A Queer Way of Family Life: Narratives of Time and Space in Mayra Santos-Febres's Sirena Selena vestida de pena

In her collection of essays on Puerto Rican identity Sobre piel y papel published in 2005, Mayra Santos-Febres alludes to two personal experiences that were the landmark for her 2000 novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena. The first one was the contemplation of a woman named Sirena sliding downstairs in a Caribbean mansion. That body was perceived as flamboyant, as a charming simulacrum, as "otro elemento de bisutería. Su cara hecha a la perfección, sus bucles, el vestido de noche con arabescos bordados eran todo de fantasía. La voz de Sirena era lo único verdadero" (128). Santos-Febres was deeply captivated by the melancholy transmitted through Sirena's body and voice. As part of the audience of that show, she felt transported to a timeless and out of space dimension. The second memorable experience was the image of a drugged boy singing boleros and gathering trash in a bar, and it was her memory of that boy, the real seed of Sirena Selena vestida de pena.

Those momentary encounters enabled Santos-Febres to travel to the peripheries of the city of San Juan and recreate the lives of the silenced and outlaw subjects: marginal groups underrepresented by the system. The woman named Sirena and the drugged boy respond to cultural products and to processes of social transformation in late capitalism. They do not function simply as victims of uneven economic relations brought about by times of excessive consumerism and globalization but as subjects with a past, a tradition, and a history. Moreover, they actively participate in the circuits of neoliberal societies.¹ Santos-Febres's novel is part of a group of counter-canonical works that, from the 70s, have vindicated the visibility and space of homosexuality, feminism, and marginality at large. Within the tradition of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Rosario Ferré, or Ana Lydia Vega, among others, Santos-Febres goes far beyond the peripheral domains of the streets and the hotels or motels of San Juan. She eagerly throws herself into the worlds of drugs and prostitution. Instead of finding a place for subject completion in the diasporic space of the U.S., her destinations are the filthy beaches and luxurious hotels for tourists in the capital of the Dominican Republic. Furthermore, she introduces the figures of the transvestite and the transsexual as main social agents in the processes of nation and culture building.

In this fashion, Sirena Selena operates as a venue for cultural transformation through a questioning of identity categories, social practices and the effectiveness of institutions in a global world. Upon the publication of the novel in 2000, a group of scholars on Puerto Rican culture, and particularly on queer cultures, such as Jossianna Arroyo, Efraín Barradas, José Delgado-Costa, Luis Felipe Díaz, Teresa Peña-Jordán, Alberto Sandoval Sánchez, Daniel Torres, and Kristian Van Haesendonck contributed with new ideas that presented a variety of different approaches to the novel. Their essays were compiled in a special volume published in Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Fall 2003. Some critics read Sirena as the national metaphor of the political and economic situation of the island since the body of the transvestite and, therefore, of Puerto Rico—and to a large extent the rest of the Caribbean islands—inscribes cultural and social hybridism dismantling the center and periphery binaries. In this sense, Puerto Rico and its relation with the U.S. fosters an idea of transvestism which, as Santos Febres has argued in Sobre piel y papel, symbolizes the misery and poverty of Third World countries disguised by luxury and fanciness through means of foreign tourist investments. Others have imagined Sirena as a positive alternative to enter neocolonial relations between so called First and Third World countries. This view endows Sirena and all the marginal characters with the power to develop agency in their cross-class contacts and in their migratory experiences. As I will mention, the interactions offered by the protagonists...