Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

By Anahi Russo Garrido

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. The book shows the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer spaces in contemporary Mexico City, as their sexual citizenship changes, including references to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. The book shows how these individuals reconfigure relationships through marriage, polyamory, friendship, and sex. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy suggests that “new” intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. Building on ethnographic data collected over the past decade, including forty-five in-depth interviews with women between the ages of twenty-two and sixty-five participating in LGBT spaces, Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978807549

Book preview

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy

Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

ANAHI RUSSO GARRIDO

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Russo, Anahi, author.

Title: Tortilleras negotiating intimacy : love, friendship, and sex in queer Mexico City / Anahi Russo Garrido.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045292 | ISBN 9781978807532 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978807525 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978807549 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807556 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978807563 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Lesbians—Mexico—Mexico City. | Homosexuality—Mexico—Mexico City. | Gays—Mexico—Mexico City. | Sex—Mexico—Mexico City.

Classification: LCC HQ75.6.M6 R87 2020 | DDC 306.76/6097253—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045292

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Anahi Russo Garrido

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

A portion of Chapter 1 will appear in Russo Garrido, Anahi. Forthcoming (2020). Between Same-Sex Marriage, ‘Convivencia’ and Polyamory: A New Cartography of Queer Relationships in Mexico City. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 1 (Autumn). A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in Russo Garrido, Anahi. 2013. The Emergence of Lesbian Safe Places in Mexico City (1970–2010). Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies. Nov/Dec.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

A las generaciones que han luchado por el amor en todas sus formas, y las que vienen

Contents

Introduction: Intimate Contestations—Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

1. Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Otros Amores de Familia

2. On Friendship and the Production of Lesbiana Worlds

3. Sex-Stretching the Body: A New Erotic Cartography

4. Counter-mapping el Ambiente in Queer Times and Spaces

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy

Introduction

Intimate Contestations—Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City

Now that people are talking about queer and polyamory, I already lived that, said Eva, a lesbian stage director from Mexico City. On that morning we were walking in the park of the Viveros de Coyocán, a small green oasis, which contrasts with the gray traffic and the fast pace of the megalopolis. Eva was making reference to her early memories in lesbian circles in the late 1970s. As she recalls, A mí me da mucha envidia que los tipos van a un bar y pueden tirarse con medio mundo, y sin bronca. ¿No? ¿Y por qué nosotras no? (I used to feel very jealous that guys could go to the bar, and sleep with everyone, and with no issues at all. And why not women?). Now that she was in her fifties, polyamorous practices and casual sex were the object of animated public discussions once again in el ambiente (queer spaces). This was visible at a discursive level through the publication of new books on polyamory between Latin American lesbians (e.g., Mogrovejo et al. 2009; Mogrovejo 2016). Additionally, organizations such as Colectivo Poliamor were opening their doors to individuals of various genders and sexualities. In the same period, cuartos violetas, dark rooms in which women explore eroticism collectively with one another at bars, called for new erotic explorations. In everyday conversations, women discussed how their relationships might be impacted if they engaged with these practices. Borrowing Eva’s words, women were re-creating [the world] from their skin (replantearte desde la piel).

It is no surprise that such reflections on polyamory and casual sex would resurface at a moment in which debates on same-sex partnerships and marriage circulated in the public sphere. In 2009, Mexico City celebrated a historical event when it became the first place in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. If Mexico City is at the heart of this project, this process is not particular to the city or country. Across North and South America similar conversations have been occurring in places such as Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (see Lozano 2010; Pierceson, Piatti-Crocker, and Schulenberg 2010; Salinas Hernández 2013; Ulloa López 2014; Díez 2015). While the tension between same-sex marriage and polyamory is central to the reconfiguration of desire, what I came to discover is that queer Mexico City was reenvisioning a broad field of intimate relationships as tied to love, friendship, sexuality, and kinship.

