The Sounds and Queer Merecumbé of the Mission

Before my very eyes in homemade denim bell bottoms and freshly drawn eyebrows: the Legendary Mother of the House of Pan Dulce, a.k.a Adela Holiday, a.k.a La Chica Terremoto, alias my big trans mama. She’s flustered and annoyed that I rushed her out of the shower, barely able to blow out her blond lilac hair, magenta press-on nails digging into my arm as she exclaims in her iconic hoarse voice: Pero niña! What a big pain in the ass you are, Juliana. Siempre haciéndome la vida un yogurt. I feel loved. I pick her up from the apartment on Duboce and Valencia that Adela shares with my tía, her sissy sister, drag queen goddess and incomparable loca marica, Nelson D’Alerta a.k.a Catherine White. Tía Cathy waves at me from the door, kisses fly from her fingertips in my direction, flashing her deep blue eyes which match her light beard, yelling at Adela to por favor remember to buy the yuca and plátano for dinner from la tienda de los chinos, the Chinese store on 16th Street.

Adela pulls me close as we start our walk. Locking arms like comadres, we begin our nine-year-old ritual. The stroll around the Mission, our aleteo travesti. Cruising around the mission together is ritual, is kiki, is shade and chisme. It is waving to the girls on 17th Street selling beauty products who recognize Adela from back in the day. Adelita! Amor! How you doin’, mama? and when she introduces me as her kid, the youngest one and the biggest dolor de culo, the trans girls kiss my cheek twice as Adela continues her story: a Colombian dude got me pregnant and all I got was this lesbian. People in the Mission know my mama for the 30 years she’s spent up and down its streets waving her friki freak flag and spilling all that thick Caribbean accent onto its streets. A raver, an activist, a performer, a mother of the house and a sirena club kid, Adela is best known for all the work she’s done with the trans Latina community in San Francisco.

Here’s the T, mi reina: Adela and I are part of a larger chosen family. Like many queer people in San Francisco before us, we have built a family not on blood, but on our need to feel supported, seen and loved unconditionally. In our particular dysfunctional functional family, it is our familiarity with the effervescence Latinada and the queer sabrosura that glues us together. Adela Vázquez—named after the “Adelitas,” the warrior mujeres in full sombrero, cartridge belts and rifle realness who participated in the Mexican revolution—is part of the old-school transsexual matriarchy of San Francisco, which includes other matrons like Tamara Ching, Miss Major and Felicia Elizondo. See here: 1988 and Adela in shiny fuchsia pig tails, plastic butterflies crowding her head, dazzling silver, a cabeza that said where is the next rave, motherfucker? Adela Holiday in 1992 winning the Miss Gay Latino crown waving to onlookers from a float in the Pride parade. There she is in 1994 lip-syncing for the trans Latina girls in hospices dying of AIDS, bringing them wigs, earrings and food. She was the first trans Latina to be brought in front of a human rights panel in San Francisco and, weaving her English with the ton y son of her Cuban flow, advocated for the needs of her community.

Cruising around the mission together is ritual, is kiki, is shade and chisme.

Adela is our mother, the head of the house, followed by myriad trans and faggy tías and a line of children who, like me, are mostly immigrant flaming homosexuals and transgender reinas landing in Adela’s regazo to be nourished and baptized by her wisdom. Together, in the Mission, we’ve built our jardín travesti: a garden blooming from the cracks in the pavement, possible only because the Mission holds the history of our people. The Mission: the epicenter of the Latino hustle and bustle. Plus, Adela usually says, to be part of this family, you gotta be a tough bitch. Adela, a Cuban exile who landed in San Francisco in the ’80s, two decades after Castro took power, and yours truly, a Colombian immigrant arriving in the land of the U S of A 17 years ago. We are both part of homosexual diasporas—part of people who left their homes and family fleeing violence and homophobia, searching for a larger community of misfits. Landing in San Francisco and further drawn to the Mission, pulled by its constant warmth, the softness of its blue skies, its mariconeo popular, the signs that advertise POLLO CAMPERO, the evangelizing, Spanish-speaking Christians on 16th and 24th Streets waving paper fliers with a bleeding Jesús in our faces: the barrio that opens to a retumbar of pure Latin American flavor with a Central American twist.

