Not a Monolith is a Teen Vogue series for Latinx Heritage Month 2023, highlighting the diversity of those in the Latinx community. From disability rights activists to rappers to drag queens, we're showing the range of backgrounds and experiences that inform Latinx culture today.
Six years ago, back in San Juan, Warhola Pop was working as a waitress at an Olive Garden. She was treated badly, people tipped poorly. Also at this time, her career as a drag queen was stuck. The few shows she was giving were not enough to cover her rent. So, she decided to spend the last $125 in her pocket on a plane ticket to New York.
“I had no credit, no card," Warhola recalls. "I sold some stuff and collected about 1,000 pesos. If Madonna was able to make it with 30 bucks, why couldn’t I?”
Warhola arrived in Brooklyn in 2017, when the borough was experiencing what Nicole Pasulka described in her book How You Get Famous: Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn as a “drag takeover.” In 2001, when Pasulka moved to Brooklyn, she wrote, despite the robust and exciting queer scene, she barely heard the word “drag.” But between 2012 and 2016, the borough experienced an explosion of drag performances, in part influenced by the popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race. “The Brooklyn drag takeover came harder and faster than pretty much anywhere else,” Pasulka noted. “The local scene was decidedly more messy, freewheeling, and avant-garde than what we watch on TV.”
This Brooklyn drag boom was made possible, in part, thanks to Latinx drag queens who created their own spaces for performing. Bushwig, one of the largest drag festivals in the world, started in a Bushwick backyard where performers like its founder Chata, Lady Quesa, and Aja used to perform just for fun among friends. Now, the Latinx-themed drag parties are among the most exciting nightlife attractions in Brooklyn, a trend that has transcended to drag scenes in other New York boroughs.
By bringing elements of their bilingual and bicultural experience to the stage, the Latinx drag queens of Brooklyn demonstrate pride in their identities and, in queering up that mixture of cultural references, have found a way to interrogate the rampant machismo and homophobia they experienced in their hometowns. In many cases, it was precisely that toxic brew that forced them to move to New York in the first place.
In Park Slope, East Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Ridgewood, and Bushwick — which are considered among the most LGBTQ+-friendly areas in Brooklyn — the queens have access to a circuit of bars in which to perform, enabling them to make a living. They also get to live in an area that, despite its accelerated gentrification, largely offers a safe and vibrant place that celebrates diversity.
Despite the drag boom — or perhaps because of it — Warhola’s first six months in New York were tough. The city now hosts one of the most competitive drag scenes in the world, and establishing oneself as an entertainer takes time, effort, and often means working side jobs. But Warhola was determined and no stranger to new beginnings: After what she describes as a difficult childhood, she had moved to San Juan and enrolled at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, where she got a degree in visual arts. A friend from school told her she looked a little bit like Andy Warhol. The following Halloween, she dressed up as the pop artist, and from then on started experimenting with drag.
In Brooklyn, Warhola’s drag became freer. Unlike the pageant style of her early days in the Río Piedras scene, she took on a more campy and kitsch aesthetic. One day her look is that of a Miss Universe, the next she is giving you La Veneno. That versatility has helped her get more bookings.
Nowadays, she is reaping the rewards of that hard work. Last year, she was crowned the winner in Are You the Ultimate Diva?, a well-known drag competition in Brooklyn hosted by fellow boricua drag queen and event producer, Janelle No. 5.
The night of the Ultimate Diva, Warhola walked the runway wearing a replica of the iconic green, flowy, low-cut Versace dress Jennifer López wore to the Grammy Awards in 2000. For the talent show, Warhola lip-synced to a medley of songs by the legendary Cuban diva La Lupe, surrounded by backup dancers and huge feather props.
During the final question round, Warhola asked the panel of judges (among them Kandy Muse and Nicky Doll, from RuPaul’s Drag Race) if the interview could be conducted in Spanish; she had brought a translator, her sister Victoria Holiday.
“I am a very good host and I know how to give very good shows,” Warhola says. “But sometimes, English limits me. [In New York] you have to do a lot of networking. If you’re hosting other drags, you have to throw shade and hints — you know, add humor.” Developing that confidence in a second language and a witty drag voice, she adds, has been difficult.
