighting this, I make the same correlation that theorists have made between sex and public speech. Warner says, “the subjective anxiety over the public display of the body and the gendered norms of comportment also has a direct equivalent in liberal notions of what is appropriate for public discussion and political action”
14 (Warner, 2002, p. 42). The relationship of power between the private and the public is what changed with modern technology like the printing press, the radio and television broadcasts and most recently the internet. The promise that the private citizen, the marginalized voice, could finally transform the dominant.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas says that previous to the seventeenth century, there had been an aristocratic or monarchical model of the public in which the public in its totality was private, existing only in obedience to the dominant authority. What came with technology that widened the access to publications is what he called a
“representative public sphere.” Habermas says this was due to changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that allowed for “...a new model of publicness in which the public is composed of private persons exercising rational-critical discourse in relation to the state and power.” According to Habermas this shifted the public from a “reading public” to a “public of the now emerging public sphere of civil society.” (Warner, 2002, p. 47).
Habermas public sphere recognized a marginalized public that through media emerges to become a transformative public, thus changing the societal norms. He calls out this failed promise as the emancipatory potential of the public sphere that was abandoned rather than radicalized due to the asymmetrical nature of mass culture and the growing interpenetration of the state and civil society. (Warner, 2002, p. 49) Habermas argues that the public sphere is an ideal of speech representative of any point of view, was never fully realized because modern societies allowed public media to be more a vehicle for advertising and less a vehicle for public thought and critique. He says the realization of the ideal public sphere is made almost impossible by the modern advertising structure of mass media. Habermas says two specific conditions are largely responsible for the now difficult emancipatory potential of the public sphere. First the
15 asymmetrical nature of mass culture where those who have capital power can distribute their voice and make it harder for marginalized voices to question or challenge those views. Second, he stresses the growing interpenetration of the state and civil society. This he calls the
'refeudalization” of the public sphere, producing a public appealed for benign acclamation not accountability to power. Public opinion polls, for example. (Warner, 2002, p. 50)
Warner argues that Habermas’ public sphere does not consider the critical analysis of gender and sexuality, a significant one says Warner because, “some publics are defined by their tension with a larger public” (Warner book p. 56). Warner says that Habermas’ framework is not at odds with the idea that there are several publics, but that Habermas does not study the dynamics of power among the several publics.
Discussions within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the
world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different
assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is,
in effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its
subordinate status (Warner Book p.56).
The idea of a counterpublic is not new, in fact it is directly tied to the first notion of a public. What happens when a new public emerges, is that a counterpublic also emerges as the marginalized group from the dominant message that is publicized. Feminist and queer movements challenge the masculine and feminine parallels between public and private respectively. These are the same challenges that muxerista, feminist, queer movements have challenged in political, religious and colonial structures, all of which are also dominated with masculine and feminine power structures. These structures according to Warner are,
“masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space;
16 femininity, in a language of private feeling” (Warner, 2005, p. 24). Warner adds that although public and private are complex enough to allow for profound change, they often in practice are only seen as not theoretical at all. He says that although they are in fact abstract categories for thinking about law, politics and economics, “their power as feminism and queer theory have had to insist, goes much deeper” (Warner, 2005, p. 23.). What queer and feminist counterpublics do is use the same mediums as the dominant public, but they use it in a different way for a different purpose. It is used to challenge the dominant public to the ideal public sphere. It is important to highlight that although queer and feminist movements are counterpublics, they are not the only ones. A counterpublic can be any marginalized group from the general public sphere. For example, Warner writes, “the sexual cultures of gay men or of lesbians would be one kind of example, but so would camp discourse or the media of women’s culture” (Warner, 2002, p. 56).
New mediums like the podcast popularized by digital technology, ushered in the emergence of a “new public.” One that expressed itself differently from previous mediums, one that would radicalize the social structure. This new technological advancement to many would appear to resemble the transformation of the public in the seventeenth century. Instead, digital technology emerged with the capitalistic model of its predecessors. It almost immediately became a new platform for the dominant public, and the ideal public sphere once again was never fulfilled. The internet’s promise of universal access to information and discourse was abandoned for a global advertising platform, dominated by profit and not by the exchange of ideas. Latinx queer creators are using the mediums created by digital technology to become counterpublics to the dominating power structures.
Latinx queer content producers are using the same medium as the dominant heteronormative public, to create spaces for nonheteronormative identities and expression.
17 Latinx queer publications in digital technology are building safe spaces. These safe spaces are ones where one who cannot reveal their private identity and expression among the dominant public, can upon entry to the counterpublic spaces, express their full identity. It is a space where
Jotería is required to enter and engage, as Warner points out:
Counterpublic discourse also addresses those strangers as being not just anybody. They
are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse: ordinary people are
presumed not to want to be mistaken for the kind of persona that would participate in this
kind of talk, or to be present in this kind of scene. (2002, p. 424).
A counterpublic exists because it is also part of the dominant public, but when it speaks within the dominant public it is met with rejection. This highlights the required marginalization of the counterpublic as it relates to the dominant public. It then uses the same tools as the dominant public, to connect with strangers with the rejected message to organize in actions that seek to change the dominant structure.
Spanish-Language Radio
Warner’s work on counterpublics helps us understand the evolution of Spanish-language radio in the United States. Spanish-language radio not only informs this research, it also serves as an example of what can happen to a counterpublic discourse when it becomes the dominant public. When it comes to mediums of mass communication that were thought to revolutionize and challenge the existing social structures, first came the printing press then radio, followed by television and most recently digital technology.
In the United States Spanish-language media has grown from alternative, micro-level, counterpublic media to serving the majority of the population in many U.S. cities, “in 104 U.S. counties, Hispanics made up at least 50% of the population in 2019” (Noe-Bustamante et al.,
18 2020). Spanish-language media has grown along with Spanish-speaking audiences in the U.S.
Radio specifically has grown in direct correlation to the Mexican diaspora in the United States,
“from 1965 to 2015, more than 16 million Mexicans migrated to the U.S. in one of the largest mass migrations in modern history” (Krogstad, 2016, p. 1). Although during this period there was migration to the U.S. from other Spanish-speaking countries it was the Mexican audience that built the strongest tie to radio across the U.S. “In 1980 the Federal Communications
Commission identified sixty-seven Spanish-oriented radio stations on the air. By 2000, the figure had increased dramatically to nearly six hundred, signifying a near 500 percent increase”
(Casillas, 2014, p. 7). With the power to reach mass audiences came the revenue flows and the advertisers. This quickly transformed the medium from a counterpublic discourse to one that now was limiting itself to appeal to the dominant public. Nationally at 16%, the top Spanish- language Radio music format is Regional Mexican. The same pattern developed in Los Angeles, which in the 1920’s was the fastest-growing major city in the United States, “from 1920 to 1930 the number of Mexicans in Los Angeles tripled from 36,644 to 97,116, according to U.S. Census figures (Parlee, 1984, p. 3). Despite the diverse Spanish-speaking community in Los Angeles, according to Nielsen, the top demographic for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim urban area is the Mexican audience (78%) (Stroud, 2018). This dictates how the content of the shows and what music formats these radio stations produce. Because of the value in advertising revenue, the stations that originated as locally owned quickly grabbed the attention of media conglomerates.
Univision owned 70 Spanish-language radio stations across the country in 2008. Four of those radio stations are in Los Angeles where KLVE and KSCA, and they consistently rank #1 in the general ratings (Puig, 1996).
19 Before Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles become the dominant medium, it was a counterpublic. It originated to challenge the discourse of the dominant English-language media.
In many ways, it still does that today, but the priority is no longer advocacy, instead it is revenue flows. To understand the significance of radio as part of the Spanish-language media sphere, it is important to study the scholarship of the first Spanish-language periodicals in this country.
According to Félix Gutiérrez, the first Spanish-language periodicals in the United States served three primary roles. The first role is social control, and with this first role, it is important to highlight that some of the first Spanish-language newspapers were founded and edited by established English-language periodicals or government funds. “The earliest Spanish-language newspapers published following the conquest were apparently linked with the Anglo power structure and begun as Spanish-language portions of English-language papers” (Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 38). Many of the newspapers that were publishing Spanish-language news and information were doing it with government subsidies. In Los Angeles for example, Gutiérrez explains that government subsidies launched the bilingual Los Angeles Star in 1851. Other Bilingual publications were established with similar grants in New México and other states.
Stratton wrote of the challenges that journalism faced in New México when it came to
Spanish-language stories. “Bilingualism reduced by one-half the space available for editorials, news, and features, for the Spanish-language portion was largely a translation of the English- language copy. Moreover, it was usually a translation of the previous week’s English copy.”
(Stratton as cited in Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 39) Stratton is also quoted highlighting that only about 12 percent of the journalists in New México papers were Spanish-Americans, and while other
Spanish-Americans were employed their role was only to translate the English-language copy to
Spanish, a translation that was printed about a week after the English version. Gutiérrez says
20 Stratton was describing a situation in which the conquering group was establishing and framing the media for the conquered group, while restricting employment opportunities and controlling how and when the news was delivered in Spanish-language. “A more concise description of a neo or internal colonial control of the press could not be more clear” (Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 39).
Other papers were making a clear distinction between Mexicans and “educated Mexicans” by speaking favorably of those who were described as American in sentiment. “In 1879, Tucson’s
El Fronterizo reprinted an article from the Arizona Citizen complimenting the Spanish-language newspaper on its role as ‘the organ of the good Mexicans’” (Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 39).
Gutiérrez says the second role that the first Spanish-language papers served was activism.
“One recurrent theme through most of the newspapers is the recognition that the Spanish- speaking community was under severe stress and that it should face that stress through united collective action” (Gutiérrez, 1977, page 41). El Clamor Público, founded in 1855, is an example of a paper that was aligned with a political party and received government subsidies yet is recognized for its legacy of activism along with its 17-year-old editor. “Francisco Ramírez, gained an activist reputation for hard-hitting attacks on the behavior of the Yankee conquerors and for consistent defense of the rights of the Californios.” (Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 41). Other issues that Spanish-language newspapers were writing about were labor discrimination, exploitation, violence and lynching. El Bejareño, in 1855, was reporting and protesting attacks on Chicano carreteros [cart drivers] by Anglos according to Gutiérrez.
Although, in Los Angeles, Spanish-language radio’s main role is to appeal to the mass
Spanish-language speaking audience to drive revenue, it still sometimes continues to fulfill the role of activism that Spanish-language media has historically had. This activism role continues to be true specifically for a radio-audience that remains in constant growth from transnational
21 immigration. Spanish-language radio also continues to embrace the political activism role. When
New México’s Governor Bill Richardson formally announced his candidacy towards the office of President of the United States he turned to radio, “the announcement was made over the airwaves of La Raza (97.9 FM), a Los Angeles-based Spanish-language radio station” (Casillas,
2014, p. 1). In May of 2006 over a million people took to the streets in Los Angeles to demand an Immigration Reform. Organized by a coalition of community organizations and grass root campaigns, the protests were widely promoted by Spanish-language broadcasters and Spanish- language newspapers. The turnout was a testament to the significance and relevance that
Spanish-language radio can have when it focuses on challenging the social structures, because as
Dolores Inés Casillas points out, “its unique, interactive, real-time application in Latino immigrant communities that remain, despite booming population numbers, largely excluded from English-language political conversations” (Casillas, 2014, P. 3).
