Madrid is Browning: A conversation with Gad Yola

Abstract

Afro-LatinX drag artist Gad Yola was born in Lima in 1995, migrated to Spain in 2006, and began performing in Madrid in 2017, a year marked by the rise of Spanish nationalism. This interview acquaints us with Gad Yola's artistic vision and practices. It orients us toward the growing presence of “Brown art” in the Peninsula, taking a deeper look at the work of artists who declare themselves “migrants” or “Migrantas” and examining the use of LatinX’s X in Spain. Gad Yola’s career includes performances such as “El drag es marrón” (“Drag Is Brown”), the exhibition “Hypernariz” (“Hypernose”), and the music videos “No exotice” (“Don’t Exoticize”), “Aguanta Migranta” (“Hang in There, Mx. Migrant”), “Travesti del Perú” (“Trans from Peru”), and “Problemática” (“Troublemaker”). The analysis of these works focuses on the use of pop-reggaeton-cumbia rhythms, the politicization of Gad Yola’s fashion, and her references to colonial history and Spanish, Peruvian, and US pop culture. LatinX’s transatlantic “X” emerges on social media and webs across these geographies, accompanying Gad Yola’s oeuvre and the work of other artists from the Spanish capital with whom she has collaborated, including Chenta Tsai Tseng, Samantha Hudson, and the drag families Casa Drag Latina and House of Gad. From Madrid’s bars, squat houses, and museums, Gad Yola reclaims, invigorates, and re-conceptualizes such referents like Peruvian artist and philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano, while also coming up with characters like “Gad Bunny” and “Gadyoncé,” thus embodying a Global South LatinXness. Gad Yola’s queer, anti-racist art evokes a Global Iberian LatinX that bridges these terms and expands them, reconfiguring the cultural scene in Spain and beyond.

Keywords

Brown drag Iberian Studies latinos in Spain migrant Migranta LatinX American pop culture Peru

On April 18, 1993, critic Jesse Green declared in a New York Times article: “Paris is no longer burning. It has burned” (1993). Only two years had passed since the release of Jennie Livingston’s iconic documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) and, by that time, many of the film’s protagonists—African American and LatinX drag queens, voguers, and LGTBIQ+ posers in New York’s 1980s Ballroom Scene—had already passed away. Green’s article dwells on the death of Angie, the House of Xtravaganza’s mother (1968–1993), from HIV-related complications. Green describes the memorial and recalls “a giant X of blood-red carnations that seemed to stand for more than Xtravanganza” (Green; my emphasis). Following that loss, one of Angie’s house children, DJ Junior Vasquez, composed the song “X” (1994) in her honor (Tinsley, 2018: 93). Thanks to this song, the polysemic letter X in “Xtravaganza” managed to survive the fire.

The parents of the House of Xtravaganza simultaneously embodied the “X” in Xtravaganza and the “X” in LatinX. There are numerous probable origins of the “X” in LatinX (Salinas and Lozano, 2021: 251), and one of the most popular theories establishes a link between its early uses and the online chat rooms and email lists of the 1990s (Rivas, 2017). Meanwhile, the House of Xtravaganza was founded in 1982 by Hector Valle (1960–1985) who was later joined by fellow Nuyorican Angie. The “X” in the House of Xtravaganza suggests a genealogy that parallels the emergence of the “cyber-X” LatinX; another “X” that is also LatinX and is used to refer to fluid and gender-nonconforming bodies in which “reality itself is up for grabs—and may the best queen win,” as Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston stated in their collection Posthuman Bodies (1995: 5). The “X” in Xtravaganza is agile and open to improvisation; it has become part of the repertoire, or “subcultural ‘dictionary’,” articulated in Paris Is Burning, which included “balls, houses, legends; reading, throwing shade, walking; realness, categories, vogue” (ibid).

Three decades later, those x’s inhabit different contexts, bodies, and voices. This Xcess, Xaggeration, and Xtravagance are revived and reinvented in the work of Gad Yola (b. Angello Vivar; Lima, 1995–), an Afro-LatinX drag artist who has been active in the Madrid scene since 2017. Gad Yola’s work focuses on the personal experiences of queer, migrant, and racialized people in Spain. She appears alongside other fellow artists who participate in her workshops, performances, and music videos. Gad Yola is part of a global LatinX context. The “X” in LatinX, which used to gravitate toward the United States, is now in demand in other latitudes (see Alonso Alonso, 2023; Milian, 2023; Olguín, 2022). With Gad Yola, the “X” forms a triangle between her native Peru, the city of Madrid, where she lives, and the Miami-based Latin music industry. Accordingly, this publication does not associate LatinX with any particular nationality or specific origin (Milian, 2019: 5). The term “LatinX” is used here without a fixed definition, in acknowledgment of its potential to encompass a nonbinary plurality and fluidity in constant motion.

Migrantes Trasgresorxs logo.

In Madrid, this “X” takes on new meanings every time it is invoked. Take, for example, the logo used by Migrantes Transgresorxs (“Transgressive Migrants ‘Xs’”), a group of racialized sexual and gender dissidents from diverse origins that has been active in the capital since 2009. The “X” in Migrantes Transgresorxs is inhabited; it is the place where intersectionalities converge. Throughout this publication, some x’s appear in lowercase, while others are written in uppercase to highlight them. The term “LatinX” is intentionally written with both a capital “X” and a capital “L,” in line with Claudia Milian’s proposal that: “The Latin and the X are marked by, and prolong in, indeterminacy. Latin and X are capitalized to put their discursive functioning and communicative tensions in analytical play and to highlight how these dual-directional signifiers elicit continuous discernment” (2019: 39). This formula challenges normative Spanish grammar and phonetics, prompting a reflection on the meanings of “Latin” and “X” in the new contexts through which they are now transitioning.

Gad Yola’s work can be looked at as one of the initiatives that emerged in reaction to the unbridled rise of Spanish nationalism in 2017, the year of her debut. That January, Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party Vox, met with his European counterparts in Koblenz, Germany to proclaim a “patriotic spring” (Valero, 2017). In October of that same year, under Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party, Spain made front-page news in international headlines due to the repressive tactics employed by the police during the celebration of a referendum on Catalonia’s self-determination and independence (Barry, 2017). In the days leading up to the referendum, backup officers were sent to Catalonia from various other areas, with anonymous citizens cheering them on and shouting “Go get them!”—a motto usually reserved for national soccer matches (Kingsley and Minder, 2017; Wheeler, 2020: 246). Confronted with this glorification of Spanish nationalism artists and anti-racist collectives, many of them migrants or of migrant origin, articulated a powerful cultural response.

