Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Loca, a Spanish word for a madwoman or a slur for an effeminate man, unsettles people as it travels across spaces in the Americas. In Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes breathes a new meaning into this stigmatized identity by introducing the neologism transloca, which accounts for the "trans-" elements of diasporic movement and displacement of Puerto Rico as a "transnation" (15). Instead of proposing transloca as an identity, La Fountain-Stokes builds transloca performance as a theoretical lens to read "Puerto Rican loca, drag, and trans theatrical, film, literary, activist, and cabaret/ nightclub performances" (3). Although the works under analysis extend from the 1960s to the present, Translocas is far from a historical account; rather, it theorizes based on historical events and individual works that speak of a broader phenomenon and considers drag and trans as elastic—and at times intersecting—labels to characterize performance. Specifically, La Fountain-Stokes argues that these transloca performances challenge the status quo and "are key to understanding translocal Puerto Rican, American, Latin American, and Caribbean national imaginaries and social processes" (6).

At its core, transloca performance is a decolonial mode of analysis that addresses the complexities of Puerto Rican race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration. Transloca is a term that resists Anglo-American words such as "queer" and the process of globalization and capitalist logics of LGBTQ politics. La Fountain-Stokes puts in conversation an impressive amount of literature about, or produced in, Latin America and the Caribbean across different languages and disciplines. In his opening chapter "Theorizing la Loca," he traces the different theorizations and uses of loca as a debated term in queer and feminist studies and places his own contribution in these genealogies. For instance, the late sociologist Lionel Cantú Jr. used transloca for the first time to refer to a group of Latina transnational feminist scholars (35). Although significantly different in definition, La Fountain-Stokes considers his use of this term as an extension of Cantú's insights.

The two subsequent chapters focus on separate groups of performers who embody the contradictory aspects of transloca performance such as life and death and glamour and poverty. Chapter 2 contrasts the transloca aesthetics and self-fashioning of androgynous drag performer Nina Flowers to those of aspiring fashion designer and makeup artist Jorge Steven López Mercado and femme trap singer Kevin Fret, who were both brutally murdered. La Fountain-Stokes delineates the ways in which transloca embodiments and knowledges manifest in these three artists to argue for a broader transloca epistemological framework. Homing in on class as a vector of analysis, chapter 3 argues for the transloca drag of poverty as "a multifaceted, resourceful drag of resistance and negotiation, involving contradictions, invention, and inversion" (70). Drawing from solo performance, autobiography, film, and television appearances, this chapter analyzes the individual works of Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, and Monica Beverly Hillz in juxtaposition to the radical activism of Sylvia Rivera. Historically grounding the work of each of these performers, La Fountain-Stokes shows how they "challenge[d] social structures in the context of inequality" across time (101).

Throughout his book, La Fountain-Stokes accounts for whiteness in Puerto Rican identity by introducing some artists as "light-skinned"; nevertheless, it is only in chapters 4 and 5, where race takes center stage, albeit in distinct manners. In chapter 4, La Fountain-Stokes introduces the works of Freddie Mercado in genres such as painting, installation, performance art, and female impersonation. The author coins "ultrabaroque drag of rasanblaj" (reassembly, in Haitian Kreyòl) as a rubric to read Mercado's aesthetics—epitomic transloca work in its ability to cross "the line between sanity and madness, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imaginary" (105). As a light-skinned performer, Mercado's treatment of the politics of race and mestizaje in Puerto Rico has proven to be controversial. For instance, a 2019 performance was critiqued for using "blackface," which La Fountain-Stokes finds unfounded by quickly dismissing Mercado's detractors for being unwilling or unable "to acknowledge the complexity of the performance" (121). Proposing a more compelling reading on "blackface drag" as an antiracist performance mode, chapter 5 analyzes Javier Cardona's 1996 performance You Don't Look Like . . . by building the framework of transloca drag of race. This framework sheds light on the ways in which Cardona subverts performative expectations by parodically engaging racial stereotypes about Afro–Puerto Ricans from a personal perspective.

Set in New York City, the two final chapters stress the centrality of embodiment in diasporic transloca performance. Chapter 6 analyzes El bolero fue mi ruina (The Bolero Was My Downfall), a 1997 play performed by Jorge B. Merced and the Pregones Theater of the Bronx. La Fountain-Stokes offers a novel analysis on drag as a theatrical practice by linking Merced's diasporic life experiences with his performance in this play. In particular, he makes a distinction between transloca approximation and transloca incorporation to account for Merced's engagement with drag as a spectator and later as a performer, respectively (174–75). Focusing on trans performers, chapter 7 analyzes drag performer and beauty pageant winner Lady Catiria's 1990s lip-sync performances and Barbra Herr's one-woman show Trans-mission (2017) in their ability to speak through the body, "and its profound interplay with voice and with the politics of everyday life as well as pressing social issues" (227). La Fountain-Stokes shows how lip-syncing privileges embodiment over voice by reading Catiria's performances as works of art, including one where she disclosed her HIV-positive status. In the case of Herr, it is the spoken word that becomes the main communicative act in her testimonial piece, where she touches on themes like domestic violence, self-knowledge, and political activism.

Each chapter exemplifies critical and generous scholarship that is accessible to a wide range of readers. La Fountain-Stokes not only analyzes works and frames theoretical debates, but also meticulously introduces artist biographies, popular culture references, and sociopolitical contexts. Although this makes Translocas an impressive scholarly contribution at the archival level, at times this level of detail detracts attention from the book's core arguments. Moreover, in the book's introduction, La Fountain-Stokes introduces us to Lola von Miramar, his drag persona, which was one of the ways he became "a coperformative witness of sorts" in relation to his methodology and researcher positionality (23). As the author also regrets in the epilogue, von Miramar is virtually absent for the rest of the book, which represented a missed opportunity to strengthen La Fountain-Stokes's self-reflexive analyses as a light-skinned transloca himself. Despite these minor limitations, Translocas is an interdisciplinary study that stresses the importance of a translocal and decolonial analysis of performance as embodied communication. La Fountain-Stokes compellingly builds transloca performance as a theoretical framework that will shape future research on queer and trans performance in Puerto Rico and beyond.