Queer, Latinx NYC: Culture, Excess, and Documentation by Nikki Myers

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:38:31 UTC

Walter Mercado was a Puerto Rican astrologer that, despite never having come out as LGBT, became a symbol of queer expression through his mystical persona on television.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:40:03 UTC

HomoVISIONES, first broadcasted in 1994, was New York's first and only public access TV program dedicated to documenting LGBT Latino life in the 5 boroughs. Most of the programming was in Spanish, and the show centered on community events (such as Latin American day parades) as well as activist demonstrations. Recordings of the show can be viewed digitally on the Internet Archive or physically at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:40:36 UTC

José Esteban Muñoz introduced the concept of disidentifications in his 1999 book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. It refers to a survival strategy employed by marginalized individuals, particularly queer people of color, to navigate dominant cultural norms and ideologies. Rather than fully assimilating into the mainstream or entirely rejecting it, disidentification involves a tactical engagement with dominant narratives, reworking them in ways that resist and subvert their exclusionary or oppressive frameworks.

Muñoz describes disidentification as a third mode of dealing with the dominant culture—neither fully accepting nor wholly rejecting it, but instead transforming and reinterpreting it from within. This process allows marginalized subjects to assert their identities, agency, and political presence in ways that challenge hegemonic structures, while still occupying and negotiating with them. Disidentification, therefore, is both a performative and political act that questions and queers dominant ideologies.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:41:48 UTC

Curated by Latinx performance artist and writer Nicolás Dumit Estévez, indecencia embodies Muñoz's principle of disidentification and explores the colonial, theological, and sexual meanings of indecency within Marcella Althaus-Reid's call to "lift the skirts of God."

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:42:43 UTC

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is a Florida-based Puerto Rican artist, and her YouTube series "Ask Chuleta" parodies the chusma stereotype in addressing the state of the art world and what is considered highbrow culture. Chusma or chusmería is a Spanish derogatory term used to describe women who are loud, boisterous, and perceived as having poor manners.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:43:37 UTC

This 2019 documentary focuses on the migration story and everyday life of transgender artist and sex worker Iván Monalisa 16 years after originally migrating from Chile to New York to study playwriting. he film explores themes of self-exile and urban life.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:44:04 UTC

Young Miko is an openly gay Puerto Rican rapper that frequently samples classic reggaeton songs by male artists. She uses the same sexual themes in her lyrics as male artists, focusing specifically on her relationships with women (indicated by the gendering of nouns and adjectives in Spanish).

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:44:49 UTC

Chiquitita is a Brooklyn-born and based drag performer, community organizer, and visual artist. She's organized many events dedicated to uplifting the queer and trans community of New York, and gained recent attention for disrupting a GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) event to raise awareness to the human rights struggle in Palestine.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:45:18 UTC

Papi Juice, hosted at Elsewhere, is a monthly to bi-monthly party for black and trans queer people. The party features 4 separate rooms with different DJs in each.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:46:31 UTC

Whorechata is a party geared towards queer people of color in New York City, and started out at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic by Ian Kumamoto. Usually hosted every 2 months at popular venues like Nowadays, Elsewhere, and Market Hotel, the parties feature drag performances, mariachis, and are themed around Latinx culture.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:48:21 UTC

The Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Trans Memory Archive) is an activist archival project based in Argentina that preserves and documents the history, experiences, and cultural memory of the transgender community in Latin America. It collects photographs, personal documents, letters, and other materials that trace the lives of trans people, often focusing on those who have been marginalized or erased from mainstream historical narratives.

The archive plays a crucial role in preserving the collective memory of the trans community, especially during periods of social repression and violence, such as Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). Many trans people faced extreme discrimination, exclusion, and persecution, and their histories were often erased or hidden. The Archivo de la Memoria Trans seeks to restore these voices and create a space for trans histories and identities to be recognized, remembered, and valued.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:48:59 UTC

The Fales Library at NYU is significant for having an extensive collection of queer films, magazines, posters, art, and other ephemera. They have a collection of papers and files relating to the life and scholarship of Jose Muñoz.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:50:04 UTC

This is a Spanish-language informative video about HIV and AIDS. Hispanic and Black Americans have had disproportionally higher rates of HIV contraction and AIDS deaths since the virus was first discovered in the late 1980s.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:51:03 UTC

Cherríe Moraga is a Mexican-American lesbian feminist author who is most well-known for her book Loving in the War Years.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:52:26 UTC

Chavela Vargas was a Mexican lesbian folkloric singer with a career spanning from 1950 until her death in 2012 (with a hiatus between the 1970s and 1990s). While she didn't label herself publicly as a lesbian until she was 80, she sang traditional ranchera love songs written by men without changing the pronouns, and had affairs with numerous Hollywood actresses and members of the Mexican cultural elite. She's rumored to have slept with Frida Kahlo, for example, and Ava Gardner. She took 20 years away from singing due to her severe alcoholism and subsequent recovery, returning to the stage with the support of gay Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:53:23 UTC

Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991) by Félix González-Torres is one of his most well-known and emotionally resonant works. It consists of a pile of brightly colored, individually wrapped candies, weighing exactly 175 pounds—representing the ideal body weight of González-Torres’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Visitors are encouraged to take a piece of candy, which slowly diminishes the pile, symbolizing the physical deterioration of a person suffering from AIDS. As the pile shrinks, the work reflects the gradual loss and wasting of the body. However, the work can also be replenished by museum staff, allowing it to be continually restored to its original weight, symbolizing ideas of memory, love, regeneration, and continuity.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:53:56 UTC

"While at any given moment the work can be subsumed by a singular perspective, Gonzalez-Torres’s work speaks to a complex identity politics that resists simplistic categorizations. This exhibition explores how the work informs context and how the contexts and localities of Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean can be seen to inform the work. Gonzalez-Torres’ use of language is subtle, and his care in the construction of titles means that they are deliberately multivalent, their meaning changing when viewed from different geo-political perspectives or moments in time."