The need to subvert that monolithic, homogenizing “Spanishness” appealed to multiple “Otrxs” (“Other Xs”) (Olívar Graterol, 2021: 36). The year 2017 saw the emergence of such initiatives as “El porvenir de la revuelta. Memoria y deseo LGTBIQ” (“The Future of Revolt: LGTBIQ Memory and Desire”), aimed at raising awareness about sexual and gender dissidence and engaging in artistic practices that question hegemonic narratives. Under this project’s auspices, workshops, seminars, concerts, and exhibitions were organized at public institutions throughout Madrid. One such event, a workshop-seminar called “there’s no such thing as sex without racialization,” with an eponymous publication edited by anthropologist leticia rojas miranda and historian francisco godoy vega, shares various commonalities with Gad Yola’s queer, anti-racist project. The publication proposes “a decolonial approach to the libertarian agenda regarding sexuality. (…) a type of activism and theory of feminism and sexuality that takes the struggle against racism and coloniality seriously” (espinosa miñoso, 2017: 8). Their proposal encompasses linguistic insubordination through the use of lowercase letters in titles and proper names—evoking the work of bell hooks—and the glottopolitical use of punctuation marks: “We live in a world of quotation marks where words are not quite capable of naming, or translating, where their inadequacy makes them provisional” (espinosa miñoso, 2017: 10). Accordingly, the volume is overflowing with x’s: (1) memes bearing the caption: “cuando te dicen ‘me gustan lxs latinxs/sois más calientes jeje’” (“when someone tells you ‘I like latinxs/you’re hotter, haha’”) with a picture of an angry-looking girl (piña and guariota, 2017: 28); (2) titles proclaiming: “no soy queer, soy negrx” (“i’m not queer, i’m a black x”), or that insist: “Soy intensamente negrx” (“I am an intensely black x”) (piña narváez, 2019: 38); (3) authors signing as “PANCHITA PERVERSX” (“PANCHITA PERVERTED X”) (egaña rojas, 2017: 52); and (4) poetic actions such as “la indocumenta(dx)” (“the undocumented x”) (rojas miranda and godoy vega, 2017: 74). These are just four of the many examples where the everyday, expansive, agile “x” appears.

Also in 2017, some artists and activists regrouped, forming collectives such as Colectivo Ayllu (@colectivo_ayllu), composed of migrants and sexual dissidents from former European colonies who collaborate on research and political art initiatives. Their objective is to raise critical awareness that jolts the publics’ collective memory and helps dismantle colonial structures. Colectivo Ayllu has organized weekly voguing workshops in defiance of “white Spanish—pinkwashed and homo-nationalist—Ballroom” (Carrera Rivadeneira and Ayllu, 2020: 191; piña narváez, 2019: 43). iki yos piña narváez (b. Venezuela, 1984–), one of the driving forces behind Colectivo Ayllu, wonders: “What does it mean that the Madrid scene is dominated by white people when this practice historically belongs to black, migrant, racialized communities?” (46). A photo of Gad Yola holding a sign that reads “Black Lives Matter” was used to illustrate an article by piña narváez in which the author answers this question by titling her piece “El Voguing is not white, honey” (2019: 43).

Colectivo Ayllu has helped consolidate the conceptual frameworks of other anti-racist and gender-sexual dissident spaces that have emerged such as “Don’t hit a la negrx,” a series of parties organized in 2017 and inaugurated on 24 May 2018 (Carrera Rivadeneira and Ayllu, 2020: 193; Godoy Vega, 2023: 199). Like piña narváez’s article, the name is notoriously written in Spanglish or Goblish. This trend is reflected in the work of multidisciplinary artist Chenta Tsai Tseng, author of an article that contains the verse from which the series of parties took its name: “¡Oye ‘men’ no le pegue a la negra!” (“Hey, man, don’t hit the Black woman!”), borrowed from a salsa song by Colombian musician Joe Arroyo (2020). In just four posts after the original article appeared on social media, “Black woman” (“negra”) became “negrx” or “Black x” (@donthitalanegrx). The organizers of these events pay homage to the spaces historically associated with the Ball Room and voguing scenes and have created a strike fund, which they refer to as a “sexy box,” to support the people who attend these parties (Tsai Tseng, 2020; Godoy Vega, 2023: 202). Gad Yola debuted at one of these gatherings and has served as the host for the series of events since its very first edition (Ramírez, 2022; Godoy Vega, 2023: 199).

Spanish nationalist sentiment resurfaced in 2023, as a reaction against the proposed amnesty law for the Catalan political conflict, leading to violent protests in Madrid where far-right groups chanted racist slogans while bearing Spanish flags (see Europa Press, 2023). Gad Yola’s recent music video, “Problemática” (“Troublemaker,” 2023), takes up the appropriation of the Spanish flag by right-wing parties. She reclaims this nationalist symbol by wearing it over her shoulders as she walks around Madrid (Gad Yola, 2023b). The clip was intentionally released on 12 October, a Spanish National Holiday that also commemorates Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Gad Yola’s gesture connects contemporary co-opting of the flag with Hispanidad’s most quintessential symbol, Columbus. “Problemática” shows Gad Yola pulling the trigger at Madrid’s renown Columbus monument, symbolically ridding the Spanish capital of this icon.

Gad Yola’s creative projects feature numerous collaborators with whom she creates and develops a uniquely personal, though not individual or isolated, world. For the past 5 years, Gad Yola has been associated with Casa Drag Latina (@casadraglatina), which she co-founded in 2019 along with four other Latin American drag queens: Shirley Stonyrock (Ecuador), Clush (Peru), Lady Cirka (Brazil), and Nativa (Mexico). Self-management has become a driving force for these racialized, migrant Madrid-based drag queens who define themselves as “Brown artists” (Tsai Tseng, 2019b). Together, they have created theatrical works with such evocative titles as “Latin Drag Queen Jail” (2020), “Uncrowned Misses” (2021), “Migrant Pride” (2021), and “A Thousand and One Shakiras” (2023), combining monologues, dance, performances, and, in Gad Yola’s case, original songs. In 2023, Gad Yola inaugurated her own house, the House of Gad, featuring Nativa (Gad’s drag mother) and Gad’s daughters Kill Lola, Galindo Galán, Noelia Quino, and Charly Valverde, all from Bolivia. Although La Casa Drag Latina was already making art and generating spaces within what we might call the Transatlantic LatinX scene, House of Gad is more overt in its exercise of intersectional activism, declaring, imagining, and projecting itself as such.

