Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Enzo E. Vasquez Toral TRANSLOCAS: THE POLITICS OF PUERTO RICAN DRAG AND TRANS PERFORMANCE. By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 350. Loca, a Spanish word for a madwoman or a slur for an effeminate man, unsettles people as it travels across spaces in the Americas. In Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes breathes a new meaning into this stigmatized identity by introducing the neologism transloca, which accounts for the "trans-" elements of diasporic movement and displacement of Puerto Rico as a "transnation" (15). Instead of proposing transloca as an identity, La Fountain-Stokes builds transloca performance as a theoretical lens to read "Puerto Rican loca, drag, and trans theatrical, film, literary, activist, and cabaret/ nightclub performances" (3). Although the works under analysis extend from the 1960s to the present, Translocas is far from a historical account; rather, it theorizes based on historical events and individual works that speak of a broader phenomenon and considers drag and trans as elastic—and at times intersecting—labels to characterize performance. Specifically, La Fountain-Stokes argues that these transloca performances challenge the status quo and "are key to understanding translocal Puerto Rican, American, Latin American, and Caribbean national imaginaries and social processes" (6). At its core, transloca performance is a decolonial mode of analysis that addresses the complexities of Puerto Rican race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration. Transloca is a term that resists Anglo-American words such as "queer" and the process of globalization and capitalist logics of LGBTQ politics. La Fountain-Stokes puts in conversation an impressive amount of literature about, or produced in, Latin America and the Caribbean across different languages and disciplines. In his opening chapter "Theorizing la Loca," he traces the different theorizations and uses of loca as a debated term in queer and feminist studies and places his own contribution in these genealogies. For instance, the late sociologist Lionel Cantú Jr. used transloca for the first time to refer to a group of Latina transnational feminist scholars (35). Although significantly different in definition, La Fountain-Stokes considers his use of this term as an extension of Cantú's insights. The two subsequent chapters focus on separate groups of performers who embody the contradictory aspects of transloca performance such as life and death and glamour and poverty. Chapter 2 contrasts the transloca aesthetics and self-fashioning of androgynous drag performer Nina Flowers to those of aspiring fashion designer and makeup artist Jorge Steven López Mercado and femme trap singer Kevin Fret, who were both brutally murdered. La Fountain-Stokes delineates the ways in which transloca embodiments and knowledges manifest in these three artists to argue for a broader transloca epistemological framework. Homing in on class as a vector of analysis, chapter 3 argues for the transloca drag of poverty as "a multifaceted, resourceful drag of resistance and negotiation, involving contradictions, invention, and inversion" (70). Drawing from solo performance, autobiography, film, and television appearances, this chapter analyzes the individual works of Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, and Monica Beverly Hillz in juxtaposition to the radical activism of Sylvia Rivera. Historically grounding the work of each of these performers, La Fountain-Stokes shows how they "challenge[d] social structures in the context of inequality" across time (101). Throughout his book, La Fountain-Stokes accounts for whiteness in Puerto Rican identity by introducing some artists as "light-skinned"; nevertheless, it is only in chapters 4 and 5, where race takes center stage, albeit in distinct manners. In chapter 4, La Fountain-Stokes introduces the works of Freddie Mercado in genres such as painting, installation, performance art, and female impersonation. The author coins "ultrabaroque drag of rasanblaj" (reassembly, in Haitian Kreyòl) as a rubric to read Mercado's aesthetics—epitomic transloca work in its ability to cross "the line between sanity and madness, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imaginary" (105). As a light-skinned performer, Mercado's treatment of the politics of race and mestizaje in Puerto Rico...