The third role from early Spanish-language press that Gutiérrez highlights is serving as a medium that reflects Chicano life. The pages of these early Spanish-language publications are document daily life, poetry, language, humor, music and other aspects of daily life. They also nurtured a strong cultural identity for the Chicano community and resisted assimilation. “An
1877 article in Los Angeles’ La Crónica, argued that Chicanos were losing their ability to speak
Spanish and coupled the use of Spanish with the need for an activist press to defend the Chicano
Community” (Gutiérrez, 1977, p. 65). The Spanish-language press also promoted the community self-help units and mutual aid societies of Chicano barrios and serve today as records of the earliest grass-roots organizations advocating on behalf of their communities. These grass-root efforts not only reflect the work that the community was doing to improve their quality of life, but also how the Spanish-language mediums have aided these efforts. The few archives in
22 existence are a permanent record of the community’s aspirations for each other and they tell us how they organized to preserve identity resisting the Anglo influence that was imposed by the dominant social structure.
Poetry, ethnic identity, migration, community self-help organizations, mutual suspicion
between Anglo and Chicano communities and political participation were all part of
Latino life in the last half of the 19th Century. The newspapers of the period recorded
these and other aspects of barrio life and in doing so provided a permanent record for
historians. (Gutiérrez, 1977, P. 66)
Spanish-language radio emerged in the United States to fulfill the same roles that
Gutiérrez highlights of early Spanish-language periodicals. Today, capitalistic forces use
Spanish-language radio to connect the Spanish-language audiences to advertisers. That is the main function of the leading Spanish-language radio stations in the United States today, and the leading Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles. In certain occasions, the medium does still perform the role of advocacy media and serves as a documentation of what life is like in the dominant audience it serves. It is important to highlight that radio only documents and represents the identity of the dominant audience, because as it has grown into the dominant media it has marginalized identities and expressions that do not fit in to the dominant public.
One contemporary example of Spanish-language radio as advocacy media are the marches of 2006. Radio, along with community organizers and other mediums, helped mobilize the millions that took to the streets, but more specifically, it was the radio personalities that were instrumental in connecting with the audience pursuing immigration reform using the radio microphone. It informs how Spanish-language podcasts are building new platforms for discourse. The personality serves as the core of the community that is built from mutual identity
23 and expression first. Popular radio hosts have always been the main drivers of Spanish-language radio audiences, who is giving the message becomes as important to the audience as the content of the message. Audiences are not expecting a professionally trained voice, they are expecting someone who sounds, looks, and lives like them.
The current popular hosts are easy to map, but historically little was written and documented of the early Spanish-language broadcasts. Scholarship recognizes that in Los
Angeles, “the first Spanish-speaking radio broadcaster on the air for any length of time was
Pedro J. Gonzalez.” (Parlee, 1984, P. 1). He hosted Los Madrugadores, (“The Early Risers”) on
KELW, Burbank California, which began broadcasting in 1927 (Albarran, Hutton, 2009, p. 6).
The program had live musical performances with announcements on job openings as well as interviews with community leaders that informed the audience of their rights, something that eventually led to the arrest of González. “His story dramatizes the difficulties of developing
Spanish-language broadcasting in the United States at a time when the Depression heightened the discrimination against Mexicans.” (Parlee, 1984, p. 2) This paper will not go into the details of his arrest but will state that community protests and diplomatic intervention eventually led to the release of González and his deportation to México. His rise and fall are told in an award- winning documentary called “Ballad of an Unsung Hero.”
The history of Spanish-language radio as a documentation of the dominant cultural identity as well as a medium for advocacy, dates back decades. A study of Spanish-language radio in 1941 found that the news that were provided in Spanish-language broadcasts focused overwhelmingly from foreign countries (80%), primarily México. “The large amount of foreign news coverage illustrates that Spanish-language radio programmers were in tune with the bi- nationality of the communities they served” (Albarran, Hutton, 2009, p. 6).
Podcasting
24 Spanish-language Radio as a medium informs how Latinx creators produce content in the podcast format. Spanish-language radio as a dominant medium also informs why the Latinx queer creators use the podcast medium to create content on Latinx queer identities. This research looks at how the podcast has provided agency to produce content to underrepresented communities and how it has reached audiences less defined by geography and more by interests/experiences.
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 transformed the traditional handheld mobile phone into a multifunctional device that allows users to be connected to each other anytime of the day. It also allowed for users to access global information feeds directly from the palm of their hand.
Because of the iPhone, smartphones as they are refereed to dominated sales of mobile phones and by 2018 almost a quarter of adults in the United States claimed to be ‘almost constantly’ online. Along with giving individual users access to global information and communication, the
‘smartphone’ as it is often referred to, disrupted other established mediums. One of those mediums was audio storytelling.
In 2001, Apple had launched the first handheld digital audio player, called the iPod. It consequently created what we know today as a podcast, a word used to describe a broadcast in short form that could be listened to, on demand, in the iPod. “The term was first used in 2004 and in 2005 was declared word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.” (Jham et al, 2008). The quick rise and popularity of the smartphone allowed users to access their music from the same device they used to make phone calls ending the need for the iPod device, which was officially discontinued by Apple in 2017. The podcast format for audio however, kept growing. According to The New York Times, more than half of the people in the U.S. have now listened to one, and nearly one out of three people listen to at least one podcast every month.
25 (Peiser, 2019). The exact number of podcasts is unknown due to the various hosting platforms that exist and almost no data is shared between them. Anyone with access to a microphone and the internet is able to publish a podcast, making it virtually impossible to quantify the precise number of podcast creators or the content that is published. The profile of the podcast creators is equally hard to identify. The data that is available proves the popularity of the format, Variety reported in 2018 that Apple Podcasts had over 500,000 active podcast titles in over 100 languages. In 2019 Spotify, a predominantly music streaming provider, announced a multi- million-dollar investment into podcasts (Lopez, 2018). Smartphones are driving the rise of podcasts; in fact, they are responsible for a 157% increase in listening since 2014 (Nielsen
Podcast Insights, 2018).
Just as with every medium before the podcast, Spanish-language creators are using the medium in their own way. They borrow from radio and challenge what radio has been unable to fulfill. Radio Ambulante’s co-founder Daniel Alarcon says, “radio is the most traditional and most loved medium in the whole continent” (Ospina, 2015, p. 76). However, Radio Ambulante is not traditional radio, it is instead an award-winning Spanish-language podcast. It was founded in
2012 by Alarcon and Carolina Guerrero and is hosted by National Public Radio in the United
States, or as it is more commonly known, NPR.
Ambulante is the Spanish word for someone or something that is in constant movement and never stays too long in the same place. Radio Ambulante can then be a literal interpretation of a radio broadcast that moves, that transcends beyond the reach of an antenna and that extends beyond the borders of geography. Alarcon spoke on the importance of creating this podcast in
Spanish instead of the English format of NPR. “For us it was a priority to create a space to celebrate, Spanish, as a communicative tool” (Ospina, 2015, p. 76). The globalization of
26 information is creating a new experience for Latinx diasporas and Spanish-language information.
For past generations of immigrants, information and communication from and to their home countries was delayed and fragmented. Today digital platforms provide immediacy to information and communication regardless of geography. Alarcon says, “We wanted to create a style of radio that didn’t yet exist in Spanish elsewhere, but that was nuanced, understanding that all stories have contradictions, that the world is complex” (Ospina, 2015, p. 76). Just as every medium before it, with growth comes the
Queer Latinx Podcasts in Los Angeles
Queer Latinx creators in Los Angeles are using the podcast as a medium to create discourse that has for too long been left out of Spanish-language and English language media.
They are hosting complex conversations addressing Latinx mental health, LGBTQ+ sexual and gender identities and expression, cultural representation, language and more. Although there is no exact data on the amount of Latinx podcast creators, queer podcasters in Los Angeles are already creating new narratives. Los Angeles-based podcasts like Tamarindo, Locatora Radio,
Café con Chisme, and De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, among others are opening up conversations to issues that have been largely ignored by legacy Spanish-language Media.
Most of the creators of these Latinx podcasts self-identify as queer and constantly point out the lack of representation they have experienced despite growing up surrounded by Spanish- language media.
Jotería Studies
Jotería studies, building on previous scholarship on queer Latinx communities, provides tools to contextualize and historicize the Latinx experience documented and recorded by De
Pueblo, Católico y Gay. To understand why Jotería Studies exists, and why it is important that
27 this research adds to the Jotería scholarship, we first have to recognize the limitations of the media and academic institutions when it comes to including queer stories and more specifically
Latinx queer stories. “Homophobia, sexism, heteronormativity, classism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and racism still exist in every part of our society” (Tijerina Revilla, Santillana,
2014, p. 177). This research only exists because of the many ways that media as an institution has marginalized the Latinx queer community. The heteronormativity that media in general frames has not just marginalized the queer community, it was largely erased the queer narrative.
Even with the progress that English-language media in the United States has had in recent years, the dominant narrative continues to be that of a heterosexual, white person.
From what Warner tells us about a counterpublic and a dominant public, is that in order to penetrate the dominant speech, one has to make private all parts of our identity that are not acceptable in the dominant public. This helps us understand why in media, at the macro level, the white gay man is the representation of the queer community. According to GLAAD’s Where We
Are on TV report, 48% of LGBTQ+ characters on broadcast television are white, 46% of
LGBTQ+ characters on cable networks are white and 51% of LGBTQ+ characters on streaming services are white (Townsend, Deerwater, 2020-2021, P. 23).
In the case of Spanish-language media, which is the focus of this research, heteronormativity and colorism, have left out the stories of the brown, black and indigenous queer communities. As established earlier in this research, early Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals in this country were not archived and scholarship has largely discovered them through research and via anecdotal interviews. Although improved in comparison to early
Spanish-language newspapers and publications, early Spanish-language radio and television in this country are also not extensively archived. The result is a limitation to the scholarship that
28 has been written about Spanish-language media, a limitation that consequently also has left out queer Latinx stories, “homophobia, patriarchy, and white supremacy are deeply embedded in our communities; consequently, there is a lack of literature that speaks to the collective experiences of Jotería” (Tijerina Revilla, Santillana, 2014, p. 172). As one of the first Spanish-language projects of its kind, De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, is a valuable contribution to Spanish-language media, it is also a valuable contribution to Jotería studies. This archive of interviews challenges the established heteronormative narratives of media institutions and the audio-format of the podcast erases the colorism frameworks that visual media promotes, “the queer Latina/o and
Chicana/o experience must be told and heard from all of our communities.” (Tijerina Revilla,
Santillana, 2014, p. 172).
Although this research does not try to map all the Jotería scholarship that has become visible in recent years, it does contribute to it. To provide some context, this research establishes some of the many ways that Jotería Studies and scholarship can exist, “the term jotería derives from the colloquial Spanish-language term joto [sissy, faggot], one of three pejorative terms (the others being puto and maricón) for gay men in México and in Mexican and Chicanx (a gender- neutral version of Chicano/a; also, Latinx) communities in the United States.” (Alvarez Jr.,
Estrada, 2019, p. 863). According to Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Jorge Estrada, the field dates back to the early work of gay and lesbian Chicanx artists and activists of the late 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s, as well as Chicana feminists (Alvarez Jr., Estrada, 2019, p. 864). The term joto, as was described earlier, is first experienced by many in the Latinx queer community as a negative evaluation of self-expression. Xiomara Cervantes5 writes about early encounters with the word early in her childhood, “perhaps it was on the playground in elementary school, when
5 Xiomara Cervantes was originally published with the name Vincent Cervantes.
29 the words faggot or queer were not harsh enough to describe young brown boys who act differently.” She adds, “or perhaps it was from my father, who expressed his disdain when I played with my sisters’ muñecas instead of playing soccer outside like my boy cousins.”
(Cervantes, 2014, p. 196). Because most Latinx queer individuals first encounter the word in a similar context as Cervantes, or with more violence and trauma, not everyone who identifies as
Latinx and part of the LGBTQ+ community in academia will understand the term as one of empowerment and as part of a field they are contributing to. Language is also a form of limitation, so it is important to highlight that other members of the Latinx queer community probably have a different word that relates to them the way joto relates to the Chicanx/Latinx experience. Also, there are some English-speaking members of the Chicanx/Latinx community who probably do not identify with the word joto and who do not use it to describe their identity.