In Gad Yola’s work, fun, frolicking, lip-syncing, and twerking have taken shape, and taken possession of all sorts of bodies, all over the Spanish capital. Like the artist, her audience is present in various spaces, which explains why Gad Yola is intent on performing at nightclubs and on the street as well as in contemporary art venues. As researcher and performance artist Kareem Khubchandani explains “choosing where you do drag—on the street, in the club, at home, in the library—is also an opportunity to think about the relationships of power, history and the body” (2023: 174). Gad Yola premieres her new songs at cultural centers dedicated to community development and transformative social change. Among these are La Parcería, a space for reflection, creativity, and action that was founded by migrants and has been in operation since 2010, and EspacioAfro, an Afro-diasporic artistic, cultural, and political initiative active since 2016. Gad Yola has also participated in artistic residencies at exhibition spaces such as CentroCentro and Matadero and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. At the same time, Gad Yola has performed in establishments in Madrid’s historically pop neighborhood (Club Maravillas and Café La Palma, in Malasaña), its most LGTBIQ+-friendly zone (DLRIO Live and Fluide Escape, in Chueca), and its most multinational, diverse, and gentrified area (Mercado San Fernando, Bar Label, and the occupied social center La Quimera, in Lavapiés). Her career spans street parties such as Madrid Pride in 2022, where she performed in the center of the city, and the 2023 Fiestas de la Paloma, one of Madrid’s most emblematic summer festivals. With Gad Yola’s presence throughout the Spanish capital, Madrid’s cultural scene is “Browning,” so it seems worth inquiring about the impact of her work on migrant identities and migrant bodies, as well as on Madrid’s art and culture. What does a non-white queer project like this Peruvian artist’s work set in motion in Spain?

Gad Yola’s work seeks to “Xcandalize” with other potential techniques and languages. The world-famous RuPaul’s Drag Race “Dictionary” has popularized the notion that drag generates its own vernacular (see DragRaceWiki-Fandom, 2023). In his latest book, Decolonize Drag, Khubchandani focuses on the multiple ways gender is co-constituted by race, migration, class, and disability (2003: 24). He presents RuPaul’s Drag Race as an empire, a “project of accumulating power by managing both capital and knowledge, money and minds” (87). As such, to decolonize drag is also to promote, invent, and invert a new vocabulary in dialogue with the territory where the performance takes place. One of the few voices to have analyzed the drag scene in Spain is researcher Anne-Marie Korte, who highlights some of the key features of drag in the Canary Islands, where the art form is intimately associated with carnival celebrations, unlike Anglophone or even peninsular drag (2022: 101). This apt observation requires further research and elaboration to address issues such as the following: What cultural influences—particularly Latin American and African influences—distinguish drag performance, its technologies (décor, stage, costumes, contour, flesh), its techniques (dance, pose, strut, flex, scowl, split), its music and themes in the Canary Islands? Is there such a thing as “peninsular drag” and “island drag”? And by extension, what about Andalusian, Catalonian, Galician, or Basque drag? Is the distinction merely linguistic or is there something else that defines them? How have film director Pedro Almodóvar’s characters and his depiction of drag impacted the way people in Spain imagine the national drag scene? The history of Iberian drag is yet to be written, and this is a task that requires theorizing the terms specific to each scene. In Madrid, Gad Yola promotes two ideas that are addressed in this interview: the characteristics of what she calls “Brown drag” (2023a) and the implications of being and declaring oneself a “Migranta” artist (2022a). This neologism adds a certain specificity to the migrant experience, using the letter “a”—used in Spanish to indicate the feminine—as opposed to the more standardized used (gender-neutral) “e” in the word “migrante.”

A third concept that Gad Yola’s work galvanizes is that of “drag surgery,” an idea proposed in her first exhibition “Hypernariz: Campaña contra las deformaciones de la nariz” (“Hypernose: A Campaign Against Nasal Deformities”) during an artistic residency (@romperencasode, 5 October 2021). At the opening, four participants used plastic components and makeup to “hack” their noses. The aim was to “drag up” their facial features, accentuating them to mock the white, Eurocentric canon of beauty. As Gad Yola explained, “we could have chosen any part of the body because, for racialized people, the entire body has a history” (Ramírez, 2022). The reparative potential of “drag surgery” is particularly noticeable in Madrid, where much of the cultural activity produced by migrant and racialized artists has tended to highlight other physical traits, like hair, that are often a target of racist attacks (see Bermúdez, 2023: 96; García López, 2021: 39; Wiener, 2021: 163; Bela-Lobedde, 2018: 42). These workshops reflect the material nature of Gad Yola’s project because, like many other drag artists, she is personally involved in creating her wigs, nails, makeup, dresses, costumes, jewelry, and shoes.

As fashion design and collective social design are inextricably linked, Gad Yola politicizes her garments in the public sphere. In 2020, the artist created a top bearing the slogan “CALLATE BLANCO” (“SHUT UP, WHITE MAN”) for an activity at Teatros del Canal, a performing arts center in Madrid. The phrase was inspired by a viral meme by Argentine anti-racist sex worker Rebe Lope, who attended a demonstration of mostly white feminists wearing a T-shirt that read “CALLATE BLANCA” (“SHUT UP, WHITE WOMAN”), purposefully spelled without the usual accent on the first “a” to reflect the informal “vos” form of “you” typically used in Argentina (Godoy Vega, 2023: 75). The photos of Gad Yola posted on Instagram sparked racist and trans-phobic comments such as: “CALLATE NEGRO” (“SHUT UP, BLACK MAN”) (76). Months later, Gad Yola published an ad on social media to sell her tops (2021). The ad features Gad Yola wearing the iconic garment in three different locations around Madrid: (1) a public bus where the driver slams on the brakes and an old lady contemptuously spits out, “get out of the way, wachiturra,” a pejorative racist slur; (2) a classroom where a student points out that “it wasn’t a discovery, it was an invasion,” and the teacher “corrects” him; and (3) a scene in Plaza de España, where we hear a woman, presumably a native of Madrid, lamenting, “Jeez, I mean, even eating pizza is considered cultural appropriation now.” In these spaces, the T-shirt serves as a witty and assertive response that is also safe precisely because it is silent. Unlike the cause, or woke, marketing of multinational companies like Inditex, Gad Yola’s re-contextualization does not exploit migrants to produce its product, instead it is migrants themselves who conceptualize, wear, and mobilize the logo as a sort of shield.