Now, the Mission opens in front of us. Now, we pass the hustle of 14th Street near Arriba Juntos, where some tipsy dudes in tank tops, beer resting in their hands and on their bellies, eye us up and down, whispering amorcitos to Adela. We both chuckle at the smallness of the catcalls, and I pull Adela closer to me. After all, she is my mother, my family, the madre that provided a safe haven for me to twirl and explode into the transsexual sissy I am today. With every step, with every tacón alto, the colossal history of the neighborhood stirs under our feet. Every dictatorship, gang persecution, genocide and paramilitary government that has pushed our people over the past 60 years to seek refuge in this small vessel of sabor tucked so far away from our homes. In this constant 65 degrees and partly cloudy, we—the Latin American immigrants—drop un poquito de nosotros, a bit of heart and sound, a bit of tierra. We plaster the streets with signs and aesthetics that replicate those of Tijuana, San Salvador, Guadalajara, Tegucigalpa, La Habana, Camagüey: MI TIERRA SPECIAL OF THE DAY, PANCHITA’S, PANCHO VILLA TAQUERIA, MI RANCHITO PRODUCE, EL CAFETAZO. We sell guaca fries and carne asada fries. The grocery stores overflow with tortillas, plátanos, frozen yuca, chiles and a constant murmullo of mariachis and banda carrying the rhythms of Spanglish. A dance of Spanish and English at every turn: the signs, the music, the merecumbé of our speech. It is on this corner of San Francisco where language explodes: a disco ball reflecting fragments of our tongues onto every corner of the barrio.

La Misión has an accent. A tilde, a tide of sonic perreo that vibrates from the epicenter of its roots to the muchacha outside every TIENDA DE PRODUCTOS LATINOS chopping mango and limón to the rhythm of the latest cumbia. Óyelo bien: La Misión suena en Spanglish. It awakens every morning with the ton y son of the seño at the corner of 19th Street selling churros in a bozarrón that hits in waves tú-dólar-churro tú-dólar-churro tú-dólar-churro. Churros for only two dollars, mami, llévelo. The seño’s two kids sit on a crate next to her, playing video games on a phone. Tú dólar, she says. Because it is your dollars that she wants, los tuyos, your dollars that she’s come to hustle to pay rent and send money to mami back in El Salvador. The lure is in her tongue. The way the seño trills her “rrs,” rolling them with no timidity. How she reaches for those words she’s learned in English—“two dollar”—and pushes them out metamorphosed, embellished, retocadas with a bit of glimmer: tú dólar churro. This, the language of the future, the grammatical textures that follow no rule, no discipline, but a creative playfulness and a need to survive. Here, where there is no solid distinction between English or Spanish, where there’s no recognizable end to each language; where those imposed language borders disappear and, in their place, an ever-evolving sancocho of sass and deleite erupt—pao!—flying high like a pajarito. Further down the street, the rhythms of the señora are joined by the homies banging tongs against the carrito selling ho-duh ho-duh ho-duh. Bacon wrapped hot dogs to cure that hangover, mi reina, and then some. We remember the dudes on 16th and 24th Streets who used to hover around the bus stops selling tee-ke tee-ke tee-ke in whispers—paper tickets for $1 to ride the MUNI bus. Now the system is all automatized, MUNI is $3 a ride and that local black-market economy of cheap travel is dead. And yet. We pass our local merenguero further down the street, the old Dominican dude in his automatic wheelchair, boom box tightly wrapped with cabulla, merengue roaring behind him. A sa sa sa propelling him up and down Mission Street as he whistles to Adela, who rolls her eyes and pulls me into the nearest alleyway.

With every step, with every tacón alto, the colossal history of the neighborhood stirs under our feet.

Spanglish here is default. It refuses to be othered and belittled by the Oxford English Dictionary and the Real Academia Española. Dumping the rigidity of properness, it stands colossal over the barrio, nourishing the streets with its limitless linguistic codes. Here, in the Mission, Spanglish never asked for permission from the gatekeepers of “Proper English” and “Correct Spanish” to exist. Instead, it flowed naturally from every mouth, every sign, creating a labyrinth of musical treasures, of phonetic textures that explode in every corner reading Open Only For To Go, Bueno Bonito y Barato, Morena’s Fashion, Ernesto’s, at Halloween, No Candi No Trik or Tri, and at Thanksgiving, Pollo For Sansgiving. Even the Chinese and Middle Eastern immigrants running some of the corner stores and fish markets have learned Spanish with their English and now weave both, dropping Spanglish to attract and serve their primarily Latino clientele. Just stand on 18th Street and Mission and hear the young middle eastern boys say, hello señorita.

Ah, mi reina, ¿cómo te quedó el ojo?

