El Alto | Queer: Gender Sexuality and the Arts in the Americas

El Alto 148 EME
149
A ‘MARICA’ ARTS
SPRING:
Natalia Mallo (NM): Tell us how you started out
in music.
EME: My relationship with music has been
bequeathed to me. I’m privileged to have
been born in a musical family that celebrates
everything through music. My father is from
Ayacucho, a region in South-Andean Peru with an
immense musical tradition, and he is one of my
favourite singers. My uncles are also singers and
multi-instrumentalists. I grew up amidst family
folk-parties, the jaranas, where the musical
repertoire combined traditional Ayacucho and
Andean repertoire with that from the Pacific
Coast. That is how I started out in music, almost
unconsciously, hoping to be part of this family
tradition.
NM: What does it mean to be a young artist
making traditional music?
EME: I think that, right now, making traditional
music is both a political decision and a political
bet. I believe that making this type of music
as a conspicuously trans and marica person is
powerful. And there’s a claim attached to it as
well, as it’s a way of reclaiming our space as
part of the musical history and tradition of our
country. The traditional music scene tends to be
a conservative and traditionalist one and, for this
reason, very machista as well.
NM: Tell us about your influences in music.
Natalia Mallo interviews EME about their music,
non-binarism and Peru’s marica arts scene.
EME: There are many, innumerable artists who
influenced my career: Violeta Parra, Chavela
Vargas, Mercedes Sosa, Victoria Santa Cruz,
Susana Baca, Chabuca Granda, Rosa Guzmán,
Chalena Vásquez, Margot Palomino, Omara
Portuondo, Buika, Adriana Varela. These are
powerful women and voices, hugely different to
each other, but they all taught me what it meant
to sing, to reveal oneself completely in a song:
reveal one’s wounds, one’s sweetness, vulnerability,
strength.
I also think of Susy Shock, of Alok Vaid Venon, of
Giuseppe Campuzano, of Pedro Lemebel - artists
that speak directly to my experience and to my
identities. These are artists in whom I could finally
recognise myself and who opened the way for
many other dissident artists like myself. Discovering
them was like opening the door towards accepting
my own marica-ness (mariconada) as a source
of creation, towards understanding that I am not
merely a dissident identity making art but that
my dissidence is vital to my artistic work. Susy, in
particular, is relevant because she’s a trans person
who sings and writes folk music. Discovering her
work was both transformative and encouraging.
NM: How much of your gender identity and
expression affects your music?
EME: A year ago I made the decision to undertake
a musical project that’s 51% activism and 49%
music. I did so because I understood that my
music, which comes from my identity, is vital
to my activism. There’s a great responsibility
in being a trans person who has the privilege
of dedicating themselves to music. There’s a
platform to be used. As a result, not only is my
music affected by my identities (transmasculine,
non-binary, assigned female at birth), but also
the ways through which I manage my musical
project. Not only do I want to sing songs with a
transfeminist content; I also want the project to
provide a coherent reflection of our struggle. I
try to create and follow that path each day. For a
year, I’ve been working with women musicians on
stage; our production team is now all comprised
by women and dissident artists. I believe that my
identity affects my music transversally: from the
contents and experiences that inspire me, to the
choice of the repertoire and the mise-en-scene,
to its management and production.
I’m not willing to go back into hiding or policing
my gender identity or its expression so that I can
find a space in the music scene.
NM: How was Eme born? What does it mean to
make a public transition?
EME: Eme has been my social name for a while.
Eme is the initial of my birth name taken to a
non-binary logic. I racked my brains for months
around it because of the potential consequences
it could have in the “music industry”. For years I
worked in building a musical project with a previous
name as I was told that making my identity visible
would damage my “musical career.” But making
a public transition was one of the most liberating
experiences for me. It’s a political act of making
an otherwise very invisible community visible
– a community that is largely invisible within the
LGTBQI+ community itself. It means exercising my
privileges in accordance with the transfeminist
struggle. We, trans people, need to take over more
and more spaces, we need to speak with our own
voices, in order to open the way for ourselves but
also to pave the way for those who are coming after
us. I think a lot about trans children and young trans
people. They are our engine. I believe that my public
transition was, first and foremost, an act of love and
of self-love.
NM: What’s happening in Peru’s queer arts scene?
EME: I’d rather talk about marica art. Theres a
distinction between being queer, which describes
a trend from the global North, and being marica.
Queer in Peru means copying that trend which
isn’t local. On the contrary, marica is, and its art
responds to our own experiences as Peruvian
dissidents, without trying to reproduce or copy
queer standards.
I believe we’re living an extremely interesting
moment for marica art in Peru, but I’m more
familiar with what’s happening in Lima. In the
past few years trans artists such as Marco Pérez
and Ibrain Cerebros have been exhibited, and
we’ve discovered the music of Marina Kapoor,
Andrea Vargas and Marden Crunjer. In theatre, we
also saw TransHistorias (TransStories, which was
created, directed and produced by a trans crew).
I have the impression that we are experiencing
a marica arts spring, at least in this city, and I
find it promising. The emergence of new venues,
as well as feminist and LGBTQI+ spaces has
contributed a lot to this process.
NM: Non-binarism is disruptive because it
challenges social and linguistic paradigms. This
creates tension and misunderstandings, but also
positive change. How do you think non-binarism
is affecting our ways of seeing the world?
EME: I believe that non-binarism challenges us to
let go of preconceived ideas about the possibilities
of inhabiting a body and about how we feel, love,
think and live our human experiences. For me, nonbinarism
is a reminder of the infinite complexity of
human beings. I also think this is part of a process
of decolonisation of the body through which we’re
reclaiming pre-colonial trans identities. For me,
non-binarism is the celebration of all possible
human experiences, and of the possibility of being
finally welcomed with our differences, which
poses difficulties at a social level, but also within
the transfeminist movement. There’s a need for a
movement that articulates the different struggles of
dissident bodies and not only of those binary trans
experiences, which are “easier to understand”.
Non-binarism has therefore the mission of
questioning and pushing the envelope of this
struggle to the next level.