Fashion as a bodily device is one of the spaces of resistance within Madrid’s racialized queer community (Godoy Vega, 2023: 200). Gad Yola’s designs have served as a platform, chronicling events in Peru, as was the case with the white camisole with red glitter lettering that she wore to the premiere of the film Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody. On that occasion, the text on the shirt read “25 peruvianxs asesinadxs por el Estado” (“25 Peruvian x’s murdered by the State,” @gadyola, 22 December 2022), reflecting the violence perpetrated by the Andean nation’s police on demonstrators protesting the government and its measures (Taj and Turkewitz, 2022). On the other hand, Gad Yola has also embodied key debates in Spain. For example, by wearing a dress printed with the Bourbon’s family tree with the slogan “Trans People Exist. Monarchy Shouldn’t” (@gadyola, 24 September 2021). This message ties in the prospect of a Third Spanish Republic—a long-lasting and ongoing demand of left-leaning political parties opposed to the monarchy—with a critique of the division within the feminist movement over the rights of trans people. Moreover, many of Gad Yola’s looks support other LatinX creators. Such is the case with the @afrofeministe design she wore to the premiere of Cardo, the Atresmedia TV series she starred in (@gadyola, 10 February 2023).

Of all of Gad Yola’s outfits, the garment she wears at the end of her performance “Drag Is Brown: The House of Gad’s Familial Fantasies” synthesizes this joint diasporic LatinX effort, in combination with “Otrxs” (“Other Xs”) (@gadyola, 7 March 2023). Created during an arts research residency at FelipaManuela “Drag Is Brown” is composed mainly of a 40-min performance filmed by producer-director Maricella Vilca Vargas (see Highlight 1). This experience served to make a family portrait of the House of Gad that was later installed in one of the rooms at CentroCentro’s “Everything Else” exhibit in 2023 (see Highlight 2). In the performance, Gad Yola’s costume embodies a combination of several superimposed “X’s”—as her semi-transparent brown dress has not just four, but multiple strips coming out of it that physically tie her to her drag daughters and mother. In this piece, each member of the household approached Gad Yola, picked up a strip and held it up to form a series of crisscrossed, interwoven paths. The “X” articulated in Gad Yola’s work is exactly like that dress: Brown, queer, collective, global, and made in Madrid.

This introduction to Gad Yola’s work points to a counter-cultural LatinX art scene—in dialogue with the United States but beyond its borders—that makes us wonder: What are the implications of the potential “Global Iberian LatinXness” exemplified by Gad Yola and her drag houses? The LatinX trans-nationality that these artists embody raises cross-cutting questions for US LatinX studies, Iberian cultural studies (see Bermúdez, 2016), and, even, Global Hispanophone studies (see Campoy-Cubillo and Sampedro Vizcaya, 2019) insofar as it situates other linguistic, cultural, and political diversities in the peninsula and beyond. In their introduction to the monograph Entering the Global Hispanophone, researchers Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya pose the following questions:
What might this new category entail for the broader fields, and the practices, of Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx or Iberian studies today? How might engaging with one or more of the geographical areas involved—Western Sahara, Ceuta, Melilla, Morocco, Algeria, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and perhaps others (…)—alter, or transform, our approach to the respective fields? (2019: 8).

One may ask the same questions back when considering a Madrid-infused LatinX: What might an Iberian LatinX frame entail for the broader fields, and the practices, of the Global Hispanophone, LatinX, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian studies? The emphasis on a “globality” that caters to various languages, diasporas, and variants of Spanish seems productive for these interconnected fields. In this supranational context, it is fitting to ask ourselves: What role do social media and virtual (global) culture play as research sources? How does this impact our academic practices? The interview that follows uses QR codes that lead to music videos and playlists. This is intended to bring the text to life using a technology that makes it possible to listen to Gad Yola in the medium in which she launched her career as an artist: “YouTube is my drag mother. I learned everything through tutorials” (Carrera and Escobar, 2023: 43).

The US LatinX roots of the 1990s “cyber-X” (Rivas, 2017) resonate in present-day Spain. Casa Drag Latina’s profiles on social media serve as a repository to map, not just its own work, but also the work of other LatinX drag queens on the Iberian scene who are not associated with the House, including Chile Güero (Mexico), Diamante Merybrown (Dominican Republic), Fiona (Ecuador), and Miss Diabla and Dannylicious (both from Venezuela) (@casadraglatina, 1 September 2022). Gad Yola has used social media to rally her fans and archive her work. Thus, the present study used Instagram to contact the artist, analyze her work through her posts and highlights, and share links, photos, and ideas with her. Our collaboration has, in turn, been captured online, starting with our initial meeting at Duke University (@gadyola, 9 April 2023) and throughout its subsequent unfolding in Madrid (Reina Sofía Museum 2023).

––E. R. F.

Elia Romera-Figueroa: The stage name you chose is inspired by the protagonist of Wonder Woman (2017), Israeli actress Gal Gadot. People interpret your adaptation, Gad Yola, differently depending on their location. For instance, when Rita Indiana and Los Misterios sing “Es la hora de volvé” (2010), we understand “yola” is the Caribbean counterpart of the Mediterranean “pateras” (small, often dangerous, boats used by migrants to cross the Mediterranean); while, in the United States, “gayola” is also associated as a type of bribery the police would accept from gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s (Lowen Agee, 2014). In Spain, these homonyms form a pun that is read as a colloquial expression used to refer to masturbation. But in Peru and other Latin American countries, it doesn’t have that same connotation. In this transoceanic voyage of meanings, how has your chosen name been re-signified and what do you want to convey with it today?

Gad Yola: I chose this name in 2017, before Gal Gadot went viral in 2021 with her stance on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The first drag queens I met in the Madrid scene used puns, like Supremme Deluxe, which alludes to a hamburger from McDonald’s; Kika Lorace, which in Spanish sounds like you’re saying, “Oh, my it’s hot!,” or Vedette Davis, which is a combination of the word “vedette” and the name of the actress Bette Davis. I wanted to steer clear of overused or stereotypically feminized names like Crystal, Sasha, and Ruby.

