Description
Book SynopsisDuring a few months in 1980, 125,000 Cubans entered the U.S. as part of a massive migration known as the Mariel boatlift. Drawing from first-person stories of Cuban Americans as well as government documents and cultural texts from both the U.S. and Cuba, Susana Peña reveals how a historical event shaped the formation of an entire ethnic and sexual landscape.
Trade ReviewThis wonderful work unravels the complex and messy strands of emergences, disappearances, visibilities, and erasures of the loca, the gender, and sexually transgressive Cuban male homosexual figure who arrived in America via the Mariel boatlift. Susana Peña carefully and sensitively excavates through layers of historical and cultural abjection in order to persuasively demonstrate how the loca’s stigmatized exilic trajectory is intimately connected to the advent of a Cuban American gay culture in Miami.—Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction
1. From UMAPs to Save Our Children: Policing Homosexuality in Cuba and Miami before 1980
2. Obvious Gays and the State Gaze: Gay Visibility and Immigration Policy during the Mariel Boatlift
3. Cultures of Gay Visibility and Renarrating Mariel
4. Pájaration and Transculturation: Language and Meaning in Gay Cuban Miami
5. Narratives of Nation and Sexual Identity: Remembering Cuba
6. Families, Disclosure, and Visibility
7. Locas, Papis, and Muscle Queens: Racialized Discourses of Masculinity and Desire
8. ¡Oye Loca! Gay Cuba in Drag
Conclusion
AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