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:55:16 UTC

Carlos Hernandez is a New York based queer Dominican photographer and curator, and my close friend. I recently included his Queer Alienism series in my Queer Continuum show at Brooklyn Art Haus. The series focuses on embracing gender and sexual difference, and he is largely inspired by Muñoz's theory of disidentification, seen most clearly in his renditions of the Last Supper and the traditional Mexican depiction of the Virgen de Guadalupe in bright, colorful, sexually charged settings.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:56:07 UTC

Estilazo, curated by queer Dominican Dulcina Abreu, focuses on the memorabilia and continued community-building of the Latinx queer nightlife scene in New York City. The show featured works by Angel Añasco, drag performer Chiquitita, and flyers/posters/clothing from the popular Latinx LGBT party Papi Juice.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:57:42 UTC

The lyrics of "A Quien Le Importa" focus on someone who is judged by their community for being different despite their lack of concern for what people say and think about them. Originally recorded by the Madrid-based band Alaska y Dinarama, Mexican singer Thalia's cover embraces the queer interpretation of the song. In the music video, Thalia is dressed in early-aughts alternative clothing and performs in a gay club.

myern001 — 2024-09-15 19:59:10 UTC

Muñoz has written extensively about the performance work of Carmelita Tropicana. He writes that Carmelita's style is not fixed, but rather that she is a "cultural production herself, always appearing in character, def[ying] notions of a fixed subjectivity. Her queer and cubana body is unstable and fragmented; it registers on its surface the intermingling of the identity bits that make up her performances and persona, because she appears and participates in various forms of media theater, more experimental performances) always within character, undermining notions of authenticity and realness in favor of queer self-making practices." (p. 139)

myern001 — 2024-09-17 14:42:11 UTC

This essay outlines the process and impact of the multi-artist AIDS memorial in the primarily Mexican and working class Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.

myern001 — 2024-09-17 14:42:46 UTC

Visual AIDS is a community organization dedicated to recording the artistic contributions by people with HIV and AIDS. The website includes artist biographies, exhibitions, essays, and more.

myern001 — 2024-09-18 22:23:04 UTC

Guaracha, brought into the mainstream by Puerto Rican artist Farruko's single "Papas," is a techno-tribal style that emerged in the queer club scene of Mexico City.

myern001 — 2024-09-18 22:28:31 UTC

This article features a list of LGBT Latinx musicians for further analysis and exploration.

myern001 — 2024-09-20 18:08:17 UTC

Chiquitita is a Brooklyn-based community organizer and drag performer who is known for orchestrating celebratory events focused around Brooklyn's queer nightlife community. Recently she made headlines for protesting the speech of Ross Mathews' at a GLAAD fundraiser due to GLAAD's economic ties to Israeli companies.

myern001 — 2024-09-22 10:51:28 UTC

Jillian Hernandez writes about the aesthetics of excess, or the over-the-top, glamorous cultural signifiers used by Black and Hispanic women, and how this aesthetic represents sexual freedom and autonomy.

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:37:29 UTC

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a large-scale public artwork and a symbol of remembrance for individuals who died from AIDS-related causes. Created in 1987 by activist Cleve Jones and the NAMES Project Foundation, the quilt is composed of thousands of fabric panels, each made to commemorate someone who lost their life to AIDS. Families, friends, and communities crafted these panels, often personalized with names, photographs, and personal items, making the quilt an intimate and collective tribute.

Each panel is 3x6 feet, the size of a standard grave. As of 2024, the quilt spans over 50,000 individual panels commemorating over 100,000 people. It has been displayed across the United States and globally, raising awareness about the AIDS crisis, reducing stigma, and offering a space for collective mourning.

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:41:09 UTC

Rita Indiana is a Dominican writer, musician, and visual artist whose work blends speculative fiction with themes of Caribbean identity, queer experience, and Afro-diasporic culture. Her work explores disidentification by challenging traditional gender norms and embracing fluidity, offering new narratives for queer Latinx identity within the socio-political context of the Caribbean.

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:45:23 UTC

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:46:57 UTC

Salsa music often addresses painful narratives, both fictional and factual. Willie Colon, one of the most famous salsa singers in history, recorded this song in 1986 about a transgender person name Símon who is rejected by his community and family for his queerness and dies of a mysterious illness (presumed to be AIDS).

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:55:28 UTC

myern001 — 2024-09-22 11:58:26 UTC

Tokischa is a queer Dominican artist and sex worker, controversial for the highly explicit sexual content in her music and persona. The lyrics to Estilazo include:

Being a bitch is fashionable (ah-ah-ah, fashionable)
Ser perra está de moda (ah-ah-ah, de moda)

It's a national trend (ah)
Es tendencia nacional (ah)

Rogue catwalk
Pasarela de bellacas

Sexual style
Estilazo sexual

Morbo is the new drug
Morbo es la nueva droga

Note of morbidity (ah, ah)
Nota de morbosidad (ah, ah)

Lesbianism between women
Lesbianismo entre mujeres

Long gay life
Larga vida homosexual

myern001 — 2024-09-22 12:00:07 UTC

Vena Cava is a Puerto Rican drag artist based in Brooklyn.

myern001 — 2024-09-22 12:02:55 UTC

Louis Dorantes is a Brooklyn-based textile artist.