“Gad Yola” fits my vision of a bold, comic drag artist. And although I’ve never based my standup monologues on jokes of a sexual nature, I like what a “gayola” evokes, that moment of ecstasy and fleeting pleasure that we’re all after. It is true that, in Peru, the name doesn’t make sense; people often think it’s after the children’s entertainer Yola Polastri (b. Yolanda Piedad Polastri Giribaldi, 1950–). Today, I think it sounds a bit cacophonous, but I like that it is original and eccentric. Plus, I’ve gradually added other dimensions to my name as I started meeting people from all over the world, like my sister Lady Cirka from Brazil, where “gayola” means “cage” and has the same etymological origin as in French, where it means “jail.” I’m setting my name free.

ERF: In the documentary Paris Is Burning, model and activist Octavia Saint Laurent (1964–2009) dreamt of turning her name into a household brand: “I want my name to be a household product” (1990: 01:04). In your 2022 music video “No exotice” (“Don’t Exoticize”), you make this wish come true, presenting “Gad Yola” as an ice cream and soft-drink brand (2022b). What does it mean to film yourself riding a “Gad Yola” food-vending bike with a wig made of little bottle caps with your name on them in a graphic style that evokes Inca Kola’s yellow and blue logo? What does it mean to dress up in drag and hack, or embody, what is widely recognized as Peru’s national beverage since its founding in 1935? (see Highlight 3).

GD: The replica of Inca Kola is just another counterfeit I learned about while living in Madrid. The Inca Kola from Peru has several distant cousins made in other countries like “Andins Cristal,” “America Cola,” and “Inka Cola,” in Spain and “Andis Kola,” in Ecuador. They’re all the same shade of yellow and have the same chewing-gum flavor and come wrapped in blue plastic. These are the beverages migrants who don’t want to pay 5 euros to have a “real” Inca Kola drink in Spain. We consume the cheap version with a similar taste. That’s doesn’t happen in Peru. Peruvians would rather spend 10 or 20 soles on a familiar bottle than buy an imitation. In that sense, the brand is well positioned with the slogan “Creando un Perú que da gusto” (“Creating a Peru that is pleasing”) both in terms of family values and in terms of adapting to social changes with Afro-Peruvian, indigenous, and LGTBQ+ communities in Peru.

For me, looking at it from abroad as a migrant trans subject, a “Peru that is pleasing” is an exercise in re-signifying the brand. The idea of making the wig out of bottle caps was inspired by the work of Brazilian singer IZA (b. Isabela Cristina Correia de Lima Lima, 1990–) and her music video “Gueto,” where she wears a piece created by Walério Araújo. I did the graphic design for the wig, but the piece was created by Afro-Peruvian singer La Mamba (@lamambaone). The aim is to do a drag version of the national drink to bring attention to myself in a way that you don’t see on Peruvian TV ads and make my face and body palatable to the great LGTBQ+-phobic and white-washed masses. Inca Kola is not yet ready to have a drag queen usurp its image. So, for now, I’ll have to make a counterfeit.

ERF: This gesture of re-signifying national concepts and icons is present in many of your interventions. In the 2021 music video “Por España” (“For Spain”) by the artist from Leon Samantha Hudson, you wore a T-shirt that reads “Castiza” (see Highlight 4). And in another photo shoot, you added a photo caption that read, “The last drag queen of the Incan Empirefx (even though I’m actually a descendant of castizxs )” (Ramírez, 2022). This word castiza has a long history. But briefly, it is worth noting that it has been used to exalt Castile and all things “intrinsically” Castilian, in line with the ideas of writers like Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). But castiza has also been used to denote the intermediate step between whiteness and racial mixing, as illustrated in the casta (caste) paintings that proliferated during the eighteenth century, particularly in Mexico and in the Viceroyalty of Peru, where castiza was used to refer to a child born of a mestizo woman and Spanish man. In this crossroads of conflicting ideas, what does it mean for you to embody all things castizo as a madrileña from Peru in a music video that attacks a patriotic and heteronormative Spanishness?

GY: In the music video produced by Samantha Hudson, I worked very closely with stylist Diego Rodríguez (@ucancallmehottie). In the “Por España” video, I modeled my look on a combination of Penélope Cruz in an Almodóvar film and a fun, flashy, 1990s raver look. The fact that you can clearly read that I’m castiza is a slap in the face to people who think that the color of one’s skin or one’s origins determine whether or not you belong to a place. Saying I’m castiza is a way of saying that I am just as Spanish as my friends who appear in the video like Venedita Vondash or Hornella Góngora—two drag queens from the Madrid and Valencia scenes who always base their style on Spanish folklore like bullfighting or Madrid’s Movida—and Satanassa, a pioneering Catalonian performer from the 1990s Barcelona drag scene. So, I am just as worthy of being treated as an artist, a citizen, a legal person. It’s also a really good punch line precisely because it’s the antithesis of my character, who is constantly calling herself a foreigner and a “Migranta.”

I learned a bit about the casta paintings in the history book at the Cervantes, my high school in Madrid. Two days after the “Por España” video premiered, I had a chance to see real casta paintings at Sandra Gamarra’s exhibition “Buen Gobierno” (“Good Governance”) at the Sala Alcalá 31 exhibit space. When I posted the photos with the “Castiza” T-shirt on my social media profiles, I included an image of those casta paintings and briefly explained their significance. I thought it was empowering to allude to these images that were made by whites to teach us that, depending on how you mix or who you mix with, you can have a better or worse status in society. The “castizo” was born of a “mestizo man” and a “Spanish woman,” while the “mestizo” was born of a “Spanish man” and an “Indian (sic) woman.” In other words, in the latter case, the Spaniard is “deteriorating” the race. But if you had to choose between being a “castizo” and being a “cholo” (the child of a “mestizo” man and an “Indian” woman), it was better to be a “castizo.” That same October 12, I wore the “Castiza” T-shirt again in a march in the center of Madrid against the narrative of Hispanicity. I also carried a sign that read: “There’s no such thing as ‘improving the race,’ no more racial hierarchies!” (@gadyola, 19 October 2021).

