Graphite 10, 2019

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For Diego, with love.

TA BLE O F CO NTE NTS (FIG. 1-4) Hyangsook Kwak: Bee Catcher, Crosswalk, 2 Panels and Human-Powered Vehicle, Dimensions Variable (2019).

(FIG. 5) Michael Biala: Cube Level, 25”x18” (2018).

Inkjet print mounted on dibond, magnetic paint, assorted magnets.

(FIG. 6) Francisco Garcia: Ricardo Flores Magón occupies Union Station, (part one) (2018) Video.

(FIG. 7-13) Aleksey Kondratyev: Bodyshop, Dimensions Variable (2019).

(FIG. 14) Emilio Chapela: Hidebehind (2018) Video, 00:03:11.

(FIG. 15-17) Christian Hincapie: Robert Moses Rorschach Test 142” x 133” (2017). Frottage, oil on paper.

At work on “Art Decoy (from Industry and Agriculture, One Rockefeller Plaza by artist C. Paul Jennewein) (2018).

(FIG. 18-19) Nuong Tran: Untitled (2019).

(FIG. 20) Zack Endoso: Untitled (2018) Charcoal on paper.

(PG. 46) Nico Young: Flying Underground “I Dreamed I Could Fly” and the Future of the Metro Art Program.

(FIG. 21-24) Richard Nam: Fall of Man 3, Cat Get Off, 96”x72” (2018). Oil on Canvas. The Grapple but Drink It Cold. Just Do IT~, 4’x8’ (2019) Oil Pastel on Paper. Lay’s Chip-Up #17, 4’x7’ (2019) Oil Pastel on Paper.

Fall of Man, (2019) Oil Pastel on Paper.

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(PG. 64) Dajin Yoon: Untitled (2019).

(FIG. 25) Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Man With Heads, 78” x 48” (2015) Acrylic Paint and Oil Paint on Panel.

(FIG. 26 - 27) Rachel Lester Trend: Untitled (2019).

(FIG. 28) Camille Claire: SWARM. (2018) Video, 00:06:37.

(FIG. 29) Francine Banda: Untitled (2019).

(FIG. 30-34) Sarah Ross: Archisuits (2005) Performance.

(FIG. 35) Amara Higuera Hopping: Anthem 1; Moment 4 Life (2018) Video, 00:04:38.

(FIG. 36-41) River Castaneda: Triple Exposures New York, New York/ The Salt River Pima Reservation, Arizona/ Bennington, Vermont (2018).

(FIG. 42) Adam Green: Holywood (2019) Crayon, collage.

(FIG. 43) Cianne Fragione: Untitled.

(FIG. 44) Megan Broughton: Cello Cyanotype (2019) Cyanotype.

(FIG. 45) Bob Vieira: Amnulius. (2018) Barricade, Fuzz, Glue.

(FIG. 46) Omer Yosef: North South West East.

(FIG. 47) Michael Stamm: Untitled (2018).

(FIG. 48-49) Emily Miller: Flesh Deluge, 24”x18” (2018) Oil on Paper.

Helping/hurting. 12”x16” (2019) Oil on Canvas.

(FIG. 50) Ruby Murnik: Untitled (2019).

(FIG. 51) Brittney Leeanne Williams: Mommy and Me, (2018) Oil Paint on Canvas.

(PG. 118) Katherine Steelman: Home(bodies) Transitory Belonging At LA’s Oldest Latina/ o Drag Bar. (FIG. 52-54) Maya White: Me to Me, Devil Cove, Bull (2019) Dimensions Variable.

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(FIG. 55) Ava Kling: Trash Day (2018) Video.

(FIG. 56-57) Jenny Polak: D.I.Y ICE Escape Sign, Hammer Museum, CE Escape Sign, Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2019).

(PG. 142) Katheryne Castillo: El Gato.

(FIG. 60) Karen Achar: South Central (2018).

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A WO RD FRO M OU R E DI TO R

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The GRAPHITE team is humbled and honored to present our tenth issue, Transit.

GRAPHITE is an interdisciplinary arts journal developed by students at the University of California, Los Angeles and supported by the Hammer Museum. Each year, students invite artists to share perspectives on a given theme; past issues have spotlighted Categories, Manuals, and Consequences. The team arrived at Transit this year, a theme relevant to us as Los Angeles dwellers.

In LA, quintessential small talk more often sounds like “how did you get here?” or “how was the traffic?” than the classic “how’s the weather?” used in many other cities. Graphite begs questions not only of how, but of what and why. What brought you here? Why are you here?

We know that when we move through man- made infrastructures, histories of colonization, industrialization, and migration are omnipresent. In this issue, transit is considered through sites in Los Angeles and beyond.