Then there are members of the community who know the word, but don’t engage with it,
“importantly, not everyone doing queer and trans studies work at the intersection of
Chicanx/Latinx studies is comfortable saying they are engaged in jotería studies.” (Alvarez Jr.,
Estrada, 2019, p. 864).
This research affirms that the work of Latinx queer scholars who are not comfortable engaging in Jotería Studies are still adding valuable research to scholarship from different perspectives of the queer experience that reflect the complexity of being Latinx and queer. They should not be discredited or distanced from the field just because they are not comfortable with redefining jotería as empowerment in their own experience. Having said this, the field is elevating and expanding our understanding of the Latinx experience. “Joteria studies needs more and new critical voices at various intersections of identities and experiences, including the transnational connections described above and engagement with transgender voices and
30 experiences” (Alvarez Jr., 2016, p. 866). De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, contributes an extensive and first of its kind archive of new voices, identities, experiences, and intersections of the Latinx
Jotería community.
Anita Tijerina Revilla and José Manuel Santillana expand on what the emerging characteristics of Jotería identity/consciousness, “this identity and consciousness builds on
Revilla’s (2004) muxerista framework” (2014, p. 174). The first characteristic identified as part of the identity/consciousness of Jotería says that it is rooted in fun, laughter, and radical queer love. This research establishes this first identity/consciousness in every interview. Almost everyone who has shared their story, has also shared what experiencing happiness, joy and love feels like for them. This research is also based on queer Latina/o and Chicana/o and gender- nonconforming realities or lived experiences, another of the emerging characteristics of Jotería identity/consciousness. These interviews and the counterpublic discourse they create work towards unlearning homophobia, heteronormativity, racism, patriarchy, xenopho- bia, gender discrimination, classism, colonization, citizenism, and any other forms of subordination. This podcast also supports community members and family in their efforts to avoid and heal from multidimensional battle fatigue. These are just some of the ways that the work of De Pueblo,
Católico y Gay expands on the emerging characteristics of Jotería identity/consciousness that
Jotería Studies has identified (2014, p. 175).
Anita Tijerina Revilla is a founding member and co-chair of the Association for Jotería
Arts, Activism, and Scholarship, AJAAS. Founded in 2005, AJAAS self-described vision and mission is “a world that affirms Jotería consciousness and that celebrates multiple pathways for generating knowledge, sharing experiences, and becoming catalysts for social change. We seek
31 to live in a world free of all forms of ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized oppression” (Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship, 2019).
Jotería Studies is here to include, to elevate and to challenge the dominant speech in academia, this research uses it to also challenge the dominant speech in Spanish-language media, and English-language media. Although it is almost impossible to map all the queer representation, scripted and unscripted across all mediums, we do know of the scripted characters that appear on Television thanks to GLAAD’s annual Where We Are On TV report.
The 2020-2021 survey found that of the 773 queer regular characters counted on primetime scripted broadcast television series, only seven percent (54 characters) are Latinx. The same report highlights that, “with the actual Latinx population in the U.S. estimated at 18 percent (per the 2018 U.S. Census Bureau), once again the industry falls far short” (Townsend, Deerwater,
2020-2021, p. 26). The Spanish-language media portion of the report is so limited that instead of providing percentages, they list a few honorable mentions. One or two characters here and there on Univision or Telemundo which are the leading Spanish-television broadcasters in the U.S. and some appearing now on Netflix which is a digital streaming service.
There is no GLAAD equivalent for Spanish-language mediums in Latin America, which is important because many of their productions are featured in digital streaming services like
Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu among others. It is also important because production companies in México and other Latin American countries produce a lot of the programing that is broadcasted by Telemundo and Univision in the U.S. GLAAD also doesn’t monitor the Spanish- language queer representation or lack thereof with the same resources that it monitors English- language queer representation. This is a continuous institutionalized devaluation of Spanish- language media. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation does not hold Spanish-
32 language media accountable in the same way that it holds English-language media accountable.
For 25 years, GLAAD has tracked the presence of LGBTQ+ characters on television. The 2020-
2021 study is the 16th study published. The first edition published counted only 12 series regular
LGBTQ characters across both broadcast and cable compared to 70 (9.1 percent) in the 2020-
2021 report (Townsend, Deerwater, 2020-2021, p. 7). The same progress is not reflected in the last 25 years of Spanish-language television. No data exists on queer Latinx radio broadcasters in the United States. This research shall also serve as documentation that Eder Díaz Santillan was the queer Latinx producer of the most listened-to radio show in Los Angeles from 2014 to 2018, he was also on-air weekend talent for KLVE 107.5 FM. He kept his queerness private because he was told that was not what the audience wanted to hear. This resulted in emotional trauma that he experienced in his formative years when the social structure of his hometown and the religious institution that he was raised with first silenced his Jotería. His career opportunities in Spanish- language media were limited solely because of his gay identity. The careers of many more have also been limited, especially of those whose identity is less visible than that of the gay man. To challenge the lack of representation in Spanish-language media, he left Univision’s KLVE, and launched a Spanish-language podcast, first of its kind, by using all the tools he learned from radio, to tell his story. “De Pueblo, Católico, y Gay” turned into a community that has helped me begin to heal from the trauma that my identity is to be hidden, negated or self-rejected. Through this project, Eder Díaz Santillan has just begun to grow into his full power, his full identity and his full self-expression.
33 Methodology
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay includes only the stories that want to be told, acknowledging that there are Latinx queer individuals that support and engage with this project, and still choose not to tell their story. This research respects that choice and understands that even though their stories are not visible here, that it does not mean they are not part of Latinx LGBTQ+ community and experience. This project also acknowledges that there are far more intersections in the Latinx queer experience that play a role in the language that someone uses to self-identify, and that there are other intersections that are part of the Latinx experience that can also prevent someone from our community to be visible. While this project can never speak for them, it works to create a safe space for them as well. This project reaches those who want to be visible, who had never before found a medium to tell their story in Spanish.
The project starts with my story and makes it explicitly clear that my story is not everyone’s story, and that it is shared in the first episodes as my own identity, expression and intersections as a catholic gay man. It is also shared to connect with those Latinx queer individuals, who like me, feel marginalized by the lack of Latinx queer representation in Spanish-language media. In sharing my story for the first time, I reinforce that this is a safe space for others who have followed in sharing their story for the first time in a public medium. The title, De Pueblo,
Católico y Gay, is descriptive of my intersections as a gay man. With the intention to elevate the work of other Latinx queer individuals, elements to complete the podcast were created by Latinx queer artists. The logo of the podcast was designed by Mario Jacobo, a gay man from a small town in Guanajuato México. The music titled “De Pueblo, Católico y Gay,” was composed by
Tania Chan and Rodrigo Pereyra, queer musicians from Oaxaca, México. The pre-production,
34 recording, interviewing and post-production editing and sound mixing for each episode was done by me, a gay man born and raised in a small town of Jalisco, México.
Although not intentional, the first full episode of this podcast was published on June 4th,
2018. It was the first Monday of what is known in the United States, and other countries around the world, as Pride Month. Unless the podcast is on a hiatus, a different episode is published every Monday. After three years, today the podcast is an archive of more than 100 one-on-one interviews with people who self-identify as part of the Latinx LGBTQ+ community. There are only a handful of interviews with allies of the community, these include my father, my mother and my grandmother. There is also an interview with Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest who advocates within the Catholic church on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. The project includes interviews with therapists specializing in queer trauma, queer activists and Latinx queer celebrities.
All the interviews recorded between May of 2018 and March of 2020 were done in-person with individuals who currently reside in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. These interviews of the first season were recorded usually two or three days before they were published. To launch the podcast, I had a short list of friends who previous to launching the podcast, had told me that they would be willing to share their story on a platform like this. They were the first ones to share their story after I did. Among those friends is Renato Pérez, a therapist specializing in the
Latinx queer experience. His story is episode five of season one. He grew up in Jalostotitlán
Jalisco, a small town less than an hour drive from my hometown in México. Once all the previously mentioned episodes had been published, there was already a waiting list of individuals who had connected with our stories and wanted to share their own. To this day, there
35 are more requests from listeners who want to share their story on the podcast, than the time and resources available to record them.
After the first season concluded, I revised the workflow for all the upcoming seasons. I take two breaks from publishing throughout a year. The first hiatus is of about a month and a half between December and January. The second hiatus happens between July and August and also lasts about a month and a half. I use the hiatus to schedule interviews and capture most of the recordings for the entire upcoming season. Once I have around 10 episodes recorded, I launch the trailer and then publish each episode one Monday at a time. The remaining interviews are recorded as the season is being published to allow for new volunteers to also add their voice.
Each episode is usually edited and mixed with music the weekend before it is published. The platform that I have used to publish the audios is Anchor.fm, and it allows me to schedule further releases. When I can anticipate that I will be unable to edit during a specific weekend, I schedule an edited episode in advance. That platform also distributes my audios to all the mayor podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and others including Spotify. The latter now owns Anchor.fm but did not back in 2018 when the podcast was launched.
The first season has a total of 28 episodes and 20 of them are interviews. It is the longest season, all the seasons after that have an average total of 20 episodes. From May of 2018 to
March of 2020, I recorded all my episodes with Neumann TLM 103 Condenser Microphones.
All the interviews were recorded in-person in a professional recording studio. The lighting of the space was dim overhead lighting that added to the intimacy of the conversation. All the interviews after March of 2020 were recorded remotely due to the COVID-19 global pandemic to ensure the safety of myself and my guests. After March of 2020 I began to record using my laptop’s built-in microphone and the videotelephony computer software, Zoom. I had the full
36 intention to set up a studio to record from home during the pandemic, but the sound quality from the Zoom recordings, although different, was not a negative experience for the listeners. In fact, when the fourth season wrapped in June of 2020, the podcast’s audience had grown by 30%. I have been recording using Zoom since then. Using digital tools to record episodes allowed for interviews of individuals who live outside of the United States in countries like México,
Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and more. The podcast format allows for each interviewee to provide as many details as they wish about their upbringing. It allows them to provide specific details of how they choose to express and live their sexual and or gender identities.
The queer Latinx experience is not a monolith, instead it is a complex experience that requires deep context and demands the exploration of any intersection of identity that makes each Latinx story unique. This is the reason that I choose to not screen my interviewees. Most of the episodes are a recording of the first time I spoke to the interviewee about their story. There are a few exceptions. For some guests who volunteered to be on the podcast, their message that was sent to me via social media volunteering to be on the podcast, also included some of their story as they explained why they so passionately connected with what they had heard. The details of their story were never taken into consideration to say “yes” or “no” to each guest. In fact, I have never said no to someone who wants to tell their story. This podcast strives to welcome everyone from the Latinx queer community to participate. I do not want to pick and choose stories and consequently frame, through my lens, the Latinx queer experience. I do have to point out that because of the title of the podcast, most of the people who connect with it, are more than likely to have had a profound experience either with religion or with traditional family values in their formative years, especially as they relate to their queer sexual and/or gender identity. Also, because the first four seasons were recorded in-person, in the Los Angeles
37 metropolitan area, the Latinx queer individuals tend to also have an experience with migration, like myself. This does not mean that people who do not share these intersections are not welcomed or do not engage with the podcast, they are, and they do, they are just not the majority.
Most of the stories you hear speak to the emotional toll of discovering that you do not fit in to the family structure that the Catholic religion and that the traditional heteronormative family values, and Spanish-language media set.