ERF: You have collaborated with multidisciplinary artist Putochinomaricón (b. Chenta Tsai Tseng, 1990–) on several occasions. For instance, on the co-production of the music video “No exotice.” This video decries the fetishization of people with non-white bodies in intimate and/or sexual relations with white people, striking a contrast between its reggaeton, pop, and cumbia rhythms and a story of abuse that ends with you wounding the assailant with a knife before plunging into feigned sorrow then smiling, as if liberated (Gad Yola, 2022b). In their book Arroz tres delicias: sexo, raza y género (“Three Delights Fried Rice: Sex, Race, and Gender,” 2019) Tsai Tseng revindicates the role of popular culture—in this case, Snow White—as “an escape valve that allowed them to be themselves for an hour and twenty-eight minutes” (2019a: 28). What influence has Tsai Tseng had on your work? Are the three minutes and forty-two seconds of “No exotice” a tool to get revenge—at least through pop music—on those violent, racist, and toxic intimate and sexual relationships?

GY: Chenta has had tremendous influence on my career as an artist. We share many similar life experiences, from the fetishization of our intimate and sexual lives, to our participation in anti-racist activism through artwork created from our queer, dissident perspectives. In 2020, Chenta offered to produce a song for me, and in 2021 we took the plunge. They were very meticulous about the creative process, and I really felt supported when I told them about the song’s subject matter and about the reggaeton and cumbia rhythms I wanted. We created a mood board with songs and images to evoke the base and melody while we worked together on the lyrics in the pre-chorus and the final naming. We had three sessions in the studio. Then, while I was recording the music video in Peru, Chenta finished editing the vocals before going on to mix them and create the master with Chilean singer-songwriter Ignacio Redard (@ignacioredard).

For me, writing “No exotice” was a way to heal, because, in it, I laugh at myself while also embracing that teenager who didn’t know where to draw the line to protect her self-esteem and look out for herself in sexual relations. Obviously, not all my close relationships with white people have been tumultuous, but Chenta encouraged me to relive and revisit a certain incident through music: What would I have done in that situation? What would I have felt if it had been worse or better? What do I want to say?

Meanwhile, we also played with that pop-style repetition, with typical cumbia instruments like the timbales and the guaracha, and with the sort of melodramatic lyrics associated with a stereotypically heterosexual, monogamous Latin love affair. The single was released in March 2022, and it was very well received. I had a chance to travel around Spain––Mallorca, Málaga, Barcelona, Valencia––to present it. Now it’s become an anthem in the Spanish drag scene.

ERF: Another of your songs, “Aguanta Migranta” (“Hang in There, Mx. Migrant”), invokes a new migrant identity, that of the “Migranta,” a concept that you adopted for the song’s title. Migranta is also the name of a 2021 documentary by directors Luiz Felipe Lucas and Manauara Clandestina about immigrant artists from all over Europe in search of a new language with which to conceptualize the way this region was established. What does “Migranta” mean to you, with that capital “M” that makes it look like it’s screaming and with the “a” at the end that detours from the Spanish migrante? What does migrant/Migranta identity mean in Spain nowadays? Is there ever a point where you’re no longer a Migranta? In your case, you came to Spain in 2006 and obtained a Spanish passport in 2020. You announced this milestone on social media with a poster proclaiming: “Legally Spanish,” a sort of replica with a twist on the title and aesthetics of the American comedy franchise Legally Blonde (see Highlight 5). And yet, to this day, you still refer to yourself as “Migranta.” Why is that?

GY: I understand Migranta identity as being associated with the southern hemisphere, Latin America, Africa, a Global South in line with the framework proposed by the Black trans-feminist iki yos piña and artist-curator francisco godoy in their book Devuélvanos el oro (“Give Us Back the Gold”) (2018). I chose “Migranta” because of the clear gender implications of substituting the “e” (in the default gender-neutral migrante) for an “a.” The Migranta has no gender, because the Migranta is stripped of gender. Migranta identity stems from the mobility that is driven by living conditions in our countries of origin, by the levels of poverty we’re exposed to, and by the lack of rights for women and people who identify as LGTBQ+.

In that sense, my song “Aguanta Migranta” isn’t for everybody. It’s not for people who came to the northern hemisphere on a student visa hoping to make a better life for themselves with a standard of living that is in no way precarious and is associated with Latin America’s middle classes. I associate Migranta identity with what I saw in my own family, the circumstances of my LGTBQ+ friends, trans and queer people, and non-binary people with an illegalized or irregular migration status. The premise of the song’s lyrics was to create a composition that reflects the sort of life I had when I got to Spain in the early 2000s: the first generations of Latina women who found themselves in Madrid, looking for an apartment or room, finding recreational spaces in parks like Lago or the Retiro, sending remittances home from the first Latino call shops, etc.

I don’t think one ever ceases to be a Migranta, even if you marry a European or get your papers or become a citizen, not even if you win the Princesa/Príncipe de Asturias Award (The Princess of Asturias Awards, formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014). The trauma of having to leave your family or place of origin behind marks you for life. Only those of us who have experienced it understand what that means: children separated from their parents at an early age, getting work papers with contracts to provide care for European citizens, adapting to the Spanish educational system, etc. Note that what I call “Migranta” is a different experience from that of an exile or refugee. The term “Migranta” implies a distinct sort of romanticism fueled by the intention of aspiring to the “Eurodream.”

ERF: What did the “Eurodream” mean in your own family history? Why migrate to Spain and not to the United States or some other European country?

GY: The “Eurodream” is the promise of the European welfare state, which was built on colonial plunder and slavery. It means welfare, abundance, and opportunity as opposed to the precariousness, violence, and poverty of Latin America. In the case of Spain, Latin American migration surged in the early 2000s. My mother’s side of the family began coming to Spain in stages. They were, for the most part, women who worked taking care of people’s houses and children. Then they brought their own children and young nieces and nephews over. The main reason for coming here was the language, and because the first person in the family to come to Madrid got here in the 1990s.

ERF: Close family ties are among the main themes of “Drag Is Brown,” and this is reflected both in the performance piece and in the portrait included in the art installation (see Highlights 1 and 2). In this piece, you reflect on memory and the imaginaries that migrants in the West create as a form of resistance. What is the role of these bonds of affection and this personal and collective memory in this project?

GY: As far as the close personal relationships between the members of House of Gad who participated in “Drag Is Brown,” I find our stories are deeply rooted in love and admiration. I met Nativa while dancing cumbia in a club, and I met Kill Lola while working as a telemarketer. My fellow Peruvian Rola Apocalipstick (@brendaluciacontilde), whom I met through anti-racist activities in the students’ group “Estudiantes de Abya Yala” at the Complutense University, also participated. We’ve performed together on stage and shared experiences that brought us so close together that we decided to establish our own drag house. We all have a similar background: born in Latin America, moved to Spain at an early age, parents with a history of migration, the neighborhoods where we lived in Madrid’s South––Vallecas, Lavapiés, Legazpi––the discrimination we encounter in bureaucratic procedures, in our art, and in day-to-day life.