By choosing to answer in Spanish, Warhola wanted to affirm what she had already done onstage: stand proud of her cultural references and identity. “The only thing I have that is American is citizenship," she says, "everything else is Hispanic.”
This celebration of heritage creates a shared bond of community, one that also fosters support. Last October, Vena Cava, a drag queen who hails from Puerto Rico, organized a fundraiser at The Rosemont, a gay bar in Brooklyn. All tips and proceeds went to Brigada Solidaria del Oeste to offer relief to those affected by Hurricane Fiona. Nightlife can often serve as a rendezvous point for crowdfunding and other forms of mutual aid, thereby creating a space to organize for the LGBTQ+ Latinx community.
Of course, this shared heritage also means Latinx LGBTQ+ people understand one another’s culture in a way others may not. There are “noches de perreo y putería’’ during which you can hear performers lip sync to legendary songs like “A quien le importa” (in the Thalía’s iteration), “Todos me miran” (by rock and roll glory Gloria Trevi), “Loba” by Shakira, and other gay anthems of the Latin American pop canon. In these spaces, the community expresses its queerness and Latinidad in ways that sometimes are not possible at home or in the workplace.
La Zavaleta’s stage name is an homage to Mexican singer and actor Susana Zabaleta, whose “a la chingada, you better respect me attitude” inspired the drag queen to be strong while growing up as a queer kid in Mexico. La Zavaleta — or The Art of La Zavaleta, as she also refers to herself — says that incorporating cultural references into her drag makes it special and unique.
“You can’t erase culture,” she says. For La Zavaleta, it is necessary to think beyond the Latino cliché. She thinks some queens lack depth when representing their culture. “Some queens incorporate their culture, but they go for something basic,” she explains, using as an example Mexican queens who create a concept around Día de Muertos. She considers this an easy go-to. There are more ways of representing Mexican culture, La Zavaleta says, beyond Catrina makeup. “Me pongo una skull y ya soy Latina?” she asks. “No, there is more.”
In 2021, La Zavaleta participated in season four of Dragula, a TV competition in which the Boulet Brothers crown the best Next Drag Supermonster. Says La Zavaleta, she took that opportunity because the first season of the show inspired her to do drag, and because, unlike RuPaul’s Drag Race, Dragula is not about dolls who want to get dressed by designers.
Dragula was also the best platform to showcase her favorite category of drag: spooky. “Since I started, I was the spooky girl, the villain, she was the bad one, always,” she recalls, explaining that nightmares inspire her stage persona. “It’s what I like, it’s what I dream, it’s what I see — witches, spirits.”
The look that made her most proud during Dragula was the drag version of a Mexican icon who is usually portrayed as the prototypical macho fortachón: For the Weird, Wild West category, she presented a zombie-like, Mad Max version of the leader of the Mexican revolution, Emiliano Zapata. “He was a bit jotillo," she says of Zapata. "He was a bit queer, with his boots and his cowboy look.”
This queerization of Emiliano Zapata has been controversial. In 2019, the artist Fabián Cháirez exhibited at Palacio de Bellas Artes a painting of a naked Zapata riding a horse and wearing high heels that were also revolvers. Some members of Zapata’s family were outraged, stating that depicting a queer Zapata was offensive to his legacy. A group of agricultural workers, supporters of Zapata’s beliefs, demonstrated outside the museum, expressing the same discomfort and asking for the painting to be removed.
But La Zavaleta leaned in.
“I put on a very big hat, I put on some boots with a very large peak, an arm with a gun and, well, I shot like pa-pa-pa,” she says, describing the look.
When it comes to her look, La Zavaleta finds inspiration in Lady Gaga, whose songs she likes to lip sync. But it is when she performs songs in Spanish that she feels The Art of La Zavaleta is at its apex.
“I do Gaga to turn the energy up,” she explains. “But I do songs in Spanish because they have a message. People that follow me stay with those lyrics that make them think about something else, is what I do in my art, make people think something else.”
