Cuir Solidarities: A Runway Across the Mona Passage
By Ariana Costales Del Toro
“The unity is submarine.” - Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens
Despite their proximity and similar colonial histories, Puerto Rican and Dominican people hold a complex relationship with each other. Migration between the islands has been constant since colonial times, but significant waves in the 1960s and the 1990s increased the population of Dominican people in the Puerto Rican archipelago. However, once they arrived in Puerto Rico, whether legally or illegally (through the treacherous currents of the Mona Passage), Dominicans experienced enormous amounts of racial discrimination and xenophobia. This disdain from Puerto Ricans has impacted the relationship between both people and, as Marisel Moreno explains in Crossing Waters, Dominican “stories of hardship–the reasons behind their water crossings–tend to remain silenced, hindering the possibility of solidarity” (109).
Although contemporary solidarity efforts exist today, I am particularly interested in highlighting cuir solidarities between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, mainly through the emerging ballroom scene that has created spaces for cuir populations to gather, survive, and resist together. [1, 2] For instance, collaboration efforts between Draguéalo and the Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue in Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico have created cuir connections across waters. At the time of their biggest collaboration, in 2022, both groups served as ballroom houses that not only provided safe spaces for their members but also organized local voguing workshops and balls.
Before arriving in the Caribbean, Ballroom culture flourished in New York City between the 1960s and 1970s. As Marlon Bailey notes in Butch Queens Up in Pumps, balls were created by Black queer people wanting to establish spaces where their community could reunite away from the “White ruling classes and homophobia imposed by Black communities” (89). With the participation of Latinx people, ballroom continued expanding and since then, it has reached every major city in the United States as well as other parts of the world. As explained by Kiana Gonzalez Cedeño and I in our forthcoming article “Ballrooms and the Sacred Runway: Intimate and Public Lamentations in Cuir Communities of Puerto Rico”:
While still part of the underground, Ballroom culture has traveled transnationally and it is now present throughout different Latin American and Caribbean countries. However, even though Afro-Puerto Ricans were largely involved in Ballroom culture at its early stages (as seen through the existence of the famous House of Xtravaganza, the first Latinx ballroom house founded in the 1980’s and led by Puerto Rican House Mother Angie Xtravaganza), Ballroom culture did not fully arrive to the archipelago until after 2017 with the help of Edrimael Delgado Reyes who founded LaBoriVogue [Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue], one of the first ballroom houses in Puerto Rico.
When compared, the ballroom scenes in PR and DR have emerged in such similar ways that Circuito Queer, a collective that creates collaborations between feminist and LGBTQIA+ leaders from PR and the broader Caribbean, has called them “mirrors of one another” (my translation). Just like LaBoriVogue, Draguéalo was formed in 2017, however, in an Instagram post, the house notes that the ballroom scene in the Dominican Republic started forming even earlier, around 2013. [3]
Even though the ballroom scenes in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are still slowly emerging, these two houses have already done important work fostering community spaces and unity while also creating inter-island connections that have stretched across maritime borders. In 2022 the houses (with the help of other collectives like Circuito Queer and Plataforma Eje) organized an initiative called “El Plumerío: Cruce de Caribe y Performance Caribeño” a series of events hosted in the Dominican Republic, which aimed to explore cuir performative practices in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Among the events was a symposium titled “Drag, Ballroom y otras prácticas performativas en el Caribe,” a series of voguing workshops, and a ball.
The importance of this collaboration can be further understood by considering cuir perception and legality in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, homosexuality is legal. Furthermore, same-sex marriage is legal, and transgender people can change the gender markers on their birth certificates. However, despite these measures, cuir Puerto Ricans still face a great amount of discrimination and violence based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. In the Dominican Republic, homosexuality is legal, but there are no laws to protect cuir people from violence and discrimination. Moreover, in 2021, a revision to the Dominican Penal Code proposed to eliminate sanctions for discrimination based on sexual orientation. This proposed change illuminates how cuir Dominicans are continually exposed to violence and neglected by the government.