It was Andrea Pacheco, the Chilean curator and director of the FelipaManuela cultural space, who decided to take the family portrait in the living room at FelipaManuela. What she wanted was precisely to evoke that sense of family spirit. The living room at FelipaManuela has hosted a great many artists, so it’s a way of forging bonds of affection with other migrant, racialized, and dissident people in Madrid (see Highlight 2). For instance, among the artists who have visited the space are Andrea Pacheco González (1970–) and Lorenzo Sandoval (1980–), co-editors of the book Sombras ocultas en el tiempo (“Shadows Hidden in Time”) which includes a reflection on “Drag Is Brown” (2022: 135), as it happens.

Personal and collective memory are also present in the performance piece, where we change roles within the drag family and represent our blood relatives. We played our godparents, mothers, and grandmothers, paying homage to whatever ancestor we chose, establishing a dialogue with them, acknowledging their merits, and celebrating them. In that sense, we worked on the emotional shortcomings aggravated by migration and family separation.

ERF: This performance includes the term “marrón” (“Brown”) in its title, which you used on a banner in the 2023 Critical Pride demonstration. There, we read “ORGULLO MARRÓN” (“BROWN PRIDE,”) which was also the title of writer and journalist Gabriela Wiener’s article in The New York Times (2020). What does it mean to you to be a “Brown” drag artist? And how is that different from “white” drag? Is all drag by people of Latin American origin in Spain “Brown” just because of where its creators came from?

GY: Saying “Drag Is Brown” implies thinking about art from the perspective of bodies that have not enjoyed or obtained due recognition for their contributions. In other words, any technique or art is equally valid when executed by a person who is not white. Proclaiming “Drag Is Brown” is akin to African American trans drag queen Crystal Labeija’s cry in the documentary The Queen, when she exclaims: “I have the right to show my colors, darling!” (Simon, 1969: 01:01). She was disapproving of the jury’s vote in favor of the white contestant, which made Crystal lose the ball. Ever since, Crystal has headed her own community and house, where she competes with LatinX and Black people, away from the white gaze.

The difference, compared to the sort of drag my Spanish colleagues are engaged in, has to do with the circumstances in which our drag takes place: the themes of our shows, the spaces where they are carried out, and the personal concerns each of us has as artists. There are a lot of drag collectives in Spain such as monster queens (@lacorte), drag kings (@dragkingespana, 2023), or Andalusian drag queens (@lasninia, 2023). But there was no group with a critical anti-racist basis to its artistic creations. At House of Gad, we critique and condemn racist practices in drag like the use of blackface by Alma DeSoul—winner of the Torremolinos Drag Queen Gala (Matas, 2022)—the xenophobic jokes at some outmoded bars in Chueca, like the Black&White, and the cultural appropriation in party posters like those for the “Gay-Shas” in Barcelona (@gayshas.ar, 2023).

But not all drag created by Latina or migrant artists is “Brown drag.” What I do is take a stand and make a statement. Without that statement, it’s not “Brown drag,” the way I see it. “Brown” means endowing that adjective and that color that has always been associated with all things negative, foreign, and undesirable with new attributes.

ERF: What does a LatinX diaspora mean to you? Do you see any sort of dialogue between, for instance, U.S. Latinos/as/es/Xs and Latinos/as/es/Xs in Spain? I’m wondering whether you have found any U.S. Latino/a/e/X intellectual or cultural referents useful in articulating your identity or in your work as an artist here in Spain.

GY: The Latinx diaspora means reconciliation and truth. I see the Latinx diaspora as a way of coming to terms with my identity in Europe without feeling like it’s been de-localized or invalidated due to the fact that I’m not in Latin America. This is something that makes a lot of the folks in my community feel guilty: thinking about our Latin identity and creating artwork about it when we’ve been away from our countries for years. That’s why, to me, it means reconciliation: seeing yourself as a migrant, Latino, and queer subject who accepts the contradictions inherent to living in Europe as a migrant.

As far as US Latino referents, the first that I recall is Eva Longoria, whom I first encountered in ABC’s Desparate Housewives. Then I started following her and her work as an activist on social media. She’s always questioning the invisibility of Latinx and indigenous peoples in the US media. Also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, especially after all the commotion she’s caused on Twitter since 2018, her approachability, and the milestone her election set in America. And then there’s actress and model Indya Moore—an Afro-Latina from the FX series Pose—singer Selena Quintanilla, and the Chicana drag queen Valentina, among others. Valentina caused quite a stir when she took part in RuPaul’s Drag Race because of the way she redefined the “Latina” drag aesthetic.

ERF: Your album, Travesti del Perú (2023c), establishes a dialogue with the legacy of Peruvian artist and philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013). Since 2017, Campuzano’s work is on display in one of the few open-air public spaces at the Reina Sofía Museum. To be more exact, it’s in the courtyard of the museum’s new wing, the Patio Nouvel, a space that is accessible and visible to anyone wandering down the street. You are currently living in the south of Madrid, in Vallecas, the city’s most emblematic working-class neighborhood, which was traditionally home to domestic migrants who flocked to the capital from rural areas. But you spent your teenage years living in a building in front of the Nouvel from which you would now have been able to see Campuzano’s work named Beauty Salon (2014). How and when did you come upon Campuzano’s work? How does Campuzano’s omnipresence in one of the main art institutions in Madrid, Spain, and Europe resonate with you?

GY: I came upon Giuseppe’s work during the 2020–2021 pandemic through social media content posted by Peruvian collectives like “No tengo miedo” (“I’m Not Afraid”) (@r0sarabi0sa, 2023), and through organizations like the Spanish Cultural Center in Lima that did some Facebook live streams where they talked about Campuzano’s work (see “La mirada que soy,” 2021). I had also heard about him at friends’ recitals. In 2020, someone gave me a pirated PDF copy of the catalogue for Museo Travesti del Perú (“Transvestite Museum of Peru”) and, ever since, I’ve kept going back to it to reread parts of it as if it were some kind of Bible. Then, in 2022, the Lima Art Museum (MALI) put on a show called “Giuseppe Campuzano. Línea de Vida” (“Giuseppe Campuzano: Life Line”). They did various live streams on YouTube, and I followed them.