For La Candelaria, a Bushwick-based queen, her clothes make her feel most herself onstage. She first spotted her drag future in the garbage, when she found a Vera Wang wedding dress in a dumpster while walking on Madison Avenue about three years ago. She took the dress home, unstitched the pieces, and repurposed them to create a new dress.
She named the new white, foamy, ethereal gown Soledad. La Candelaria wore it to perform for the first time in drag at a talent competition at the House of Yes. That night, she lip-synced to the heartbreak ballad “Mi Talismán” by Mexican vozarrón, Ana Gabriel.
Before moving to New York, La Candelaria says she was a well-behaved Catholic child who didn't even dare curse. She was born in Pereira, Colombia, into a very Catholic family, in which she says she was the first openly gay member. She grew up feeling reprimida — repressed — and without opportunities to explore her gender expression or sexual orientation. This didn’t change after she moved to Medellín to go to fashion design school.
Same-sex marriage became legal in Colombia in 2016, and adoption by same-sex couples was permitted in 2015. But Colombia is still considered the second-most dangerous country in the Americas to live as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, according to a limited report from 2019. “In Colombia, the problem is that when you are too confident with your femininity, people around you do not accept it,” La Candelaria says. “I feel very comfortable with the feminine energy, I can handle it, I’m able to work with it, I identify with it.”
If she had stayed in Colombia, she says, her drag persona wouldn’t exist — or if it did, it would be very different. There, it would have taken more time to get to the level of personal and artistic freedom she enjoys now. Beyond Catholic morality, beauty standards that favor slim bodies and beauty queens would have pressured her to look a certain way. “In Colombia, La Candelaria would have gone in a different direction,” the performer says. “There, everything is, look like a woman, look beautiful.”
La Candelaria recalls the early days of putting on the dresses she continued to design after that remake of a Vera Wang as a time to reflect on who she actually was. That was a process fueled by the open-mindedness she found in New York. Through drag, she became empowered in her femininity and, at the same time, opened herself up to other possibilities of self.
But the welcoming queer environment that Latinx drag queens, BIPOC, trans, and nonbinary performers find in Brooklyn stands in contrast with the alarming landscape of the United States as a whole. Across the country, an increasing number of state legislatures are passing bills aimed at banning public drag performances. According to the Movement Advancement Project, as of September, 725 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced.
Since last year, the joy of liberation that characterized drag performances has been overshadowed by laws that aim to ban what is referred to as “male or female impersonators” from performing in public spaces or in the presence of children. The language of one of the bills from Tennessee claims that drag performances are “harmful to minors” and should be prohibited within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks, and places of worship.
The rhetoric of such laws obscures the definition of drag, treating it as indistinct from gender identity. It also labels drag as adult entertainment and implies that drag queens are potentially groomers and pedophiles. Encouraged by this, far-right groups, like the Proud Boys, have threatened and attacked drag events such as drag story hours. In Nevada and Alameda County, California, libraries were attacked in June last year. The group has used guns to boycott shows intended for children to learn about the joy of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression.
Amid the legal and media chaos, banning drag has become a way to eliminate spaces where queer people can go to feel safely surrounded by other queer people. It is also a way to abate the existence of queer, trans, and nonbinary children by preventing them from finding joy and comfort in seeing their elders thrive.
Danger still abounds in La Candelaria’s home country, but Colombia is now seeing a wellspring of queer and trans activist groups that use art and voguing moves to support social protests; they are firm in their stance against any kind of phobia or censorship against the LGBTQ+ community. In 2021, during the social protests against the conservative government in power at the time, Pantera Godoy, an Afro Colombian trans organizer, and other vogue dancers like Piisciis, Nova, and Axid twerked in front of the riot squad’s shields and armor, using queer expression in opposition to oppression.
Queens in Brooklyn use their performance, appearance, and community to create connections to their roots, which is allowed — and even celebrated — because of the rich drag, queer, and Latinx culture they’ve fostered in a city that largely offers a safe space for many marginalized communities. But even the richest community can’t always create the comfort of home. For La Candelaria, it’s that longing for her home country and her family that’s calling her back. “I had to distance and separate as much as possible to be able to find out who I was,” she says. “Now maybe I can reconnect.”
