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

El Alto 96
Bonita At Cumbre Tajín
97
LGBTQI+ identity into the Cumbre Tajín festival
in order to properly reflect a multiple, diverse
reality, and create expressions and narratives
that are capable of building inclusive and safe
cultural practices.
The First Totonacapan Sexodiverso Forum is an
initiative created jointly by Tareke Ortíz, the
Artistic Director of Cumbre Tajín, and BONITA,
a multidisciplinary stage collective of Mexico
City that uses parties as a way to encourage
attendants to explore their femininity regardless
of the bodies in which it may reside. The initiative
took place as part of the British Council’s
Outburst Americas programme, which strives
to share the experience of Outburst —Northern
Ireland’s LGBTQI+ arts festival— with Mexico’s
LGBTQI+ artists, with the goal of promoting the
development of queer art and queer forms of
expression.
The First Totonacapan Sexodiverso Forum was
multidimensional. For an entire month, the
artists-activists designed actions jointly with the
Totonac queer community to exhibit pluralistic
cultural representations, and to shed light on
the challenges that the community faces in the
region’s context. The multiple performancebased
actions, together with workshops,
mentorship programs, an altar, a tortilla
production project and an anti-beauty pageant,
served as a showcase for how urgently the
LGBTQI+ community needs to achieve integration
with the traditional understanding of indigenous
identity.
TORTILLAS FOR EQUITY, A BEAUTY
PAGEANT FOR EQUALITY
Every festival afternoon, the BONITA dressing
room would become the venue for tortilla
making. As dictated by the ancestral recipe,
maize would be mixed with water and quicklime
to produce nixtamal, but the resulting
product looked in no way like the traditional
preparation. The typical yellowish color was
replaced by fluorescent pinks, electric purples
and incandescent greens. The dough would be
painted with vegetable colorants to turn baking
into a political act: cooking is not exclusive to
women, women are not just women, and identity
is indigenous, gastronomic, sexual, and political.
The BONITA dressing room thus became the place
where trans tortillas were fried on a comal every
afternoon for the entire duration of the festival.
The BONITA dressing room was thus transformed
into a ceremonial venue, a performance in and of
itself. Whoever visited it could gather around the
comal’s fire, change their pantyhose, paint their
lips and don false eyelashes. Then they would
walk on a catwalk, play music on a DJ set and pay
tribute to the victims of violence against trans
persons and hate crimes at an altar that honored
their memory and made violence visible.
But this was not the only ceremony. The
participants’ emotions were brought to a climax
during a key moment of the programme: the
“Señorita Cumbre” (“Miss Cumbre Tajín”) antibeauty
pageant.
For the Papantla queer community, most
of its cultural life takes place and acquires
meaningfulness at the parties and annual beauty
pageants that involve trans women and crossdressers.
The contest’s award categories are as
varied as the cultural calendar: Miss Veracruz
Norte, Princesses, Carnival Queens, etc. With this
paramount performance in mind, the Sexodiverso
project exchanged thoughts with Belfast’s
Outburst Festival Director Ruth McCarthy, and
asked the following question: why should a prize
be awarded based on paradigms of discrimination
such as beauty, physique, race and social class?
Could a platform of this nature act as a way to
celebrate diversity in all shapes and sizes? Can
a beauty pageant also be a sociopolitical act for
the denunciation of inequality? This is how the
idea of the anti-beauty contest was ushered in:
a contest in which beauty lies in the singularity
of the individual, and where all the participants
are part of an invaluable mosaic that creates a
powerful identity whose celebration at Cumbre
Tajín is imperative.
POLITICAL CATWALK
The anti-contestants would strut on the antipageant
catwalk as activists. For a whole month,
each participant was coached by specialised
producers to identify their style and develop a
narrative that would tell their story through visual
and performance-based projects. The stories of
abuse, discrimination, crime and homophobia
came to life on the catwalk, which ceased to be a
passive place to become an active one, an arena
for denunciation, for the struggle for rights, and
for a joint crusade to materialise human rights
that can no longer be held back.
The pageant’s participants ended the show by
standing at the back of the room in a horizontal
line that was democratic and devoid of all
hierarchies. At this point, they displayed their
beauty accessories. However, the traditional
crowns and scepters laden with fake jewelry
were replaced by white placards written with the
following motto in black lettering:
We want to stay alive
My body will not be rated
This is no competition
We are stronger together
We are united
Not one more of us shall fall.
(© María García-Holley)
The Totonacapan Sexodiverso Forum was an
initiative developed by the British Council as
part of the Outburst Americas Programme, in
collaboration with Outburst, BONITA and Cumbre
Tajín 2019. María García-Holley is Head of
Arts, Mexico at the British Council.