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4 Translated/Translating Woman: Comedienne/Solo Performer Marga Gomez, “Sending All Those Puerto Ricans Back to Mexico,” and the Politics of a Sexualized Location Puerto Ricans
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Translated/Translating Woman Comedienne/Solo Performer Marga Gomez, “Sending All Those Puerto Ricans Back to Mexico,” and the Politics of a Sexualized Location Even though I don’t like to define myself as a lesbian comic, it helps me take the worry out of a situation where I’m traveling hundreds of miles to face people. This way they know where I’m coming from. And it’s funny because it’s like lesbian is almost a sort of ethnic root. In a way it is a culture unto itself, and the two cultures (lesbian and Latino) . . . a lot of people don’t think of Latinos as being queer at all. —Marga Gomez, interview Increasingly, feminist and other field workers realize that we need to be sensitive to differences between our subjects and ourselves, aware of the possible power relations involved in doing research by, about and for women, and that feminist studies must include a diversity of women’s experiences based on race, class, and sexual preference. —Patricia Zavella, “Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Identity with ‘Chicana’ Informants” I don’t speak Spanish but I try my best eso si que es! (S.O.C.K.S.) —El Vez, The Mexican Elvis, a.k.a. Robert Lopez, in the album G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues (1996) 4 112 Marga Gomez is one of the most accomplished Latina feminist comediennes and solo performers of her generation. In several television appearances and numerous successful standup comedy and solo performance pieces, she has used the circuits of mass media to disrupt and to reinvent images of Latinas in the national imagination. She has appeared on HBO’s national cablecast Comic Relief 1993 and on Comedy Central, Showtime, and PBS and performed occasionally with the Chicano comedy group Culture Clash in its 1995 self-titled Fox network television program (broadcast in the Southwest). She is featured in Karen William’s docucomedy, Laughing Matters, and appeared in the Hollywood sci-fi thriller Sphere. She was also featured in Culture Clash’s live show entitled Carpa Clash.1 In 1994, American Playhouse optioned her best-known and highly praised performance piece, Memory Tricks, for film production , and her subsequent piece, titled Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty, and Translated/Translating Woman | 113 Marga Gomez as a matador in a 1997 publicity photo. Photography by Linda Sue Scott. (Reprinted with permission from lindasuescott.com.) [35.173.233.176] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:55 GMT) Gay, has toured nationally. A Line around the Block is a solo performance about her father and the Latino entertainment world of the 1940s and 1950s in which he thrived.2 Jaywalker deals with her hilarious attempts to break into Hollywood film; The Twelve Days of Cochina is a dirty take on the traditional Christmas story; and Marga Gomez’s Intimate Details, a hopeful search for love and romance. Los Big Names, a tribute to parents and New York’s Spanish-language teatro history, opened at the prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in spring 2004. Before she achieved success, Gomez studied drama and creative writing at Oswego College, in New York, then moved to San Francisco and became a member of the feminist grassroots theater group Lilith. Gomez left that group in the early 1980s and collaborated with the Bay Area Chicana comedienne Monica Palacios.3 Along with Palacios, Gomez performed as an original member of Culture Clash for about two years. Later, she and Palacios left the group and performed together along the West Coast. As a solo performer, she has performed many standup shows over the past five years and has opened for diverse acts such as Los Lobos, k.d. lang, and others. Her solo performances, including Memory Tricks, Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty, and Gay, and Half-Cuban, Half-Lesbian, are compelling because they touch upon issues of immigration and assimilation anxiety, as well as racism, misogyny, and homophobia as they occurred in latetwentieth -century America. The notable scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, writing about the importance of the revolutionary Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga’s theater work in bringing the perspectives of lesbians of color to the fore, demonstrates that, within Western drama, “the perspectives of playwrights who are lesbians of color and lesbian-of-color characters are practically non-existent.”4 The same can be said of standup comedy. However, comediennes like Marga Gomez and her contemporaries Monica Palacios and Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano) use the stage in innovative ways, inventing hybrid and experimental genres...