Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021); 350 pages; ISBN 978-0472074273 (hardcover)
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021); 350 pages; ISBN 978-0472074273 (hardcover)
A transloca does, and can be, many things. The untranslatable namesake of Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s latest academic study, she conjures multiple, at times intermingling, feminine self-transformations: drag queens, divas, transfeminine women, effeminate queers, faggots, and femme selves in formation. A theatricalized madness, a gender-bending blaze. The transloca might make herself visible—her glamor as indelible as it is patent—or imagine her appearances and audiences more variably. She can circulate online and in the media, walk the streets and work them; she might come to life in the dressing room before vamping onstage, the harsh lighting and performance-fueled perspiration threatening her makeup so fastidiously caked. The transloca makes a name for herself, be it across the islands of Puerto Rico or in the current of its diaspora. Sometimes both, sometimes neither, usually somewhere beyond or drifting in between. Blink and, well, you probably won’t miss her, but stare and you might not know what hit you.
In Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, La Fountain-Stokes dwells in the unfixity of translocura (defined as transmadness, transqueerness, or transfaggotry) and those who embody it. He locates his titular subjects within a “transglocal” context (a portmanteau connoting transnational, global, and local belongings) to mark a series of rapturous performances, longings, and self-imaginings that remake Puerto Rican identity and social life. These articulations of extravagant femininity also demand a capacious neologism—the transloca—which functions at once as a nominal and adjectival queer femme alterity and as a theatrical genre of campy, transgressive excess.
Through his work on the transloca as both subject and sensation, La Fountain-Stokes gives shape to that affective, elastic, and otherwise difficult-to-name space that can be seen as bridging trans, hyper-femme, drag, and queer cultures. The term makes contiguous, even if provisionally so, these unruly feelings of feminized reinvention, crafting an archipelagic terrain on which such enmeshments become decipherable. These shared experiences of translocura that La Fountain-Stokes portrays know a euphoric exuberance just as much as they stride in the shadows of (trans)misogyny, impoverishment, violence, and death—a reality whose imbrication in state necropolitics he takes seriously from beginning to end.1
La Fountain-Stokes’s text accentuates the ever-multiplying contradictions that define transloca life: the simultaneities of joy and peril, fame and precarity, liberation and loss. Never smoothed over, these frictions surface again and again, within the discrete performances he introduces but also in the convergences and the intimate, dialogic groupings that his seven chapters produce. Perhaps the book’s most alluring contribution lies in these inventive, entrancing worlds that La Fountain-Stokes weaves together.
For readers looking to acquaint themselves with the theoretical and semantic stakes of the transloca, the introduction and first chapter deftly present the antinomies at the heart of La Fountain-Stokes’s subjects. The author moves with ease through a vast range of literature and disciplines—including literary theory, linguistics, queer of color and feminist scholarship, and transgender and performance studies, to name only a few—to chart the historically discrete meanings of transloca self-imaginations across an expanded geography of Puerto Rican culture. He characterizes the transloca as a locus of glamor, joy, eccentricity, abjection, and shock—tactics whose (re)deployment through performance trouble or disavow dominant regimes of power. As such, the introductory pages invite one to envision the category of transloca as “a modality,” “a praxis,” and “an epistemology,” moving the term past the ways various bodies appear and toward their mobilization to creative, radical, and anticolonial ends (19, 25).
The etymological possibilities of the Spanish transloca—both the meanings of its constituent halves and that of its composite whole—are compellingly traced in the book’s first chapter. Where loca (madwoman or queer) connotes a gendered and ableist trope of mental frenzy, while also carrying an epithetical pang akin to that of faggot, marica, and (in the francophone Caribbean) folle, the rhetorical loca, like these terms, has experienced a reclamation as a desirable dissidence. La Fountain-Stokes situates the loca’s unruly girl next door, the transloca, in a lineage beginning with the Chicanx scholar Lionel Cantú Jr., who coined the term when describing the (soon-to-be eponymous) group of feminist scholars working to publish the 2014 anthology Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas.2 The prefix trans-, in this early context and those that have since followed, performs many tasks: it calls forth a transgressiveness, a queerness, and a disruptive cartography, while also suggesting a familiarity with a fellow queen of mythic proportions, the cross-dressing transformista (drag queen).