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City investigates the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer communities in Mexico City. This book takes place at a moment in which new forms of governing, legislating, and signifying difference flourish in Mexico, as across the continent from the mid-1990s onward. We witness important changes on sexual and reproductive citizenship in Mexico City, such as same-sex marriage, antidiscrimination laws, abortion, and gender identity laws. These changes surge in a period of economic neoliberalization after NAFTA begins and as part of a so-called democratic shift during which LGBTTT activism increasingly uses the channels of the state to defend human rights.¹ These shifts give place to a series of public recognizable identities (e.g., gay, lesbian, transgender), relationships (marriage), and spaces (Zona Rosa neighborhood). In the process, particular ways of being, relating, and moving become recognizable and normalized in public while other forms of queerness remain troubling. While the eyes of the world are focused on the Zapatista uprising on the southern border in the early years following NAFTA, attention slowly shifts toward the North, where femicide, the drug war, and militarization come to characterize the country.

Informed by this larger set of transformations, this book raises the following questions: How are individuals reconfiguring and negotiating new discourses and practices on intimacy such as love, friendship, and sexuality in this context? How is the social organization of intimacy shifting in the Mexican capital and in particular for women participating in el ambiente? Such questions are of central importance at a moment in which forms of relating are at the forefront of debates on queer lives. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy argues that new intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining the discourses and practices of intimate relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. In the process, individuals negotiate not only these new relationships with partners and friends but also various forms of complicity with transnational discourses on intimacy, the state, and lo mexicano. This book shows how women (mainly cis, but some trans) participating in el ambiente negotiate emerging relationship modalities such as friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.

From Subject Formation to Subject’s Relations

Ethnographic studies on same-sex sexuality in Mexico and Latin America have predominantly paid attention to gender and sexual subject formation. In other words, research goals have often focused on identity or self-making. These studies have offered an important critique to Western narratives on sexual object choice. Nonetheless, scholars such as Guillermo Núñez Noriega (2014) suggest that anthropology has lacked imagination by predominantly representing same-sex sexuality along the identity/practice binary in Mexico and Latin America. If sexual identities have been questioned in the academic literature, less attention has been paid to what I call subject’s relations, which in my view have been central to queer politics in Mexico City since 2000 through public debates on marriage, unions, and polyamory.

Subject’s relations is a play on words and ideas on subject formation, which was one of Foucault’s central projects to create a history of the different modes by which our culture, human beings are made subjects (Foucault 1982, 126). By using the term subject’s relations, I signal the processes through which cultures produce dominant relationship models particular subjects must abide by. Subject’s relations also highlight how in the 2000s and 2010s the question in Mexico City was not Who am I? but, borrowing Foucault’s words in his later work (Friendship as a Way of Life), What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated? (Foucault 1996, 308). While relationships do not exclude subjects, reflecting primarily on relationships urges us to pay attention to other aspects of el ambiente (queer spaces). A focus on relationships connects with recent inquiries in feminist and queer theories on intimacy, which have investigated feelings, affect, the personal, and attachments to friends, families, and lovers. In The Global and the Intimate, Pratt and Rosner (2012, 3) describe how intimacy is never purely personal but takes on specific political, social and cultural meanings in different contexts. I here investigate how intimacy is transformed in el ambiente in Mexico City in the 2010s. In other words, how are we to understand queer lives in Mexico if we focus our attention predominantly on relationships?

