EL PAISA

I will never forget entering a gay vaquero bar for the very first time and seeing my Tio Luis––a macho cowboy from the sierras of Durango––dancing arm-in-arm with another man. I had never seen anything like it. I had never even pondered the possibility of it. I will never forget entering that gay vaquero bar and seeing what I saw because frankly, after that moment, I would never be the same again.

As the youngest son from a farm-and-factory-laboring immigrant family of nine, I grew up in the United States always coming home to rural Mexico––a bucolic land of memory, Catholicism and gendered traditions in which homosexuality simply did not and could not exist. I arrived at adolescence dancing cumbia and quebradita, wearing cowboy boots and learning to master the guitar so I could perform at Sunday mass. I arrived at adolescence overcome by Cholo culture, barrio gang violence and the constant concern of so many relatives landing in prison. But I also arrived at adolescence burdened by a shameful secret I couldn’t quite make sense of and which, as the time went by, forced me further and further into a lonely place of fear, shame and vigorous introspection.

It has been noted that homosexuality is the only minority group one isn’t born into. As a Mexicano, I could turn to my father, mother and numerous siblings to gauge how I might overcome the cultural difficulties of living in an unfamiliar country. Queerness, on the other hand, meant complete and utter isolation. There was nobody I could turn to with my anxious questions, no built-in community, so my burgeoning homosexuality became antithetical to my Latine culture. Queerness and Latinidad were mutually exclusive, it seemed, thrusting me into a crisis of identity at a woefully young age.

You can imagine, then, my complete shock when I entered my first gay vaquero bar only to find my beloved Tio Luis in the arms of another man. But as I approached the dance floor, I came to realize that, despite the same tejana, the same handlebar mustache and the very same portly build, this wasn’t my Tio Luis after all. No, as I drew closer and the gay vaqueros spun upon the dance floor, they were also mi padre, mi primo, mi padrino. For the very first time in my life I witnessed vaqueros––the veritable embodiment of masculinity to which I was always taught to strive–– participating in queer culture. They were all so strikingly familiar, so much like the men I knew and loved that being at that bar suddenly felt like home.

My mind spun with swift jubilation, ushering in a truly transformative moment. Unexpectedly, I found myself encouraged to embrace both my queerness and my Latine heritage as equally integral parts of myself. EL PAISA examines this singular experience and how it empowered me to finally claim my own intersectional and multicultural Queer identity––an identity that continues evolving to this very day and which enables me to thrive in an increasingly complex world.