Seeing Giuseppe’s image on the walls of the Reina Sofía and recognizing it makes me appreciate the clear guidelines the museum’s directors have followed in their work: the focus on gender and the critique of heteronormativity. In addition to Campuzano’s work, the Reina Sofía has exhibited works by Daniela Ortiz and the Ayllu Collective, which demonstrates the institution’s interest in decolonizing itself, something Campuzano was also seeking. Thinking about a mobile, “transvestite museum” made using replicas and forgeries precisely in order to talk about the history of trans murder and homophobia in Peru.

ERF: In the music video for “Travesti del Perú,” you include direct references to Campuzano’s traveling museum or, as you call them, “forgeries” (2023c). The catalogue of Campuzano’s Museo offers insight into the history of trans people in Peru through its archive (shoes, manuscripts, moches, maps…), its chronicles of transfeminicides, and its bodily memory, or repertoire, to use Diana Taylor’s terminology (gestures, dances, orality…) (2003: 20). Museo Travesti del Perú emerged as a research project in 2003. Twenty years later, your initiative reiterates it and proposes a new approach to LGTBIQ+ and colonial heritage through a series of dates (1566, 1803, 2023), personal histories (Francisco Pro), and monuments in which you intervene. Of all the references Campuzano included in his catalogue, why did you choose these for your music video? How do you re-signify these times and “sites of memory” through your intervention?

GY: I chose the dates 1506, 1803, and 2023 because there is an interval of almost 200 years among them. I highlight those years as a testimony to the fact that white, cisgender, heterosexual repression began with colonization. People assume that the 1969 Stonewall riots were the first queer demonstrations against police brutality and heteronormativity, but they were not. If we want to talk about how No son 50, son 500 años de resistencia (“It’s Not 50, It’s 500 Years of Resistance,” 2019), as the title of the book by the Madrid-based collective Migrantes Transgresorxs suggest, we have to prove it.

In 1506, an edict was issued in Peru declaring that men should not wear long hair so that they could be distinguished from women (Campuzano, 2008: 38). That is why the first scene in my video takes place at the hairdresser’s, a safe space where there is no end to aesthetics, and where many trans people work.

In 1803, the Afro-Peruvian Francisco Pro was put on trial accused of being queer for wearing a tapada limeña in public (Campuzano, 2008: 39). That’s why I wear a tapada limeña in that scene in the video too (see Highlight 6). I set that scene in the local market in Planeta, my neighborhood in Lima, where two police officers surround me and question my gender expression and identity.

Finally, I included the year 2023 because of the marches organized to protest the murder of two trans women sex workers in my district, Cercado de Lima, at the start of the year (Redacción ER, 2023). It was a massive protest that had a huge impact on the community. That’s why we wanted to show us finally happy, dancing, and making a statement. Because despite all this, we are still alive, we are still creating in Peru and abroad to put an end to this repression.

ERF: Earlier, you mentioned a fellow artist and activist from Madrid, iki yos piña narváez. She talks about a series of referents that were decisive for thinking about what she calls “cuerpx otrx” (“othered X bodies”), among which she includes those that “could well have vogued with Black bodies in Paris Is Burning and established a dialogue with the Inca deities that inspired Giuseppe Campuzano and his ‘Museo Travesti del Perú’” (piña narváez, 2017: 40). Clearly these referents are alive and are being engaged with, not only in your work, but more broadly in contemporary Madrid.

So, I wanted to ask you about other sources of inspiration. For instance, when you do “criollo lip-synch” (Carrera and Escobar, 2023: 44) or, in your live performances, when you directly reference icons of global LatinX culture like La Lupe’s “Ser el grito” (“To Be the Scream”), or songs with a long history among activists such as “Me gritaron ‘negra’!” (“Someone Screamed ‘Black Woman’ at Me!”) by Afro-Peruvian artist Victoria Santa Cruz. At other times, you make connections with pop culture, like in the show “Las mil y una Shakiras” (“A Thousand and One Shakiras”) that you did with La Casa Drag Latina. Then you have also created characters like “Gad Bunny” (2020) and “Gadyoncé” (2023) that result in a potent Global South LatinX creation. What is your connection with these referents? How receptive are audiences in Madrid to the way you impersonate these icons?

GY: I think that no matter how decolonial a struggle or a person may be, when they get home, they turn on the radio or watch a video on YouTube and they know who Shakira is, they know what Bad Bunny did, or they watch Thalia’s TikTok videos. In other words, we cannot run away from mass culture. Also, the “impersonator” drag queen who imitates the gestures, mannerisms, look, and even voice of celebrities to a T is a key figure in trans history. Impersonations of mainstream artists like Dianna Ross, Lady Gaga, and Judy Garland helped consolidate drag. In that sense, I think my versions of Shakira, Bad Bunny, Beyoncé, Celia Cruz, and La Lupe in my shows and in photographs and social media sketches is a bit cheeky. It entails imagining an anti-racist drag version of these icons, and this is well received because we add our own spin to it. Our audience, which is mainly Latino, identifies with those sounds, and this generates a really cool space of mutual understanding.

ERF: Let’s finish with a creative exercise that could well be constantly updated: What is your LatinX soundscape in Spain?

GY:

[Highlights]

1.
“Drag Is Brown” performance. Photo by Lukasz Michalak. Used by permission.

2.
Portrait for “Drag Is Brown.” FelipaManuela’s “Everything Else” exhibition, CentroCentro Cultural Center. Photo by Lukasz Michalak. Used by permission.

3.
“No exotice.” Photo by Gonza Gallego. Used by permission.

4.
“Castiza.” Photo by Gonza Gallego. Used by permission.

5.
“Legally Spanish.” Photo by Sergy Producciones. Used by permission.

6.
“Tapada Limeña.” Photo by Gabriela Aranda Barcelli. Used by permission.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This publication has benefitted from the innovative analytical and critical support extended by Tejidos Conjuntivos, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Program in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices, and Cultural Studies, organized by Germán Labrador Méndez, Jorge Gaupp, and many, many others, whom I thank for the opportunity. A very special thanks to those tejidos who made those months engaging and enjoyable. I am deeply appreciative of Stephanie Sieburth, who introduced me to Paris Is Burning back at Duke, and to those who shared their ideas about this interview and patiently reviewed it: Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez, Cristina R. Cejas, and my boulder, Andrés Porras Chaves. I extend my utmost thanks to Gad Yola, for this year-long collaboration, trust, and generosity.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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