Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance [Review]
In an interview with performance artist Javier Cardona, scholar Jossianna Arroyo asks him if he identifies as a transloca, the conceptual label Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes has used to describe Cardona’s work. His response turns the query back to La Fountain-Stokes: “I would love to dialogue with [La Fountain-Stokes] more to find out if he thinks of his own work as a critic as fitting the label of ‘transloca.” (141) This gesture by Cardona gets at the heart of the project of La Fountain-Stokes’ new book Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2020). The boundaries between critical and embodied, between scholar and practitioner, are blurred in his conceptual articulation of the term transloca—La Fountain-Stokes has also delved into fiction writing and drag performance. The theorization of the term is literary and experimental; breaking the constrictive boundaries of traditional scholarly writing is itself a transloca act.
La Fountain-Stoke’s articulation of the term transloca, in the introduction of the book, is theoretically rigorous but expressed in an intimate form of writing full of poetic imagery. The book opens:
Translocas piss people off, but sometimes they also make us laugh and even cry. They (or should I be saying we, us Puerto Rican and Caribbean translocas) are upsetting and exhilarating but also dreadful, redundant, and passé. Hilarious but simultaneously boring. Gorgeous except when absolutely hideous or simply pain. […] Alive, except when we are dead […]boomeranging audiences into the future, snapping the present out of its complacency, challenging its teleological insistence on narratives of progress, modernity, and integration. Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Caribbean translocas (whether gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, dead or alive, male or female or simple fabulous) shatter molds in different colonial languages and geographies […] dragging our bilingual cultural legacies like bright flowers or exotic birds in the tropics or as carcasses at the slaughterhouse […]” (1)
In the book’s opening paragraph, the author lays out a definition of transloca as polarizing, living within the dichotomy of desire and marginalization. The language in this passage is poetic, with its juxtaposition of descriptors that seem oxymoronic (“hilarious but boring”) and its lyrical imagery “like bright flowers, carcasses at the slaughterhouse.” This sharp contrast is a feature of La Fountain-Stoke’s creative writing, in his stories Blue Fingernails/Uñas pintadas de azul (2009), and it is a pleasure to see it make its way to his scholarly, yet excitingly ludic, theorizations. In the passage, we see La Fountain-Stokes inserting his positionality into his work as he exchanges the ‘they’ of his object of study for a ‘we/us’ where he includes himself in his conceptual category. The contrasting images and insistence on oxymorons to describe translocas are an example of his aesthetic style: a type of deadpan darkness that seeps into an otherwise cheerful tone, which allows him to signal lurking violence that lies under the glitz of transloca aesthetics.
So what, or who, is a transloca? The term describes a wide range of queer/cuir embodiments that the author understands as a “modality” and “praxis” rather than an identity (19). With ‘loca,’ La Fountain-Stokes resignifies the charged meanings of the word that suggest female insanity or homophobic slur with the affective connotation gay men, “a sign of complicity and understanding.” (20) The ‘trans’ prefix signals the geographic movement contained in this identity: transnational, transhemispheric, but also the opacity signified by its movement connotation, “transversal, oblique.” (20) In the simplest of terms, a transloca—whether it be a drag performer, a transgender woman activist, or a male-presenting cisgender gay man—is a Puerto Rican or Caribbean subjectivity that transgresses gender and sexuality conventions, and in La Fountain-Stokes’ own words: “th[e] book is a reflection on drag and transgender performance as an artistic practice, a form of entertainment, a catalyst for community growth, and a mechanism of self-expression.” (23)
Though La Fountain-Stokes brings together groups of cisgender gay men who present as effeminate (Kevin Fret) or only briefly engage in drag performance (Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced), cisgender men who blur artistic and everyday gender and drag presentations (Freddie Mercado), conventional drag performers (Nina Flowers) and transgender women in drag (Barbara Herr, Monica Beverly Hillz) or with complex relations to drag (Sylvia Rivera, Holly Woodlawn), he highlights the very porosity of these categories, stating: “The contiguities and confusions of drag and trans that I negotiate through the category of transloca performance are historically grounded, socially constructed, and theoretically productive and should not be simply dismissed; it is impossible to discuss drag performance without acknowledging the centrality of trans experience to this art form.” (12) While the author uses the term to speak about contemporary performers and activists, it draws on a wide genealogy of cuir figures that are themselves transhemispheric. From Pedro Lemebel to Reinaldo Arenas, transloca also does the work of signifying cuir as a Caribbean or Latin American formulation that subverts the political and class normativity of Anglo queerness.