Each interview in this project was conducted by me. Of all the interviews conducted only one has been removed from the project after the person who had shared their story, requested for me to do so out of privacy concerns. The majority of the episodes are in Spanish to make the content available to an audience that consistently does not experience Latinx queer stories in media. As GLAAD’s report points out, while English-language media continuously improves on
LGBTQ+ representation, Spanish-language media continues to only have isolated examples of inclusion. The podcast does have Spanglish (a combination of English and Spanish) episodes as well as a few English-language episodes. Each interview was conducted in the language that the interviewee felt more comfortable communicating their story in. This consideration was made for each interview to allow for genuine self-expression.
Each episode’s editing was kept to a minimum always, only taking out redundancies and or technical mistakes. For example, while recording virtually, a lag in the video software or internet connection can result in a silence or distorted audio. As the interview is recorded, my headphones allow me to catch those mistakes and repeat the question with an improved audio experience. In the editing process a story is never altered to leave out anything that the interviewee wanted to share. While the average episode is around 30 minutes, there are episodes closer to 60 minutes in length and other interviews that were published in two back-to-back
38 episodes. I made the decision to edit minimally and to not narrate interviews, to ensure that I was not framing or telling the story for the guests. The goal is that the published episode is as close as it can be to the conversation that was recorded. The following are English translations of questions that were consistently asked in each interview. Some interviews may or may not include all the questions, or they may include a different variation of one or more of the listed questions.
1. When did you realize you were different from the traditional heteronormative sexual and
gender identities?
2. What role did religion play in your upbringing?
3. How did you learn the language to self-identify as part of the Latinx LGBTQ
community?
4. Who was the first person that you expressed this identity to?
5. When did you choose to tell your family?
6. If the person had not yet shared their queer identity with their immediate family including
their parents, they were asked why?
7. Last, they were all asked if they currently would self-describe as happy? And why or why
not?
Each interview also included additional questions that were specific to each of the interviewees based on the story they shared.
Ethical Considerations
Before introducing the findings of this research, there are a few important points to highlight. First, while I have tried to avoid framing the Latinx queer experience through my lens,
I have undoubtedly framed it. Allow me to stress that while 100+ interviews can seem like an
39 extensive collection, they should not represent the Latinx queer experience as a whole. While each story has allowed this unique project to elevate stories that had never been told in media, there are many more that have yet to be told. There is more work ahead for this project and for other platforms to accurately amplify the Latinx queer experience and to fully understand all the intersections.
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, has extensively documented how geography, religion and traditional family values intersect with a man’s gay sexual identity. The interviews that touch on how queer sexual and gender identities intersect with institutionalized religion and traditional binary family values, can often trigger memories of emotional and physical trauma. The conversations that have been recorded for this project require an abundance of trust between the interviewee, the interviewer and the audience. A “safe space,” is how this podcast is often described by those who listen to it and have volunteered to share their stories here.
Episode “Anónimo,” published on March 3rd of 2019 told the story of a bisexual man who was terrified to disclose his sexual identity to his wife. He first sent a private message via social media, he was moved by the stories he had heard on the podcast and wanted to tell me, on a recorded conversation that he was a bisexual man. It was the first time he told anyone about this, ever. He also shared that he was the victim of sexual abuse as a child and that this event had confused him for most of his teenage years about his sexual attraction to men. When he started listening to the podcast, he learned the language to self-identify and he began to heal the trauma from his past. After his episode was recorded, I referred him to a personal friend and therapist that had previously also shared his story on the podcast. They worked together for two years and
Edgar came back in February of 2021, no longer hiding his identity to share how he came out to his wife as a bisexual man thanks to this project and to the therapy he had.
40 Episode “Anonymous,” it was published on September 30th, 2019. Certain details of the story, like dates and locations, were changed to protect his identity. His story touched on the emotional and physical trauma of faith-based conversion therapy as well as a suicide attempt.
For this episode, I consulted with a team of experts on LGBTQ+ trauma. What that consultation advised was to allow the person full control of the narrative. One of the things I learned through the team of experts was that having someone share the traumatic events that lead to a suicide attempt can trigger an emotional memory that feels real enough that the person may relapse into that vulnerable emotional and mental state. To create safety guardrails, I had many conversations with the person leading up to the recording. The date, time and location of the recording were chosen by him. The narrative was under his control and while he touched on the most vulnerable part of his story, I just listened, and no follow up questions were made. All the risks of sharing his story were fully disclosed to him, he still chose to tell his story because the podcast had already had a profound impact on him. He was driven by the realization that his story could help someone else.
Other episodes have touched on physical abuse, verbal abuse, bullying, sexual abuse and hate crimes. Two transgender women were verbally harassed by a heterosexual couple at a popular bar in Downtown Los Angeles the night of August 23, 2019. An altercation followed and the women, and one of their friends, were forcibly removed from the location by a security guard employed by the bar. The incident was captured on video and quickly went viral on social platforms. The podcast allowed both Khloe and Jennifer to tell their side of the story, not in an interview format, instead they were handed the microphone without interruptions. Again, they had full control of the narrative, this allowed them to share and say only what they felt
41 comfortable sharing. This technique allowed me to elevate voices and stories, and not tell the stories for them.
Each interview allows every guest to self-identify and to only disclose what they are comfortable sharing. When someone asks for the courtesy of anonymity or to change names, locations and or dates, the podcast agrees to every request. The episodes that included graphic details of violence, sexual abuse or physical harm, include a trigger warning at the beginning of each episode, as well as information to resources at the end of the episode. While this project cannot change the teaching of the Catholic church, or the traditional heteronormative family values most Latinx queer individuals are raised with, De Pueblo, Católico y Gay works to ensure that those who want to share their Latinx queer story have a platform to do it in, and therefore the choice to tell your story becomes a personal choice and not one dictated by media underrepresentation.
42 Findings
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay has allowed queer Latinx individuals to tell their stories for the very first time, and it connected those stories to an audience in over 90 countries. The qualitative data gathered is a first of its kind exploring the two major intersections of the Latinx queer experience, geography and religion, and how both of these inform queer sexual identities and expression. The value in this collection of interviews is far beyond what could possibly be synthesized in this paper. Each story shared is a finding in itself. Each way that the audience has engaged with this project is also a finding in itself. The personal impact it has had on each Latinx queer individual that has engaged with this podcast is also a finding in itself. I cannot list them all, I am unaware of them all, because although some have shared with me a version of the above findings listed, many more have not.
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, has generated 350,000 unique downloads. Seasons one through four are an extensive archive of interviews of Latinx queers in Los Angeles, who are mostly part of the Mexican diaspora. Recently in seasons five and six, because the COVID-19 global pandemic forced me to record virtually, it was begun to grow an interview archive of queer Latinx individuals in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.
The following is a breakdown of each season:
Season Total Episodes Total Interviews Total Audio (Hours) Season 1 30 26 14 hours 24 minutes
Season 2 23 23 11 hours 53 minutes
Season 3 11 11 05 hours 58 minutes
Season 4 18 15 10 hours 26 minutes
Season 5 17 17 10 hours 51 minutes
43 Season 66 15 12 04 hours 25 minutes
Total 114 104 57 hours 57 minutes
The following are overarching findings from the more than 100 interviews conducted.
For each, I will use an excerpt of an interview as support. The interview excerpts selected are meant to show the finding as heard in the voice of an interviewee. The excerpt is not meant to be a representation of the only way this finding can exist within the Latinx queer community.
One of the most common themes that is found in every interview, happens in the formative years of every Latinx queer individual. As we begin to grow into our queer identity, we still do not know exactly what it is we feel, we do not yet have the language to describe it, but our environment quickly tells us we are not supposed to express it. Renato Pérez was born in
Jalostotitlán, a small town in the state of Jalisco in México. His episode was published on July 8th of 2018, he shares what how he quickly learned to hide a part of himself.
Season 1, Episode 5: Renato Pérez
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:03:26] Platícame un poquito entonces de cómo fue para ti
explorar ya tu niñez, tu adolescencia y explorar un poquito tu sexualidad, ¿Cuándo te
empezó a caer cómo el pensamiento a ti? [Tell me a little bit about what it was like for
you to explore your childhood, your teenage years and explore your sexual identity, when
did you began to be aware of yourself?]
Renato: [00:03:39] Fíjate que es bien chistoso, porque yo sabía que era diferente desde
muy chico. Yo creo que tenía unos siete u ocho años cuando yo empecé a sentirme
diferente. No sabía qué era ni qué significaba para mí. Yo era diferente. Yo me sentía
6 Season 6 data is not final; the numbers represent only what had been published at the time this paper was submitted.
44 como más artístico, más inteligente que los otros niños, como que no pertenecía a este mundo, como que yo era, sabía otras cosas que otra gente no sabía. Me sentía como que tenía, aquí en Estados Unidos dicen "you're gifted", ¿verdad? y yo sabía que tenía un
"gift", yo sabía que tenía algo mágico que no sabía que era. [It was very funny because I knew that I was different since I was really young. I think I was around seven or eight years old when I began to feel different. I did not know what it meant for me. I was just different. I felt more artistic, more intelligent than the rest of the kids, like I did not belong in this world, like I was – I knew things that other people did not know. I felt like
I had, here in the United States they say “you’re gifted” right? And I knew I had a gift; I knew I had something magical that I did not know what it was.]
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:04:18] ¿Ósea que tú no lo asociabas en esa etapa, cómo algo negativo? [So, you were not associating it yet at that stage, as something negative?].
Renato: [00:04:21] Nada. Todo cambia, ¿verdad? Todo fue un proceso, pero al principio yo sabía que era algo diferente, no sabía qué era. Eventualmente empiezas a recibir mensajes de tus amigos, mensajes de tu familia, de que está mal, de que estás quedando en ridículo y empiezas ya a dudar de tu magia y de tu poder, ¿verdad? Ya no, ya no es un regalo, sino es algo negativo. (Renato, 2018). [Nothing. Everything changes, right?
Everything was a process, but at the beginning I just knew it was something different, I did not know what it was. Eventually you begin to receive messages from your friends, messages from your family, that it is wrong, that you are making a fool of yourself and you begin to doubt your power, right? It is no longer a gift anymore, instead it is something negative.] (Díaz Santillan, 2018a).
45 One of the direct consequences of the marginalization of the Latinx queer community is that as a community we also remain largely marginalized from ourselves. In my personal journey as a Latinx queer man I found it challenging to open up to my family as my whole authentic self.
I believed the narrative that was framed by media and society, which was that my queerness was something no one wanted to talk about. For most of my formative years, I believed that hiding my queerness was the only way to be accepted by my surroundings. This podcast challenged that assumption and opened a space for conversations that would connect us to our own identity, to our own self-discovery and self-expression, but also to our families and to our broader community. De Pueblo, Católico y Gay proved not just that the Latinx queer stories have not been told, but that there is in fact a public that is willing to listen. Yes, the 350,000+ downloads prove this already, but it is deeper than that. Each download represents a first. The first time someone told their story, the first time someone self-identified, the first time someone heard their story in a medium. The stories that have been shared here prove that this podcast is not just for the Latinx queer community but for a bigger community of allies as well. Oscar shared his story with me, and his episode was published in April 2021. He found my podcast through his father.
Season 6, Episode 8: Oscar
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:00:24] Oscar, bienvenido al podcast [Oscar, welcome to the
podcast].
Oscar: [00:00:24] Gracias [Thank you].
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:00:26] How are you?
Oscar: [00:00:28] I'm good, I'm good. Just like a little nervous but I'm mostly excited.