Taking into consideration how vulnerable cuir Dominican people truly are, it becomes essential to recognize the importance of hosting “El Plumerío,” a space intended to educate and converse about LGBTQIA+ topics, within the Dominican Republic. In the end, the collaboration between Draguéalo, Circuito Queer, Plataforma Eje and the LaBoriVogue worked to reject the silence forced onto cuir Dominican people. Moreover, their refusal to comply with cuir repression is key in understanding how “El Plumerío” was not only an act of cuir solidarity but also a space of resistance.
The connection established between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic also has decolonial importance. In "The litany of islands, the rosary of archipelagoes: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains how the “construction of isolated island space is an implicit consequence of European colonialism and has a tremendously complex history” (28). Marisel Moreno builds upon this in Crossing Waters, to explain how island isolation “was a strategy that facilitated European and US domination in the region” (18). In other words, it is the legacies of colonialism and colonization that have imposed language barriers and closed borders. Yet, just like Kamau Brathwaite writes, our unity is submarine. Our connections do not need to be limited by maritime borders because, in reality, our islands connect underwater. Thus, by building this runway across the Mona Passage, cuir Puerto Rican and Dominican people bridge the superficial divide in an act of decolonial solidarity.
In the end, cuir/queer efforts to repair the relationships between Caribbean people address both the ongoing effects of colonialism and the struggles cuir/queer Caribbeans face within their homelands. By emulating the solidarity implemented by Draguéalo and LaBoriVogue we could achieve stronger submarine connections across the broader Caribbean.
Notes
[1] A recent example of this was in 2021, when footage of undocumented Dominican and Haitians arriving in yola to a Puerto Rican beach made headlines. What was important about the footage was how people witnessing the arrival showed solidarity to the migrants. Some of the recordings captured Puerto Ricans cheering people on as they ran from migration authorities while other videos captured Puerto Ricans urging runners to sit amongst their families to hide them. These videos sparked conversations within the Puerto Rican population, particularly amongst those that hoped for better relations between Dominican, Haitian, and Puerto Rican people.
[2] In using "cuir" I am acknowledging how Spanish-speaking people resist the term “queer” in order to differentiate from Western sexual and gender understandings that often silence or do not account for the colonial complexities lived by Latin American, Spanish-speaking Caribbean people and other minoritized peoples. For more in-depth discussions about the development of this term, see Alejandra Márquez Guajardo. “Cuir-ing Queer: Speculations on Latin American Notions of Queerness.” The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric. Eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander. New York: Routledge, 2022 and María Amelia Viteri. "Intenciones: Tensions in Queer Agency and Activism in Latino América." Feminist Studies 43-2 (2017): 405-417.
[3] Most of LaBoriVogue and Draguéalo’s public archives are scattered across social media platforms. This reflects how cuir people have found ways to archive their lives and social manifestations outside of conventional archives.
References
Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974.
Circuito Queer [@cirqpr] “El desarrollo de las Casas de Ballroom en República Dominicana y en Puerto Rico se han hecho espejo le une de le otre en muchos aspectos.” Instagram, 10 January 2024.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “The litany of islands, the rosary of archipelagoes’: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 32.1 (2001): 21-51.
Draguéalo [@draguealo] “Las comunidades ballroom en el Caribe y Latinoamérica se mueven sin aprobación. Que viva el ballroom, pasarelas inclusivas.” Instagram, 24 May 2022.
Gonzalez-Cedeño, Kiana and Ariana Costales-Del Toro. “Ballrooms and the Sacred Runway: Intimate and Public Lamentations in Cuir Communities of Puerto Rico.” CENTRO Press, forthcoming.
Moreno, Marisel C. Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature & Art. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2022.
Cover Photo Credit: Firelei Báez, “Untitled (Carte de l'Isle de Saint Domingue)” 2022.
Ariana Costales Del Toro (she/her/ella) is a Puerto Rican Ph.D. Candidate at Michigan State University’s English Department. Her research explores everyday forms of queer/cuir resistance, refusal, and survival within the Caribbean. She is also a fellow of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, where she maps, transcribes, and archives the photography work of the late Frank Espada, who aimed to capture the Puerto Rican experience within the US and Puerto Rico.