Women Generations and Narratives of Progress

This study focuses on diverse lesbian generational cohorts, and thus another reemerging concern across the pages is change.² Documenting changes within or across generations has interestingly been at the heart of notable ethnographic projects on Latina / Latin American women’s sexualities (e.g., Rivas Zivy 1998; Hirsch 2003; Garcia 2012). These studies discuss the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to changes in discourses and practices around women’s sexualities. While providing accurate contextualization to explain change, transformations may appear to be teleological or even relying on a tale of progressive emancipation. In this story women’s sexualities are subject to patriarchal control in the past / Global South, and younger generations appear in control of their sexualities and bodies in the present / Global North. As Blackwood and Wieringa (1999, 14) argued two decades ago in their anthology on female same-sex sexualities across cultures, by ignoring issues of sexuality, [researchers] imply these issues are not relevant to the South. Northern women have body politics. Southern women have gender and development. This book questions readings that represent changes in gender and sexual norms in Latin American, as unidirectional or in alignment with narratives of progress. As a feminist activist told me in a conversation on the criminalization of abortion in eighteen Mexican states in the 2010s, Changes of the past are not forever.

This book also differs from other ethnographies on the study of sexuality in Mexico and in Latin America, as its focus is on individuals who identify as women. In earlier decades, ideologues of the nation, such as Octavio Paz (1961), represented women as uniform, dominated by men, submissive, and self-sacrificing. In recent decades, ethnographic work has developed a more complex understanding of agency, gender norms, and power relations in the Mexican context. The unitary subject has been destabilized through, among other strategies, work on women occupying multiple positionalities such as indigenous women, workers, and migrants (see, e.g., Stephen 2005; Bastian Duarte 2011). Most of these ethnographies do not discuss lesbian lives in Mexico. An exception to this trend would be the work of Alfarache Lorenzo (2003), which reflects on the strategies lesbians appropriate to negotiate the gender transgressions their sexual identities entail. In addressing intimate issues that relate to women’s sexualities, this book has the potential to challenge common characterizations of women in the Global South, as discussed above. As Katie Acosta suggests, an absence of research on sexually nonconforming women is more than an empirical gap in the literature, as it may feed the misconception that there is nothing to be learned from work that centers on sexually nonconforming women of color (2013, 3). By focusing on women’s relationships, this book provokes a dialogue with decades of ethnographic research on queer lives in Mexico, which have repetitively focused on male bodies or lesbian formal activism.

The Politics of Naming

The subjects of this book are women who participate in queer spaces known as el ambiente, which I describe further below. They are women who take part in lesbian groups and organizations, who visit the queer cafés, bars, and clubs in Mexico City. Some shy away from these formal, visible queer spaces, but they form part of the intimate networks of friendship that sustain el ambiente in Mexico City. While I met some of these women almost two decades ago at an event organized by the lesbian-feminist organization El Clóset de Sor Juana, I met others through the informal networks of interlocutors’ living rooms in 2010. Some of these women vividly recalled the climate of the city in 1968 and the seemingly eternal seventy years of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) rule. Others had lived half of their lives under the rule of the right-wing party PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional). Some interlocutors identify as lesbians (lesbianas), others as bisexuals, others as pansexual. Others use colloquial terms such as levis or lencha to refer to their sexuality. Others identified as lesbianas a decade ago and now refuse to associate themselves with any single category. Independent of their sexual identities, all of these women participated in the networks of el ambiente, currently or recently. For this reason, I refer to them most of the time through the (long) term women who participate in el ambiente. I also use the words queer women at times because queer can embrace a range of nonnormative practices and unstable subject positions. The word queer, however, is rarely used in LGBTTT communities in Mexico. In Spanish, the term queer has often been translated-mistranslated as raro/rara, extraño/a, o marica; and queer theory as teoría torcida, teoría marica, teoría rosa, teoría ‘entendida,’ teoría transgresora (Fonseca Hernandez and Quintero Soto 2009, 46). The term queer or cuir is more often used in academic contexts (see, e.g., Viteri, Serrano, and Vidal-Ortiz 2011; Falconí Trávez, Castellanos, and Viteri 2014; Lanuza, Carrasco, and Valencia Triana 2015). On a few occasions I use lesbian as a shorthand term to characterize places geared toward women having same-sex practices, as in, for example, a lesbian café. In other passages (predominantly in chapter 2) I use the term lesbian to speak of women who engage in same-sex sexuality, but in particular to denote participants in the construction of a world with a lesbian perspective, in which women relate to one another. It is nonetheless important to reiterate that not all the women I interviewed identified with the label lesbian, but they all participated in el ambiente.