The book opens with a discussion of early RuPaul’s Drag Race star Nina Flowers, murdered gay trap singer Kevin Fret, and Jorge Steven López Mercado, three young Puerto Rican gay men who help La Fountain-Stokes articulate what he names “transloca epistemologies” (45). In bringing together a young and queer López Mercado, known publicly because of his virulently homophobic murder, with the artistic performances of Fret and Flowers, also representing different scales of celebrity, the capacious range of the analysis is on display. He will repeat this move throughout the book, bringing together the deeply political activism of trans pioneer Sylvia Rivera with Holly Woodlawn’s acting and advocacy, and simultaneously studying the aesthetic and political commentary in a particularly rich and compelling analysis of Mercado and Merced. The book then moves on to articulate drag and transloca performance in relation to class (the drag of poverty), race (the drag of race), migration (in a wonderful analysis of Merced and Ramos Otero) and locality and cosmopolitanism in Mercado’s work.
Though the translocas La Fountain-Stokes examines hold different political and aesthetic outlooks, there is a nudge towards an oblique form of decolonial complicity in their transgression of not only gender and sexual expressions, and identities, but in the Puerto Rican and Caribbean specificity of their positioning. The analysis of the linguistically marginal place of Flowers and other Puerto Rican contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but also of Flowers’ androgynous and transgressive drag presentation, which veers away from traditional standards of drag femininity, is excellent, especially as it examines the market logics of performing in RuPaul’s global entertainment industry and the veneration of money at play in club drag shows. I found the chapter “Welfare Queens and the Transloca Drag of Poverty” to be one of the most compelling in its inclusion of race, class, and the neoliberal assault on welfare logic. In this chapter, La Fountain-Stokes considers downward mobility and seems to suggest the queer prevalence of this phenomenon, and his discussion of welfare as a substitute for sexual desire and material well-being is fantastic. But moving through such a wide variety of performances, topics, politics and aesthetic modes, every chapter in the book offers rich and sophisticated accounts of the performers being studied.
In “Freddie Mercado and the Ultrabaroque Drag of Rasanblaj,” the usage of rasanblaj and Caribbean and queer neobaroque as a decolonial aesthetic is a generative lens from which to analyze the ephemeral complexity of Mercado and his works. The word rasanblaj stems from Caribbean Kreyol, and it insists on “engag[ing] with the multiplicity and complexity of the Caribbean” by “dirty[ing] metropolitan models,” a sort of Caribbean version of rasquache aesthetics. (103) The analysis of Mercado’s pieces and performances is great, especially in its consideration of silence and the aural effects of Mercado’s performances, which are also examined in relation to Lady Catiria and Barbara Herr in another chapter. The discussion of the controversy over Mercado’s recent suggested use of blackface (in the provocative photo that graces the cover of the book) feels limited. La Fountain-Stokes labels those who denounced Mercado’s blackface as “mostly white, […] university-age viewers who did not watch the performance” (120) who were dismissive of Mercado’s masterful legacy of transgressing social norms and his complex aesthetics. While this last part may be true, it misses an opportunity to analyze how this controversy triggered a racial and generational reckoning in Puerto Rico. The dismissal of the claims fails to consider how, even if through imperfect means, younger generations force much-needed conversations on power differentials among Puerto Rico’s cultural and artistic community.
The book’s final chapter offers a beautiful analysis of drag performances by transgender stars Herr and Lady Catiria, following an analysis on migration and diasporic displacements that started with Merced. In the book’s conclusion, La Fountain-Stokes offers a series of provocative questions that came up throughout my reading: Is transloca a phenomenon specific to Puerto Rico and, if so, how may it help us think about the link between coloniality and the current crises—debt, infrastructure, depopulation, and gentrification,—currently besieging the islands? “Is transloca performance a useful concept to understand perreo combativo” (232) and the dominant role of queer and trans of color, Puerto Rican youth in the struggle for decolonial futures? While La Fountain-Stokes poses these as questions, his analysis offers us a wealth of clues about the urgent role of queer embodiments, pleasures, and transgressions in the face of multiple forms of colonial, heteropatriarchal, gender, sexual, and racial violence that we live with.
Translocas The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance
by Lawrence La-Fountain Stokes
350pgs. University of Michigan Press. $29.95
Zorimar Rivera Montes is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University. She has a B.A. in History of the Americas and an M.A. in Caribbean and U.S. Literature, both from the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras. She works on Puerto Rican and US literature and popular culture in relation to financial and decolonial theory, race, gender and sexualities.