I've been listening to your podcast for a long time and my dad is actually the one that
brought it to my attention. He's like, I think you really love this podcast and I started
46 listening to it and binged it. And then he's the one that was like, hey, like I told them that
like we had a chatted a little bit and he was just like, you should do it. And I was like, no,
like, I don't know. And he's actually the one that, like, convinced me to do it. So, I think
he'll be really, really stoked. (Díaz Santillan, 2021b)
Oscar’s interview also highlights a shared theme in all of the episodes that have been published in De Pueblo, Católico y Gay. How every visible Latinx queer person has at some point in their life, a period of deep reflection on their identity. This period is often remembered as a turning point, one where we finally accept our identity and no longer try to conform to the heteronormative environment around us. I say we, because my story which this project begins with, also has this. For most of the stories shared in this podcast, this moment is often also a decisive moment when it comes to our relationship with the God we were raised with, one that we have been explicitly told, condemns queerness.
Oscar: [00:13:17] I think that would be like the first time that I can actually remember
having that thing, like, oh like I'm different, you know?
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:13:24] But sorry to interrupt. Did you also feel this sense of, I
can't share this, and I can't ask about this? Or was that not there?
Oscar: [00:13:32] No, it was for sure there. So, I think soon after, probably when I was
like maybe like eight or nine or something, I started to realize like I was gay. I was like,
oh, I'm attracted to boys. And there was a time, a period time where, like, I distinctly
remember, like, praying about it and being like, hey, God, I don't want to do this, you
know? I don't want to be gay. Can you just, like, switch me over? And it honestly was
probably for a couple of months that I did that. And then shortly after I came to the
realization, I have a very, very clear memory of being in my bed and telling myself, like
47 saying it out loud, being like, I'm gay. And then feeling relief, feeling just free, in a sense,
also coming to terms with the idea, I think at that time I remember feeling like, oh, there's
no one listening, I'm praying, there's nothing out there, but feeling OK about it and
feeling very like looking back on it, I realized, like, how kind of rational it was. I was
like, oh yeah, I guess there's nothing out there. But at the same time, I knew that even
though I admitted to myself, I can't tell anybody, you know, and in my head, I thought,
well, I remember creating a plan in my head and saying, well, you know, get it high and
then high school and I'll have a girlfriend and then I'll just leave and go to school
somewhere and then start over. (Díaz Santillan, 2021b).
Another theme that is consistent in most of the interviews conducted is the impact that not seeing others like us can have in how we understand our identity and our self-expression.
Often times, in our environments growing up, there were almost no examples of the lives we could lead. The very few queer individuals who were visible were met with harassment, and in some cases violence, by those around them. I interviewed Mariana Marroquin for the first season in the Fall of 2018. She is a transgender woman who was born and raised in Guatemala. She shared the profound impact that an seeing an actress like herself, in a Spanish-language movie, had on her.
Season 1, Episode 14: Mariana
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:13:59] ¿Cuándo fue que tú te diste cuenta de la palabra
transgénero y de esa identidad? [“When did you become aware of the word transgender,
and of that identity?”]
Mariana Marroquin: [00:14:06] Mira cuando, eso es bien interesante, porque la palabra
transgénero la vine a conocer hasta que vine aquí a Los Ángeles. Ok, pero antes de
48 conocer esta palabra, yo estudié teatro en Guatemala. Yo me gradué de la Escuela
Nacional de Arte Dramático de Guatemala, con maestros que eran de mente muy abierta y toda la gente era artista y me daban ciertas libertades de expresión sin ser libertina, con mucho respeto a la carrera. Y entonces, la primera vez que yo vi a una mujer que había nacido diferente, que se había operado, fue con una película de Pedro Almodóvar. El puso a la actriz en ese tiempo, se llamaba Bibi Anderson, pero ahora se llama Bibiana
Fernández y es española y la puso en una película. Y cuando yo la vi a ella yo la vi desnuda y le vi su cuerpo y me dijeron ella nació niño, ella nació con el sexo masculino y se operó y ahora es una chica Almodóvar. En este momento yo dije, wow, es posible, es posible ser quien yo soy. Es posible que mi cuerpo esté en la misma línea que mi mente y mi corazón, que mis sueños, que mis pensamientos, que mis deseos. Y fue ese momento en el que yo dije, es posible. Tengo que tomar decisiones buenas en la vida, tengo que trabajar, tengo que porque es posible. En algún lugar del mundo hay otra mujer como yo, porque mis únicos ejemplos en Guatemala eran muy tristes, eran asesinatos, eran chicas trabajando en la calle y yo siempre había crecido con eso, entonces yo ya no quería seguir sufriendo de esa manera. [“Look when, that is very interesting, because the word transgender, I came to know until I came to live in Los Angeles, ok, but before I learned the word, I studied theatre in Guatemala. I graduated from the National School of
Dramatic Art of Guatemala, with teachers that were open minded, and everyone was an artist, and they gave me certain liberties of expression without being liberal, with a lot of respect for the career. And so, the first time I saw a woman that had been born different, that had surgery, was with a movie of Pedro Almodóvar. He casted an actress that back then was named Bibi Anderson, but now is Bibiana Fernández and she is from Spain and
49 he casted her in the movie. When I saw her, and I saw her nude, and I saw her body, and
they told me she had been born a boy with male genitalia and had surgery and now she is
an Almodóvar girl. In that moment I said, wow, it is possible, it is possible to be who I
am. It is possible for my body to be aligned with my mind, my heart, my dreams, my
thoughts and my desires. That was the moment that I said, it is possible. I have to make
good decisions in life, I have to work, I have to because it is possible. In some part of this
world there is another woman like me, because the only examples I saw in Guatemala
were very sad, they were murders, girls working in the street, and I always grew up with
that, and I did not want to continue suffering like that.”] (Díaz Santillan, 2018b).
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, finds that platforms created by Latinx queer creators speak to the Latinx queer community at an intimate level. This intimacy is often referred to as a safe space, one that allows queer Latinx individuals, who have felt misrepresented or marginalized by media, to be vulnerable and share their life and details of their queer identity in a way they would not share if they did not feel safe. Mariana also spoke about this during her interview from 2018.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:41:11] Mariana, te agradezco con todo el corazón tu tiempo, tu
honestidad y sobretodo tu historia porque nos has abierto el camino por el simple hecho
de ser tú y de luchar por ser lo más feliz que puedes ser, así que muchas gracias.
[“Mariana, I want to thank you with all my heart for your time, your honesty and most
importantly for your story, because you have paved the way for us just by being you and
fighting to be the happiest you can be, so thank you very much.”]
Mariana Marroquin: [00:41:29] Muchas gracias a ti. Sabes, cuando venía manejando
para acá dije, para qué? ¿Para qué decidí hacer una entrevista, si después me voy
preocupada por lo que dije? Pero yo, yo creo mucho en tu talento y yo te he visto trabajar
50 duro y creo mucho en ti. Y si alguien podía sacar esta conversación que sacaste el día de
hoy, de la cual no me arrepiento ni nada de lo que dije, tenía que hacer tú. Y por eso creo
que te dejo aquí mi corazón, porque creo que tenía que pasar de esta manera, en esta
intimidad. No vine sin ninguna agenda. Vine completamente abierta. [Thank you so
much. You know, when I was driving here, I said, what for? Why did I decide to do an
interview, if I always leave worried about what I said? But I believe so much in your
talent and I have seen you work hard, and I believe in you. And if anyone would have
been able to get this conversation that you got today, of which I do not regret anything
about what I have shared, it had to be you. That is why I know that I leave you here my
heart, because I believe that it had to happen like this, in this intimacy. I did not come
with an agenda. I came completely open.”] (Díaz Santillan, 2018b).
Warner says counterpublics engage in discourse in private, hidden away from the dominant public. The findings of this podcast support Warner. Fabián Cháirez is a queer
Mexican artist whose work was displayed in México’s Palacio de Bellas Artes [The Palace of
Fine Arts] in November 2019. It is México’s most prestigious cultural center. Cháirez’ work was part of an installation honoring Emiliano Zapata, a renowned figure of the Mexican Revolution.
The installation had over 150 art pieces, but Cháirez’ depiction of a feminine Emiliano Zapata riding a horse became the marketing image. As soon as the image became popular knowledge, hundreds violently broke into México’s Palacio de Bellas Artes demanding the art piece to be removed.
México’s sitting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, gave a statement on the controversy during his daily briefings, “voy a pedirle a la secretaria de cultura que hable con todos, y que se busque un acuerdo, ¿si? Y que se respete la libertad” [I’m going to ask the office
51 of culture to speak with everyone and to find an agreement, yes? And for freedom to be respected] (Grupo REFORMA, 2019). Zapata’s grandson, Jorge Zapata, also spoke to news outlets on the matter, “Mi abuelo, el general Zapata, era nuestro representante a nivel internacional y esta catalogado como un hombre entre los hombres, y esa figurilla de pintarlo ahí como mujer, pues de plano lo denigra tanto a el como al pueblo mexicano.” [Mi grandfather, the general Zapata, was our international representative and he is considered a man among men.
That little figure painting him as a woman, well it degrades him, and it degrades Mexican people.” (TelediarioMx, 2019).
“La Revolución” [The Revolution] as the painting is called, existed quietly for years before it caused conservative heteronormative México to have a collective breakdown, in fact it exists as a mural in a popular gay bar in the City of México. In an interview published in March
2020, Fabian Cháirez spoke with me about how his small canvas painting made it to the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Season 4, Episode 1: Fabián Cháirez
Fabián Cháirez: [00:08:14] La pieza de "La Revolución" se expuso en algún momento,
en mayo del 2015, al lado de otras piezas mías, bueno fue una exposición individual. Y
de ahí, los dueños de un bar muy famoso en el centro de Ciudad de México, que se llama
El Marrakech Salón, los dueños de ese lugar conocieron la obra y me pidieron que les
hiciera una réplica en un mural. Entonces lo hice y fue ahí, en ese bar, donde el curador
de Bellas Artes, Luis Vargas Santiago, conoció por primera vez mi pintura a "La
Revolución". [The work of art “La Revolución” was part of an exhibit previously, in May
of 2015, along with more of my work, it was actually an individual exhibit. From there,
the owners of a famous bar in the center of México City, that is called El Marrakech
52 Salón, the owners saw the piece and they asked me to make a replica in a mural. So, I did, and it was there at that bar, where the curator of Bellas Artes, Luis Vargas Santiago, met for the first time my painting of “La Revolución.”]
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:08:59] Yo leí que La Revolución nació en el 2013, ¿correcto?
[I read that La Revolución was created in 2013, is that correct?]
Fabián Cháirez: [00:09:05] No, en 2014. [No, it was 2014]
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:09:06] ¿Qué te inspiró hacer esta obra? Platícanos un poquito de ese proceso, de cómo nació la pieza. [What inspired you to make it? Tell us a little bit about the process, how the work of art was born].