From La Fountain-Stokes’s polysemous description, transloca worlds begin to unfurl. In the second chapter, he examines how the proximity of exuberant, gender-variant performances to realities of (trans)femicide and violence, particularly under the capitalist ploys of various entertainment industries, casts a strange hue over transloca life and death. From the trials and successes of Nina Flowers (the illegibly androgynous and commercially loca contestant from the debut season of RuPaul’s Drag Race) to the brutal murders of nineteen-year-old Jorge Steven López Mercado in 2009 and trap singer Kevin Fret in 2019, La Fountain-Stokes inventories queer negotiations of fame, glamor, and safety—both their horizons and limitations.
Chapter 3 questions how diasporic Puerto Rican femmes have refracted perilous economic situations through what the author terms “the transloca drag of poverty” (70). Redefining and making fabulous the stigmatized trope of the welfare queen (with queen being the operative word here), performers such as Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, and Monica Beverly Hillz playfully trespass the politicized realms of government assistance, economic immobility, and sexual pleasure. The radical politics of activist Sylvia Rivera create an antidote to their self-proclamations of impoverishment and bastardizations of the welfare system, symbolizing the parallel necessity of fashioning support outside of state systems.
The remaining chapters concentrate largely on individual translocas. Coming from the worlds of performance art (Freddie Mercado), experimental theater and cabaret (Javier Cardona, Jorge B. Merced, Barbra Herr), and nightclub fame (Lady Catiria), La Fountain-Stokes’s protagonists, aided in these pages by a more exacting exegetic pace, evince the numerous critical aims to which the transloca puts her over-the-top image to work. A particular highlight emerges in the discussions of race, drag, and opacity in the fourth and fifth chapters on Mercado and Cardona, respectively. In these performers’ fluid plays on racial identity—what the author calls “the transloca drag of race”—they invoke queer genders to simultaneously skewer anti-Black, colonial structures that circumscribe Puerto Rican national and diasporic imaginaries (135).
For all its free-flowing citations and speculative constellations of queer and trans togetherness, Translocas is also deeply personal in nature. As La Fountain-Stokes addresses in the introduction, he too identifies with the book’s diasporic subject. In his drag performances as Lola von Miramar for more than a decade, the transformista scholar has staged and admired many of the extravagant maneuvers his study assembles. As a result, if the writing teeters on the verbose, it appears to stem from a deliberate, experimental excursion into the possibilities of transloca scholarship. For occasionally La Fountain-Stokes lifts the proverbial curtain to remind readers of his own transloca embodiment, manifesting a stylistically florid excess that plots the admittedly “free association or rhizomatic explosion of the transloca theorist/critic” (113).
At a book event hosted by New York University in October 2022, La Fountain-Stokes graciously shared the stage (or rather, classroom) with the Puerto Rico–born, New York City–based drag performers Vena Cava and Warhola Pop. At the top of their show, Vena Cava lip-synched to a moving, acoustic rendition of Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” interrupted midway by a grating assemblage of Donald J. Trump’s statements to the press in the wake of Hurricane María and its devastation of Puerto Rico and neighboring Caribbean islands in 2017. Once the song resumed (this time, Gaga’s up-tempo studio recording), Vena Cava tossed rolls of paper towels at the audience, burlesquing the former US president’s infamously hollow gestures of aid during a visit to San Juan.3 The transloca queen appeared in full force, her campy humor bordering on sincerity bordering on critique. It wasn’t love / it was a perfect illusion / mistaken for love.
As the evening of drag performances infiltrated the academic institution, with La Fountain-Stokes, dollar bills in hand, cheering them on, the spirit of Translocas came into plain view. The book, from its debates to its provocations, creates a kind of gathering place: a dance floor, a pageant, a fabulous portal between this life and the ones sure to follow.
Joseph Shaikewitz is a writer, curator, and doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Their research centers on modern Latin American art and the intersections of feminist, queer, and travesti-trans practices and histories.
[1] The looming specter of violence and mortality that the author describes brings this work into dialogue with recent books that include C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018); and Linda Heidenreich, Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
[2] See Sonia E. Alvarez et al., eds., Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
[3] See Aris Folley, “San Juan Mayor: Puerto Ricans Won’t Forget Images of Trump Throwing Paper Towels to Hurricane Survivors,” The Hill, 11 September 2018.