Once we’re out of the alleyway, we turn on 16th Street. Spanglish is ever-changing and, on this particular street, it comes bathed in glitter, riding a unicorn a pelo. Here, on this street, Adela and I stop to take in the immensity of its history. What it used to be. The land of queenas and butch papis. Queena: the Spanglish marriage of queen and reina into a delicious phonetic dance: Quee-na. And butch papi, that phonetic swag of worlds colliding into a sabrosongo lull: butch pa-pee. 16th Street, or “La Dieciséis,” as it is known by the Latinidad homosexual, used to be the Mecca of Transexualismo and Mariconería Latina. Before the techies killed San Francisco’s fashion with their Bermuda shorts and Patagonia jackets, before White babies in strollers exploded as a must-have trend on Valencia Street, before six dollar lattes and yoga studios quadrupled the rent price, there were—drumroll—Black and Brown fags, femmes and queens working the streets and prepping an outfit for the night’s show. Back in the ’90s, La Dieciséis boomed with not one, not two, but three consecutive gay Latino bars: Esta Noche, La India Bonita and Los Portales. The nightlife spilling onto the street, the bum bum of the salsa kneaded on the cement, the deliciousness of queer Spanglish drifting into the air as packs of queenas, trans girls and butch papis served True Hustle Realness, molding the barrio with their creativity, sissyhood and sisterhood. Adela and I know that our walks around the neighborhood are not only steps we take, but a stirring of the fantasmas of the past: the ghosts sculpted onto the pavement, the light posts, the decaying Victorians. The queer ghosts who didn’t survive the AIDS epidemic rising from the pavement, dancing in front of us, twirling, joining our walk so we may call on their names, so we remember their lives, their stories. Below the cement, there’s tierra, and underneath that tierra is a history of pure Latin American mariconeo.

As we near Valencia Street, we pass the now-defunct Esta Noche bar and Adela reminds me that there were two faces of AIDS: the horrible destructive one that brought death and desolation and the one that finally organized transsexual Latina women into a group to advocate for ourselves. Before the epidemic, she continues, all we did was putear y hacer show.

In their groundbreaking documentary ¡Viva 16!, my auntie, Tina Valentín Aguirre, and their sister, Augie Robles, recorded the life and hustle of queer Latinos on 16th Street in the early ’90s. The documentary includes my trans mother, Adela, my tía Mahogany Sanchez and many other drag queens, trans women and homosexual children that are all but forgotten by San Francisco’s mainstream LGBT History. Because, yes hon, Harvey Milk and the Castro queens pushed boundaries and legislation for gays, but what about the Latin American reinas that were dropping pure mariconeo diva on the streets of the Mission? What about La Condonera, Teresita la Campesina, Ronnie Salazar, La Marquesa, Mitzy Lee and so many immigrant sirenas fundraising to buy wigs and food for their dying sisters? Distributing condoms to the working girls at midnight or emceeing shows at Esta Noche? These are monolingual Spanish-speaking travestis, third-world gay papis, most of whom died in the AIDS epidemic. And although there is no plaque with their names on the sidewalk, museum with their clothes or coffee table book calling on their importance for the LGBT movement—yes, hon, that’s shade—¡Viva 16! exalts these reinas as the pioneers of gay liberation that they were. The film is a stunning portrayal of the depth and beauty of the gay Latino bar, the vital family lazos woven during parties and hangouts on the streets, the way queer Latinos existed in a political fringe that had to fight for their own survival with uña. An opening into an underworld invisible to the public eye, invisible to the official LGBT history, one that exists only for itself, for the survival of its own community. We see how the tiny stage is essential for girls to earn their coin, for the witnessing of el grito marica, the homosexual scream that built connection, created community and generated the underground veins that sustained queer Latino life in San Francisco. Allá in that hole in the wall, the depths of the art of the transformismo Latino bloomed. See here: La Ronnie Salazar in full Boy George realness bringing another Mexican doll in sequin fringe to lip-sync Rocío Dúrcal. After her, Juan Alberto—another legendary queen—sings his iconic Juan Gabriel to the cheers and faints of the audience. There is Mahogany back stage: I wanna see me in the movies, she says when the camera zooms into her beautiful face, as she fixes a black bob and laces her tacón altos. She do look good, someone beyond echoes, even though I don’t like to say it. With incredible softness, care and an intimacy that is legible from Mahogany’s easiness with the camera, she rehearses her performance song in the small mirror, pointing to the imaginary audience beyond.

Below the cement, there’s tierra, and underneath that tierra is a history of pure Latin American mariconeo.

Inside the bar, earrings hang from every ear like chandeliers. Perra! Tía! Alright honey! Bounce from sticky wall to sticky wall. Spanglish here is a siren song weaving its pink tentacles, chiseling loose every trenza to a yes mami! Thick accents take over the microphone announcing Las Chicas of the Night. Thrifted leather jackets glow as sweating bodies take shot after shot of tequila. Butch dykes showcase mullets, holding on to their women, kissing queens as they hop on stage. Esta Noche: that hole in the wall with a musky smell. Esta Noche, because it is tonight that we dance, tonight that we twirl and kiss and suck and cheer, because tomorrow, a new day dawns with its unforgiving violence. Esta Noche, La India Bonita: underground underworlds of third-world mariconeo. Noches de fantasía. Finally, the door to the bar closes as someone whispers: Ven papito, vamos a gozar.

We belong to San Francisco just like San Francisco belongs to us. Every corner of the Mission holds the memories of our people. Our tongues are carved onto its very soul so that the streets ooze a sabor, a flavor, that soaks the barrio in Spanglish. We are far away from our places of births, thousands of miles from our tierrita, but in this small vessel of energía Latina, we have found each other, we have commune with mutual language and, in that recognition, we found a piece of home.