Fabián Cháirez: [00:09:10] En ese entonces, quiero comentar sobre eso que me siento bastante contento de estar juntos en la misma sala con Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Posada, bueno, fueron un poquito homófogos, pero son grandes personajes. Pero también estoy al lado de Javier de la Garza, Miguel Ángel Cano y Julio Galán. De hecho, un dato curioso es que Julio Galán y justo él, la pintura que está cerca de la mía me inspiró para hacer mi versión del charro mexicano. Entonces pues es un, imagínate estar al lado de una referencia tuya en la misma sala. Es para mi estaba sonadísimo, entonces, bueno sigo sonadísimo. Bueno, esta pintura surge por la necesidad de representar de una forma distinta los cuerpos disidentes de hombres, porque estamos muy acostumbrados a que cuando nos mostramos vulnerables o cuando nos mostramos amanerados, se nos descalifica, se nos ve como inferiores. Entonces tomé estos símbolos del revolucionario para llevar estos símbolos a la lucha de la visibilidad de estos cuerpos. Entonces para mí es muy importante visibilizar estos cuerpos porque estamos muy acostumbrados a erotizar o a enaltecer los cuerpos híper-masculinizados, fuertes, agresivos, incluso
53 blancos. Y para mí es muy importante generar referentes positivos, referentes de fuerza,
referentes de lucha para mi comunidad. [Back then, I want to comment on that, that I feel
very happy to be in the same room together with Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Posada, I know
they were a bit homophobic, but they are huge personalities. I’m also next to Javier de la
Garza, Ángel Cano and Julio Galán. Actually, a fun fact is that Julio Galán and actually
his painting that is near mine, is the one that inspired me to make my version of the
mexican charro. So, it is a, imagine being next to a reference of yours in the same art
room. For me it was a dream, actually I still feel like I’m dreaming. So, this painting
surges out of the need to represent a different form of the dissident male body, because
we are too used to the fact that when we are seen with vulnerability, or femineity we are
disqualified or seen as inferior. So, I took the symbolisms of the revolutionary to bring
these symbols to the fight of the visibility of these bodies. So, for me, it is very important
to create visibility of these bodies because we are too used to eroticize or extol bodies
that are hyper-masculine, strong, aggressive, even white. And for me, it is very important
to create references that are positive, references that are strong, references that fight for
my community.] (Díaz Santillan, 2020).
Among the findings that relate directly to the intersection of religion and queer identities is the physical and emotional trauma that faith-based conversion therapy has on individuals who live in regions, or in proximity to regions where faith-based conversion therapy is legal. To protect the identity of the interviewee, on September 30th, 2019, De Pueblo, Católico y Gay published an episode titled “Anonymous.” Details of the story that could potentially help identify the individual, like dates and locations, were changed. This story would potentially have never been told, if it was not for the safe environment that the podcast provided to the individual.
54 Another finding that this interview supports are the importance of each queer individual to choose when to tell your story and who to tell it to. Exposing a person’s queer identity without their consent, or their agreement can expose them to a hostile response from those around them.
Expressing our queer sexual or gender identity has to be a personal choice, only when we feel ready and safe to do so.
Season 3, Episode 6: Anonymous
Anonymous: [00:04:53] “I was outed twice, so the first time I was outed, it was to my
cousin. A boy that thought I was cute, I didn't like him, so he got really upset, and so at a
party, my cousin was at. He basically told her, like, your cousin's gay, and he was drunk
and so he just outed me to her, and then I got a text from her. And she's like, "it sucks that
I have to find out through someone else that you're gay." Then I try to explain to her, you
know what like, that's not how I want you to find out, I wasn't ready. I explained to her
that it wasn't my moment. I'm sorry. And then she's like, "I can't believe you can trust
me." And it was, it was pretty devastating to know that somebody outed me, to someone I
really loved, and I wanted to do that. Now she's the most, accepting and one of the people
I truly love. It took a while to mend the little bridge right there, and then I started coming
out to my other cousins. But never to my immediate family until someone out of the me
with my family.”
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:06:08] “What was that like?”
Anonymous: [00:06:10] That was pretty hard. I think that was the worst because I
promised myself that I was going to start coming out. I wrote a letter to my family, and I
told them that, that I love you and I explained to them, I'm gay, and that I'm the same son
that you always loved. So, I was prepping myself. I was talking to myself; I was talking
55 to friends like, OK, this is the year or next year. And so strangely, it was my cousin's birthday. We went to Disneyland to celebrate. That's one of our favorite places to be at.
Feel more at home there. I got a call, and it's my mom and the tone that she had, I felt that something was completely wrong. It's just like, where are you? -I'm at Disneyland. Who you with? -I'm like I'm with my prima and my friend. And she said, "I need your home now." And I said, -OK, is everything OK? Then she said, "hablamos cuando llegues a la casa" (we'll talk when you get home). I said, OK. And then strangely, I looked at my cousin and my friend and I just said, hey, do you think my mom found out that I'm gay?
And we all laughed and we're like, nah! You know? So, we went back to my cousin's house. I said, I need to go home. I thought I was going to be another fight, another week of ignoring me. And then, everything will be OK. I told my cousin I'm going to go pick up a board game and then come back so we can finish her birthday, you know? I went home, picked up the board game, and when I was already putting the board game in my car, my mom pulls in, and again, she was just staring at the steering wheel and, and I said, -everything OK, Mom? I went up to say, hi. "¿Todo bien?" (Everything ok?) And then she asked me, " ¿eres gay?" (are you gay?) I didn't respond. I just said, "hablamos cuando llegue a la casa" (we'll talk when we get home). I went to my cousin's house, dropped off, and I told her like, -My mom asked me if I'm gay. And then she's like, where are you going to say, I was like, -I don't know, I don't Know like. I don't know. So, I dropped off the board game and told her I'll call her right after, and so I go home. I went to go change to something more comfortable because obviously I knew it was going to be a pretty tough conversation. So, I go upstairs, and she asked me again, are you gay? And then I said. I said yes. And then she said, "Well I'm not going to tell your dad, you're
56 going to tell him." And at that point, I was already crying, you know. She calls my dad, I think my dad kind of knew, I don't know how he knew but, and then my mom tells him,
"so tell him." So, then I said, I couldn't look at my dad's eyes, I just said, "my mom found out that I'm gay." And then my dad didn't allow me not to look down, he said, "look at me in the face," and so I told him, "I'm gay," and then um... My mom said that she's not going to take this bullshit [pendejadas] that's she's going to leave to México, that she's going to leave me, and let my dad fix this. So, my mom left. My brother later told me that my mom went to them and told them not to talk to me because I might make them gay, and then my dad said, weirdly out of my whole, this whole thing, my dad was more questioning, are you sure? When did you know? Uh, why? Uh, so it was more like questions, never once did he get angry at that, at that moment. And then he waved me off and said, Go to your room. And. The next day, I couldn't sleep, but the next day my mom comes in. It was after Christmas. And I gave her a picture frame that said, "you're my angel I love you mom. It was a picture of my mom and me, and she... she comes into my room and throws the picture frame on the wall. And then, I will never forget the words she told me. Que no era su hijo [that I was not her son] I will never forget that. I was on the floor saying, sorry, that's all I could say. Perdóname ma’, perdóname ma’, perdóname. [Forgive me mom, forgive me, forgive me]. It was four days of - of me not talking to family, friends, my mom made sure I had no food. I slept during the day and at night I was up, I went outside with my dogs or just to get a fresh air, you know. And.
That's when my parents came in on the fourth day. And told me that we're going to
Tijuana for our conversion therapy the next day we went.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:12:16] Where did you go?
57 Anonymous: [00:12:19] I went to Tijuana for about a year, a year and a half. It was one of those back and forth. So, at first I was going. Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Going, coming, going, coming, going, coming. And then It was a small like a home, two story home. So-called Dr.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:12:51] Was it religious affiliated?
Anonymous: [00:12:54] Very, it was religious affiliated. I went because I felt that would mend my family and my family is the most important thing in my life. So I thought it would make my family happy, so I went. Every day we prayed, she asked me every day,
Are you gay? And at first, I was saying, I don't know. And then she said, oh, that's not natural. Que no era natural. Que no quería eso Dios (that God did not want that) that he gave a man and a woman and this whole spiel of how it's a man and woman, and that they my family is only looking out for me so I can live a normal life. So, it was a full year, year and a half, and it took a toll on me, on my education. My mental state…
Anonymous: [00:13:52] Sorry… (pause)
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:13:53] No, you're fine. We're going to take a little break. We'll be right back… (pause)
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:14:31] Aside from the praying and all these conversations about what God approved or didn't approve, is there anything else that you were put through?
Anonymous: [00:14:41] It was a lot of psycho analysis, testing or I don't know, what would you call it? It was more like draw me this. Write me a story.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:14:52] Were your parents ever with you?
58 Anonymous: [00:14:54] Oh, yeah, so there were moments where first I go by myself and then my mom, then my dad. Then us together. Then sometimes I would do it with my siblings. But the stories are she showed, ink drawings and she asked me, what do I see in these? In these paintings. And honestly, later down the line, I was already getting annoyed of it. I was just, she asked me to draw, so I just drew a smiley face, circled two dots and then smile. I knew what she was trying to do I guess, like, see if I put an effort or something, she told me to draw a family. I drew stick figures and then a tree and a sun with a smile on the sun. She asked me to tell a story, I wrote a story I love comics, I wrote an X-Men comic book. I got this. and honestly, I kind of forgot a lot that I went through - through that whole year, year and a half. I never believed someone can block off something, but this one was a total block of my life. I just remember like snippets like that where she asked me to write stories or we would read the Bible, talk about my life. I made sure that whenever she was testing me that I would test her back. And interesting, I don't, this never worked for me, like at some point sometimes she would fall asleep in the therapy. She had a lazy eye. She was born blind, but later on, she got sight back. And so she would cover one eye like you, you would assume she's sleeping, and I called her out on was mad, I was like, are you seriously falling asleep on me? And she says, "No, your life is too hard. I'm just praying for you. I'm like, oh, God. OK, majority, I was just a lot of psychiatry stuff.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:17:10] Did you ever feel. Like it was working?
Anonymous: [00:17:15] I never thought I was working. I never, I think -I didn't even try to change. At first it was more for the sake of my family, to unite my family, to make sure I still have a family because I didn't want to live my life alone. When my mom told
59 me that, that I'm no longer her son. I just felt, like I'm forever alone. I have nowhere to go. I have nothing. I felt lost and I felt by saying yes to my family to go to this. That I can bring back what I need in my life, and that is my family. I love my family so much, and I hope they know that. I hope they know that.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:18:15] Did it make a difference with them, at least while you were going through the process, did they treat you better?
Anonymous: [00:18:23] I think it was helping my mom more than anything, because at the same time, she will get some religious help to, you know, religious guidance. But whenever she had episodes of questioning, like one time we were at the mall and there was this hot guy, though, it was one of those, look and then look back, and I guess my mom noticed and then she got mad, she was like, you were looking at that guy? ¿lo estabas mirando? I was like, no, no, no. And then she will call. We will not drive, but she will call her, to do a phone therapy session. So, I would step back in my backyard, be there for about two hours on the phone, and talk to her about what happened. Later down the line, my mom was starting to notice that I was not enjoying it, or I was being more sarcastic, I was more like, I'm just going with what they wanted to do. And so, the first thing she did the last time is just saw the therapist like, "ya no quiere mi hijo estar aquí"
[My son no longer wants to be here]. No creo que esto lo esta ayudando nada [I don't think this is helping him at all]. And so, she asked me to go by myself. Then she asked me again. She goes, eres gay [are you gay?], and then my response was, "Solo quiero, que mis papas, me quieran" [I just want my parents to love me]. And then she asked me again, eres gay [are you gay?] "Solo quiero, que mis papas, me quieran" [I just want my parents to love me].. And she asked me one more time, and I told her, like, look, "no voy
60 a cambiar mi respuesta" [I'm not going to change my answer]. "Solo quiero, que mis
papas, me quieran" [I just want my parents to love me]. She said, OK. She told me, "go
downstairs, and wait there." We waited for about 20 minutes. I don't know what she was
doing for those 20 minutes, and then she calls us up, my mom, my dad and me. And then
she says. "pues yo creo que su hijo no es gay. Yo creo, que su hijo es asexual. Porque su
pasado, the lack of fatherly figure in his life, lo causó no poder querer a nadie. [Well, I
think your son is not gay. I believe your son is asexual, because of his past. The lack of a
fatherly figure in his life, it caused him not to be able to care for anyone.]
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:20:31] Wow.
Anonymous: [00:20:32] Yeah, and so, I think that carried on with my family and so, till
this day, I think that's what they think” (Díaz Santillan, 2019c).
