#tocaya

these are pictures we took in downtown el paso in 2019. museo urbano is a local group that puts exhibits relating to border life out where people can see and interact with them. the other museo urbano exhibit i've seen was one related to the history of labor organizing in maquilas in juarez.

tornillo is a nearby small town with a massive detention center. i think technically it's so small it's a census designated place. there have been more kids put in detention in tornillo than the town has citizens.

life along the u.s.-mexico border is defined by u.s. violence against mexico and latines. it has been for as long as the border has existed; borders are inherently violent.

i don't know what else to say. these pictures hurt to look at. kids in concentration camps drawing things that remind them of home. and the worst part is that for whatever reason none of the pictures have names attached. just another negligible detail and another way the artists have been disappeared.

🔵 Mural de LORENA RAMÍREZ!!!

Plaza Juárez, Hidalgo del Parral.

¡Auch!

Revenge!

you, of sharpened tongue, 

maiden of thunder and war, 

guard us against malediction. 

Beautiful girl, seer, martir, 

poeta, rebel, tattooed daughter.

if you pick the first option please hmu in dms or inbox. we spent years and years in that situation and want to write about this phenomenon because the majority of our friends have been in it as well.

hope you all are well!

while trans women and, say, muxes are both transmisogynized groups and do share many political interests and goals, they will not necessarily share /all/ political interests and goals. the muxe have struggles and support related to their specific position within their culture.

this is of course complicated by individual choice, identity, and social relation, but what i am trying to convey is that if there is a person or group using a traditional cultural term instead of or in conjunction with the term "trans woman" they have a reason for doing so.

i feel like this is necessary to point out because trans women, especially white trans women, have a tendency to understand themselves as the arbiters of tma identity, norms, and politics. as i see more white trans women become aware of the global scale of transmisogyny i also see them equating traditional tma identities with trans womanhood one to one, when these identities actually have cultural and spiritual contexts beyond those of the "trans woman" identity.

as a tma person from a culture with third and fourth genders i do, as i've said before, still want to abolish the gender system as a whole. i recognize, however, that this is a process that will take longer than my lifetime, and that we must engage with the world as it is now.

if you are a white trans woman i implore you to work to understand this, because without this understanding you risk replicating colonial attitudes toward gender with a "trans" prefix stapled on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk

from the wikipedia article: "Some secondhand accounts of the cakewalk describe it as a subtle mockery of the formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The slaves would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes. These accounts describe any slaveowners in attendance as unaware that they were being mocked."

you can actually see a lot of this at work in the documentary "paris is burning", which has first person accounts from Black people who talk at length about their relationship to gender and the upper classes and how drag helps them navigate those structures and exercise a certain measure of autonomy within those structures that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.

the problem with modern drag is the extent to which it has been recuperated due to the efforts of quislings and assimilationists. people like rupaul have shifted drag from a performance intended for a queer audience and done within the context of queer community to one done for a cishet audience, with the goal being appeal to cishet tastes. this change in the subculture has made the most socially advantaged drag queens the loudest voices and has given people unfamiliar with the subculture the impression that it no longer has a large bipoc and lower class constituency. which is untrue! the drag queens in my city are all poor and mexican-american, and perform in queer venues for small cash tips. most also id as trans women and are using momey made from shows to pay for hrt.

believing that drag from white performers or rupaul's drag race represents the totality of the art form and culture is a lot like believing contrapoints is the only spokeswoman for trans people and represents us all.

it's impossible to separate the history, and tbh the present, of drag from transness. drag existed prior to transness being the identity category we know it as today, and because of that there is no way to view the history of drag as somehow separate from the history of trans women. i mean come on, sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson alone should prove this.

devaluing drag and its history is another way the white professonal, and largely assimilationist, class of trans women continue to try and exert control of transness at the expense of lower economic class bipoc and the kinds of tma people who complicate and challenge the narrative of gender and transness.