In everyday life the term tortillera simply means a woman who makes tortillas. Nonetheless, it may also be loosely translated as lesbian. Rossana Quiroz Ennis (1998) suggests that when people clap their hands to make a tortilla, the gesture mimics the lack of penetration between women that resides in public imaginaries. Tortillera is rarely used in Mexico for self-identification purposes.³ At times, it is used as an insult. Nonetheless, I have observed the term being deployed in particular contexts in order to specifically signify a Mexican lesbian. For example, at the Marcha Lésbica in 2010, a drum band that participated in the parade chanted, A mí no me gusta el pan, me gusta la tortilla nacional (I don’t like bread, I like the national tortilla). At a basic level, this chant spoke of a preference for tortillas, instead of bread. These tastes may be read as a preference for Mexican lesbians, instead of Global North lesbians symbolized by bread, ultimately providing a decolonial statement. In addition, the band was chanting at a moment in which the cost of the tortilla was skyrocketing. Ironically a large portion of corn is now imported from the United States and no longer produced in Mexico.⁴ A mí no me gusta el pan, me gusta la tortilla nacional may also be read as a cry to rectify this situation that affects the most basic staple food in Mexico. Therefore, la tortillera is a figure capturing some of the key issues of her time in Mexico, the long-felt effects of neoliberalization, as much as the transformation of intimacy in Mexican society, which allows us to publicly shout our love for la tortilla nacional.

Intimacies

The concept of intimacy has increasingly been given attention in the scholarly literature. In the social sciences intimacy has been tied to the rise of modernity, capitalism, individualism, and in some cases globalization (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006). Intimacy has been defined in various ways, but as sociologist Ken Plummer remarks, the intimate has no unitary meaning but may be seen as a complex sphere of ‘inmost’ relationships with self and others.… They are our closest relationships with friends, family, children, and lovers, but they are also the deep and important experiences we have with self (2003, 13). In interviews, intimacy resonated with this view. It was often described as a personal space that enables close connections. Yvonne (born in 1974) described intimacy as a room with four walls:

Intimidad, pues podría ser casi, casi como intimidad parte de la amistad.… No soy tan abierta para que alguien pueda ya entrar a mi intimidad; es justamente que haya primero rebasado lo de la amistad y que luego pueda pasar del otro lado. Pues no sé, es algo muy importante y no a cualquiera se le puede dar. Entonces la intimidad es algo como un cuartito de cuatro paredes en el que pocos pueden entrar.

Intimacy. Well it could almost be, like intimacy as part of friendship.… I am not so open. For someone to enter into my intimacy, they have to have made it to friendship first, and then to the other side. I don’t know; it’s something very important that you cannot just give to anybody. So intimacy is something like a room with four walls, which only a few can enter.

Yvonne’s account places friendship as the first step, like a line that must be crossed to enter intimacy. In this sense, Yvonne establishes a hierarchy of forms of affection. Intimacy here appears as a space that can be opened or closed. It functions as a privileged space that you cannot just give to anybody. It forms an almost secret part of the self that only a few can enter.

In this book, I consider a range of intimate expressions animated by love, friendship, solidarity, and so forth that sustain relationships between individuals. At times, the subjects involved in these relationships are called lovers, partners, friends, compadres, and others. The earlier notion of a lesbian continuum (Rich 1980) is useful here to think of different forms of intimacy women sustain with one another. Rich’s continuum includes sex between women, but also nonsexual interactions such as friendship, political support, and solidarity. The notion of a continuum problematizes the borders of a subject position, such as friend. It questions what the production of such categories does in contemporary relations. In past years, a number of edited collections and special issues have been published on cross-cultural perspectives on