Another finding of this podcast is the profound impact on queer identities and self- expression that a location has. Geography is a determining factor in what the Latinx queer experience and expression can look like. Interviews in this podcast that were recorded remotely, allowed us to get to learn what the Latinx queer experience and expression is like in pueblos of
México, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and others. First, the podcast format allows anyone living in these regions, who has internet access, to hear these stories. The podcast audio is not limited by geography in the same way that a television and radio broadcast are, expanding the reach of who can tell their story and expanding the reach of those who hear the stories told.
Ilse shared her story through a virtual interview done in the Spring of 2020 during the COVID-
19 global pandemic. She currently lives in her hometown, a pueblo in the state of Oaxaca,
México. Among the things that she shared, was how she discovered the podcast and what it means for her to have access to this platform.
61 Season 4, Episode 6: Ilse
Ilse: [00:39:36] Muy bien, ah entonces este, yo de ahí me metí a las playlists y de ahí a
los podcasts, y empecé a ver, ósea había varios de la comunidad LGBT, pero entre esos
me salió "De pueblo católico y gay" y yo dije, "qué es eso? Se oye chido, yo quiero
saber" y empecé a escucharlo. El primer podcast que escuché fue de tu papá y como que
yo sentí, yo me sentí como en casa, ¿sabes? Como que me sentía en un lugar muy seguro,
me ponía los audífonos y era muy genial escucharte y escuchar a las demás personas
como contaban su historia. Y dije yo quiero estar ahí. Entonces aquí estoy. Pero en ese
momento fue como, ¿por qué me siento tan bien escuchando a las personas? Y empecé a
escuchar y empecé a escuchar y empecé a escuchar y todo quedaba muy muy bonito, todo
era muy genial, el hecho de sentirte protegido. A pesar de que no conocieras a las
personas y sólo me las imaginaba y te imaginaba a ti y era muy entretenido. Mientras yo
trabajaba, te escuchaba. Y a veces me daban muchísimas ganas de llorar, pero me
aguantaba porque no quería que los demás me vieran llorar. Entonces, me empecé a hacer
muy fan y después de no sé cuánto tiempo de escucharte, empecé a seguirte en Instagram.
Y como habías sacado la última temporada, la tercera temporada. Creo que ya habían
pasado como dos, tres meses, y no habías subido nada. Y yo dije igual y ya se acabó y ya
no existe. Y me puse a llorar, y en esto entra mi hermano y me dice, ¿qué te pasa? Y digo
-pues es que, de los podcasts que estaba escuchando ya se acabaron y ya no se si van a
sacar más. Y en eso ya vi en mi Instagram que subiste una historia en la cual decías que
ibas a subir ya el intro de la cuarta temporada. Yo lloré, yo quedaba feliz, así súper bien.
"No estoy sola. Todavía están ahí, todavía siguen vivos y van a hacer más - más podcasts
para que yo no me sienta sola.” [Right, so then, I went into the playlists and started to see
62 that there were a few about LGBTQ content, but among those I saw De Pueblo, Católico
y Gay, and I said, what is this? It sounds good! I want to know, and I began to listen to it.
The first episode I heard was the one with your dad, and I felt, I felt like I was home, you
know? I felt like I was in a very safe place, I would put my headphones on, and it was
great to hear you and to hear how everyone else would share their story. I told myself, I
want to be there. And here I am. But at that moment, it was like, why do I feel so good
listening to these people? So, I kept listening, and listening and listening, and everything
was beautiful, everything was great, the fact that you feel protected even when you do not
know the people and you can only imagine them, and I would imagine you and it was
entertaining. While I worked, I would listen to you. Sometimes I would want to cry, but I
resisted because I did not want others to see me crying. What happened was that I
became a fan, and after some time I started to follow you on Instagram. By then you had
already released the full third season. I think two or three months had already gone by
and you had not uploaded anything. I thought, maybe it is over, and it does not exist
anymore, and I began to cry. My brother walked-in and asked, what is wrong? I told him,
that the podcast I would listen to was over and that there were going to be no more
episodes. Suddenly I went on Instagram and I saw you announced that you were about to
post the beginning of the fourth season. I cried; I was happy, super happy. I am not alone,
they are still there, they are still alive, and they are going to do more – more podcasts so
that I do not have to feel alone.”] (Díaz Santillan, 2020a).
On June 17, 2019, I interviewed Jesse. He is a transgender man from New York. His mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father is Puerto Rican. Jesse first came out to his
63 family as a Lesbian, and he also explored other identities before transitioning. He spoke with me about his self-discovery.
Season 2, Episode 19: Jesse
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:07:01] When did you realize lesbian maybe wasn't the term
and you felt like you had to come out again?
Jesse: [00:07:06] Yeah. So that question is rather complex, honestly, and a little
complicated because even for myself, I can't really pinpoint a time that I felt, OK, this is
not working. It's more so it kind of unraveled over the years and even speaking to people
within my community and within the LGBTQ+ community and kind of reflecting on my
life even up until present day is now where I'm kind of like, oh, yeah, so at this point in
time, 15 years ago, it makes sense why I felt this way or why I was doing this or why I
had these thoughts. And, you know, I can't really bumble it up until one date and time,
but I know that I just was like a series of events, feelings, emotions, kind of consistent.
And it wasn't up until about two years ago that I decided, OK, well, I'm just going to start
my path medically transitioning, so, and then I just kind of just did it, you know, on my
own.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:08:07] You started two years ago.
Jesse: [00:08:08] Yes. Actually, before I started my medical transition, I was in the
middle of trying to figure out where I best fit. And so there was a point in time in my life,
very, very brief point, where I actually was navigating as non-binary simply because, you
know, I wasn't necessarily showcasing or presenting as one thing, but as multiple
genders, you know, to be in specific, and also trying to figure out my feelings and what
felt more comfortable for me. And if this is something that I was fluid, you know in my
64 gender, and how I was going to continue navigating the world. So, yeah. So, for a brief
time, I was navigating nonbinary. Yeah.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:08:50] And then you realized that this is what you wanted to
do.
Jesse: [00:08:53] Yeah. And then I was just like, yeah, no, this isn't working. I don't think
that it's really reflective of me. I'm a man and you know, yeah. And I just kind of was
like, started shifting from telling people, yeah, you know, I'm nonbinary or I'm gender
nonconforming, to no, I'm a man. (Díaz Santillan, 2019b).
Jesse also spoke to me about the colorism and racial discrimination that he has experienced throughout his life as an Afro-Latinx man. Sometimes he experiences this within his own family’s expressions.
Eder Díaz Santillan: [00:20:31] Can you maybe also speak a little bit about what it's like
to be an Afro-Latino in the Latino community? What is that treatment like?
Jesse: [00:20:40] So there's absolutely colorism and racism within the Latino, Latinx
community. That's something that, of course, that's learned behavior that we have to
break ourselves as well, because you have your traditional, you know, first generation
folks, you know, depending on what region you come from in the country that's how
they're supposed to look. Right? And then you travel to another region and someone
might be a couple of shades darker or a couple of shades lighter. And there's automatic,
you know, colorism and racism within your own heritage and your own culture and your
own race and ethnicity. And it happens all the time. People don't like to talk about it. Or
if you try to call out, you know, your family, they always come back, usually, "Oh, that's
not racism. That's not what I mean." But it's like, no, it's for sure is racism, you know?
65 "no, definitely." You know, as though having a darker skin complexion is some kind of,
you know, detriment. Right? Or disease, you know? Or it's wrong. That's why I try my
best as well, my own due diligence is if I hear from my family, I try and like, that's not
right, you know? And I try to explain it. It's difficult. And I'm sure you can relate to
especially, you know, talking to the elders in your family who just don't understand or
refuse rather, to understand or budge, you know? But these are conversations that have to
be had on a consistent basis. Because just like everything else, like English, the
vocabulary, the times, everything is evolving and changing. And, you know, that's the
only way education is the best way and the best tool for people to really get on board with
what's going on. (Díaz Santillan, 2019b).
Marcos’ story was published on August 5th, 2019. They identify as queer and shared in their interview touches on just how diverse the Latinx queer experience and expression is, and how Latinx nonbinary self-expression continues to be a privilege even in progressive urban spaces like Los Angeles.
Season 3, Episode 2: Marcos
Marcos: [00:23:17] Cómo te digo, también entiendo que tengo esta plataforma de poder
hacerlo, aunque a veces también me limito y creo que me limito más porque no sé lo que
pueda suceder afuera en la calle, si voy a recibir elogios o si voy a recibir a balazos. No
sé. Creo que también eso me limita a veces, depende de dónde voy a ir, depende de en
qué espacio voy a estar. Y creo que eso también me da la oportunidad de salir más o
salirme menos, depende. [As I was telling you, I understand that I have this platform to
be able to do it, even though sometimes I also limit myself and I think I do so because I
do not know what can happen to me out on the street, If I’m going to get praises or if I’m
66 going to get shot with bullets. I do not know. I think that limits me sometimes, it depends
on where I’m going, it depends on what space I’m going to be in. That is what I believe
gives me the opportunity to be more myself or to self-censor more. It depends.] (Díaz
Santillan, 2019a)
The transcripts presented here are just a brief excerpt of each interview, and each illustrates just one of many findings. They should serve as a window of what our understanding of the Latinx queer experience can be. This research should not serve to create a generalization of the Latinx queer community, instead it contributes to the work that lies ahead to amplify the different identities and expressions that exist in the Latinx queer community, and how intersections inform the complexity of each.
67 Conclusion
While the Latinx queer community has always existed, Spanish-language media continually fails to represent it. The examples of LGBTQ+ Spanish-language scripted characters in television are so rare that GLAAD’s annual report says, it is certainly not enough when compared to the number of non-LGBTQ characters in programming” (Townsend, Deerwater,
2020-2021, p. 39). De Pueblo, Católico y Gay was created to answer what happens when the
Latinx queer community tells their own story? And is Latinx queerness something we are not willing to talk about?
Public mediums have always been introduced as the vessels for accessible information.
Habermas says that these public mediums have failed to fulfill the promise of an equal flow of ideas, because they instead become a flow of capitalistic power driven by revenue. Habermas says two conditions are largely responsible for the unfulfilled emancipatory potential of the public sphere. First, he says the asymmetrical nature of mass culture serves only those who have capital power to distribute their voice. This capitalistic structure makes it harder for marginalized voices to question or challenge those views. Second, the growing interpenetration of the state and civil society. This he calls the 'refeudalization” of the public sphere, producing a public appealed for benign acclamation not accountability to power. Public opinion polls, for example. (Warner,
2002, p. 50).
Marginalized outside of the dominant public, we find the discourse of the counterpublics.
Warner tells us they are in many ways similar to the dominant public, and they use the same tools to create publics of a new discourse that challenges the established limits of the dominant public. This is how today queer Latinx creators are using podcasting as a tool to challenge the dominant discourse of the dominant Spanish-language media. This is how De Pueblo, Católico y
68 Gay emerges, using the tools that Spanish-language media has established, to create a counterpublic discourse that challenges the heteronormative framing of Spanish-language media, and holds media accountable to be the best version of itself in its promise of representation.
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, finds that marginalization and lack of representation has not only marginalized the community from public discourse, but it has also marginalized the Latinx queer community from itself. Latinx queer individuals in certain geographical areas grow up with little to no references of queer expression, and because of this instead of fully exploring and expressing their queer identities, much of our formative years are spent finding ways to hide and suppress our queer identities and expressions. Further, the very few examples of Latinx queer individuals that are part of the Spanish-language dominant discourse in media, are always framed to fit the heteronormative dominant view. This gives the gay and lesbian identities the most inclusion in popular discourse and further marginalizes other queer Latinx sexual and gender identities and expressions. Some of the interviews collected illustrate to this marginalization of queer identities and expression. Some lack the language to self-identify, some lack safe spaces to fully express themselves and other lack the resources to explore their identity, some lack all of the above and more.
When those who do not have access to inclusive language to self-identify with, it results first with self-rejection. This is due to the fact that any language referencing to their identities carries a negative connotation. When most of the individual I interviewed first self-identified, they used the language that had the most visibility around them, the gay and lesbian identities.
As some in the Latinx queer community continue to explore their identities and expressions in safe-spaces and with others in the community, they begin to discover new language to self- identify with and new ways to express their identities. Having access to new language to self-
69 identify is the first step towards self-expression liberation. In sharing the different ways that individuals in the Latinx queer community exist, this podcast has allowed many the realization that they are not gay, instead they are bisexual, or transgender, or asexual. We have learned together in this podcast community that gender and sexual identities are two different expressions. This is why it is so important to be able to have access to open and safe queer discourse so that there is a transfer of this language within our own community. Inclusive language matters, and it is a privilege that not everyone in the Latinx LGBTQ+ community has access to. To illustrate the value of language in self-expression, in season 6, Oscar who is more comfortable expressing himself in English, talks about the limitations of language with his
Spanish-speaking parents, “It makes me sad to think that they may never get the opportunity to know me, and I might not get the opportunity to really express myself and be myself around them because I'm limited by language.” (Díaz Santillan, 2021b). Similarly, without access to inclusive language, some Latinx queer identities that are marginalized by media and by geographical location, continue to exist without their full self-expression.
In the interviews conducted with other Latinx gay men, like myself, I have found that women have largely been responsible for our liberation. In almost every interview, gay men have shared that during their self-discovery women protected, nurtured and helped them heal. They recognized our fragility in a heteronormative social dominant structure, and they befriended us and have guided to our self-acceptance. Latinx women are consistently the first members of the dominant public who engage in the discourse of the Latinx gay male counterpublic. They have many times bridged our inclusion to the dominant discourse and have embraced our jotería. The role that Latinx women have had and continue to have in the lives of gay men needs to be explored and recorded further by media and by scholarship.
70 Warner says that to be able to engage in the dominant discourse we keep parts of ourselves private. To engage in the dominant discourse, the Latinx queer community continues to self-censor its queer expression. The effects of cultural toxic-masculinity in Latinx queer individuals requires more extensive research. In most of the interviews I have conducted, as well as in my own journey with my queerness, I have found that the Latinx queer experience that has intersected with pueblos and with institutionalized religion, requires a lot of unlearning. A lot of this unlearning is happening in the discourse created by Latinx queer counterpublics. Platforms like De Pueblo, Católico y Gay, help those engaging in the safe and open discourse to unlearn the idea that feminine is a sign of weakness. We are unlearning that queer sex is a sin. We are unlearning that brown and black skin colors are inferior. For those of us that believe in a creator, we are unlearning that our creator condemns our existence. We are unlearning that a heteronormative structure is the only way to experience family. We are unlearning that all sexual relationships need to be monogamous. Some of us are unlearning to react with violence and hostility to any gender expression that is different from the dominant heteronormative social structures. We need to do more work to unlearn and heal all of our toxic masculinity in the experience of Latinx queer individuals who grew up in pueblos and under the teachings of the
Catholic religion.
Because of the intersections of rural geography, and institutionalized religion, many of the interviewees have experienced emotional trauma and physical abuse. Many of the interviewees also shared experiences with depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions. Some also experienced sexual abuse as minors. The stories were shared because every interviewee felt safe sharing them. To be able to responsibly conduct each interview I worked with Monica Trasandes from GLAAD. They provided me with a Spanish-language guide
71 that showed me how to use inclusive language, how to refer appropriately to different gender identities and what questions to avoid as well. Every Spanish-language medium should have a similar guide available to them. Anyone conducting an interview with someone from the Latinx queer community, regardless of their own sexual or gender identity, should also work first with therapists that specialize in the Latinx queer experience. I worked with organizations like
GLAAD and Bienestar Human Services,7 as well as therapists that specialize in the Latinx queer experience to ensure that my interviews did not trigger my guests. I also worked extensively to ensure that those who were re-living their emotional or physical traumas did not feel ambushed, forced or exploited in telling their story.
By challenging the dominant heteronormative structures of Academia, Jotería Studies is revolutionizing our understanding of Latinx sexuality, genders and expression. This research adds to the call that Jotería Studies scholar Eddy Francisco Alvarez makes to include new critical voices of various intersections and of various identities to our understanding of Jotería. This is a first of its kind collection of interviews that enrich Jotería Studies and provides a detailed archive of the Latinx queer identities and expression as how they intersect with pueblos, and with institutional religion. More research is needed to understand the nuances in Jotería with other intersections.
This archive of interviews collected informs how media needs to include Latinx queer identities. First, it is important that the heteronormative narrative of Spanish-language media does not tell our stories moving forward. Instead, Spanish-language media needs to include
Latinx queer storytellers in all their mediums and platforms so that our community can have the agency to tell our own stories. This includes elevating and hiring Latinx queer reporters, editors,
7 Bienestar is a non-profit organization working for the health and well-being of the Latinx LGBTQ+ community and other underserved communities in Southern California.
72 producers, writers, on-air talents, etc. This effort has to go beyond the gay male identity and the gay male expression, it has to be inclusive of all Latinx queer identities and expression. There needs to be more funding and resources for all Latinx queer identities to have their own platforms like De Pueblo, Católico y Gay. In recognizing that internet access and digital devices are a privilege, the resources to enable Latinx queer creators have to also reach the most remote areas of the Latinx community. This is essential to understanding the Latinx queer experience, because we are the only ones that can create the safe spaces that allow for the nuanced discourse to emerge.
The theory of counterpublics says that the discourse is created by active engagement of its own public. In telling my own story first, I created a safe space that allowed others to feel safe telling their story as well. Many sharing their personal journeys for the very first time. In doing so, this project proves that the nuances of our experience have surfaced only because we had the agency to tell our own story. This is a space that I would have not been able to create in Spanish- language radio. When our story is framed to fit the heteronormative dominant structure, certain parts of our identity and expression are kept private. When the platform is created by Latinx queer creators, it creates a safe environment for individuals to engage in discourse by expressing more of their private identity and expression.
This research also finds that some Latinx queer expression and identities continue to be self-censored even when they engage in discourse with a Latinx queer counterpublic. Each intersection of the Latinx queer experience requires a new safe space of discourse to be fully understood. De Pueblo, Católico y Gay explores only two intersections of a Latinx queer experience, however language, socioeconomic status (past and present), race, ethnicity, religion, and other intersections have a profound impact on a Latinx queer person’s sexual and gender
73 identity and gender expression. Some of the limitation of this research as it relates to the Latinx queer experience, is all the stories that it cannot capture because this discourse is still not a safe environment for them. As a Catholic gay man, my identity and the identity of this podcast continue to marginalize other queer identities and queer expressions. At its core, this podcast still represents the two institutions that dominate Latinx culture, men and religion. In looking at the audience of this podcast it is clear who the dominant discourse is for, and who does not feel welcome to safely engage in this discourse. 72% of my listeners identify as men, 25% identify as female and less than 1% identify as non-binary. The identities of all the interviewed collected reflect a similar asymmetrical representation. This means De Pueblo, Católico y Gay has a dominant discourse of its own.
In this project, the dominant discourse is that of the gay catholic man, and we possess within us, some of the same features of the dominant public that suppress and marginalize other identities. From this new counterpublic dominant discourse, new counterpublics emerge.
Warner’s work supports the existence of micro-counterpublics, Warner says a necessary relation to a counterpublic is an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation
(Warner, 2014, p. 199). To better illustrate the counterpublics that emerge from this podcast’s counterpublic discourse, I will call the new formed counterpublic a micro-counterpublic. It is a public that is marginalized within the new dominant speech. This new micro-counterpublic requires its own safe space to liberate their queer identities and queer expressions that are often not invited or included in the discourse created by gay Latinx men, like myself, who carry internalized homophobia and transphobia because of where we were raised and the religious faith we were raised with.
74 The work ahead for a project like mine, is not to frame the story of others through my lens as a Catholic gay man. Instead, it is to enable other queer identities and expressions to tell their own story in their own safe space. Latinx queer creators working to challenge the dominant
Spanish-language heteronormative narrative, should not work in isolation from each other. It is important to work collectively so that the queer Latinx experience leaves no one behind. It is important that Jotería Studies continues to elevate our work in academia so that we can learn from each other.
It is essential that Latinx queer academics acknowledge that education, inclusive- language and queer expression are a privilege in the Latinx queer experience, and that those of us with these privileges make our findings and our work widely accessible. This means we must do all we can to replicate our message in English and Spanish and every other language that intersects with Latinx queerness. It also means that we must broadcast our findings and stories, print them, and converse at every safe opportunity we get with our Latinx queer identity and expression. The findings of this podcast call for more extensive research and understanding of intersections that marginalize Latinx queerness and self-expression, so that we can empower each queer identity to challenge its dominant discourse and to rise to the dominant discourse in their full expression. For Latinx queer content creators, this means that every time we tell our story we need to help those who are different from us tell their story as well.
In his book, Building A Bridge, Father James Martin writes, “for the church to exercise compassion, we need to listen. And when we listen, we will learn, we will be challenged, and we will be inspired” (Martin SJ., 2017, p. 53). De Pueblo, Católico y Gay will continue to listen to
Latinx Jotería and archive our stories. The next step after learning, being challenged and being inspired is to take action that counters the effects of marginalization of queer identities and queer
75 expression. Spanish-language media needs to hire and include the diverse identities of the Latinx queer community. They should open up spaces, not to tell our stories, but to let us tell our own story in their platforms. Every dominant media corporation should also finance independence and localized Latinx queer storytellers so that the nuances of Latinx queer identities and expression are never left out.
“De Pueblo, Católico, y Gay,” was created to tell my story, a story that Spanish-language media and English-language media refused to tell. In the process of telling my own story, I found a community that identified with my Jotería and my intersections. Together we created a counterpublic discourse, in which I have learned about my identity and of the social constructs that have limited my self-expression. The learning continues, and the work ahead is now informed by the findings of the last three years. I learned how to build a better and more inclusive platform. This will result in discourse that uncovers more of the diversity within the
Latinx queer community. It will help discover more nuances in self-expression and it will discover more intersections that affect both identity and self-expression. The findings also support the creation of new platforms for counterpublic discourse that are marginalized by De
Pueblo, Católico y Gay. I cannot and should not tell everyone’s story. Instead, I should share this platform’s model so that others in the Latinx queer community who do not feel safe to fully express their story here, can create their own safe spaces for discourse. Everyone deserves a space where they can self-identify and self-express, without the limitations of the heteronormative dominant discourse, and without the limitations of the gay and Catholic man’s dominant discourse, this will expose the infinite possibilities of Jotería.
De Pueblo, Católico y Gay will continue to elevate the Latinx queer stories that intersect with the heteronormative family values of pueblos and with institutional religion. This podcast
76 will continue to archive interviews to expose and heal the trauma, guilt and confusion that these intersections create in the formative years of the Latinx queer community. De Pueblo, Católico y
Gay will move forward paying homage to everyone who was raised to believe that their story should not be told. I know exactly who you are, I used to believe the same thing, but the intersections of my life have given me the privilege of building this platform and now I move forward with everything I have learned about myself and my community to find more stories that have never been told.
Mi nombre es Eder Díaz Santillan, y yo soy de pueblo, católico y gay. [My name is Eder
Díaz Santillan and I am from a small town, Catholic and gay].
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