Here, an essay uses the oldest drag bar in Los Angeles to discuss transitory belonging in the borderlands.

Here, a series of photos compares infrastructural and natural features of Bennington, Vermont; the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona; and New York City. An object like a purse or a barricade takes on a new meaning. And, here, bodies twist, step, attempt to find comfort. We can feel their weight.

We are eternally grateful to the remarkable and forward-thinking artists who have contributed to this issue.

We also would like to extend our thanks to everyone in the Academic Programs office at the Hammer Museum for supporting and uplifting our team through this project.

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Respectfully, Haley Penn

WO— RKS

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46 FLYI NG U NDE RGROU ND “I DREAMED I COULD FLY ” AND THE FU TU RE O F THE ME TRO ART PRO GR AM I MG.1

Six men dangle above the subway platform at the Civic Center/Grand Park Metro station from wires, with their arms and legs spread like indoor skydivers. I used to see them on my old commute to and from downtown Los Angeles every week. I always wondered about them.

Did anyone else think they looked like suicide jumpers? Such a sculpture seemed risky — or at least, objectionable — in a subway station. I wasn’t used

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to public art that was objectionable. I passed by four different murals on my way home from school every day that said REFLECT, INSPIRE, CREATE, and LOVE, in that order. The six men were clearly of a different time.

There’s no wall text or information about them anywhere on the platform. I found it on the Metro website: I Dreamed I Could Fly by Jonathan Borofsky(1993) [Img. 1]. Flying had never even crossed my mind. The website said that there was also an audio element to the artwork: an “occasional lonely bird sound”. I had never heard it.

I figured the speakers had burned out years ago and were left unrepaired. But, sure enough, the next time I rode the train, I listened for it and I heard it. You would never notice it unless you knew to listen for it. I felt like I was let in on a secret.

The station on the other end of my commute, in Santa Monica, was completely different. Metro expanded to my side of town in 2016, with some shiny new stations. I could not tell you about the art at the Expo/Bundy station. I simply don’t remember it. It blurs together with all the other art on the Expo line, which is on flat panels above the station signage, and easy to miss. Metro’s new brand is streamlined. This new Metro, who affords art only a series of panels at every station is totally unrecognizable from the Metro that once commissioned these flying men and has maintained the integrity of the artist’s subtle audio component for 25 years.

Metro has more construction projects underway right now than at any other point in its lifespan, as part of the “28 by 28” effort to complete 28 construction projects by the 2028 LA Summer Olympics. The new stations come at a dire time for public art in LA. Specifically, the new subway stations, which are Metro’s first underground stations in a decade, hold the potential for immersive new public art installations such as the ones

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along the Red Line.

Metro’s station design used to change with the landscape to account for the individual character of the communities they served. Now station design is standardized across all lines, in an attempt to flatten out those differences. What changed?

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ART AT THE MAYOR’S TRAIN STOP

I Dreamed does not make any attempt to speak to the history or people of Downtown LA’s Bunker Hill area. It’s not even site-specific. Jonathan Borofsky exhibited earlier iterations of I Dreamed in several different sites, including a state penitentiary, over a decade before exhibiting the one in the Metro station.

It takes on different meanings depending on the context in which it’s shown. It’s strangely self-specific for a public artwork; the men are rendered in his own image, reenacting a dream - the most personal of experiences. There are numbers painted across the chest of each figure that you wouldn’t understand unless you’re familiar with Borofsky’s ouvre. But its imagery is open-ended, and provocative. They come from a practice of writing down numbers in sequence for hours each day. When he finished a painting or a sculpture, he’d sign it with the last number he wrote. He was on 3,276,551 when he made the figure with the blue shirt [Img. 2]. Borofsky’s installation represents an approach to public art in line with modern public sculpture, in which contemporary art is taken out of the gallery and implanted in public space.

Metro accommodates two other distinct approaches to public art in the Civic Center station alone.

A second artwork in the station by Peter Reiquam, Civic Center Benches, 2004, functions as bench seating for the train platform, even though it was commissioned and proposed as a public artwork [Img. 3]. This philosophy, which emphasizes an artwork’s use value and physical integration into surrounding architecture, falls in line with a movement of public art in the 1970s, defined by artists such as Scott Burton and Nancy Holt.

A third approach is found on the mezzanine level. Faith Ringgold’s colorful mosaic portraits, People Portraits: in Creativity; Performing; Sports and Fashion, 2010, represent members of the local community [Img. 4]. These follow a different approach to public art,

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emphasizing the work’s social integration into a community. Ringgold made the drawings, and Metro helped her procure small mosaics of them. The mosaics attempt to describe and represent the community above in the station below.

Metro was able to accommodate these three different artists’ practices -one in sculpture, one in furniture, and one in drawing - all in one station. In mockups of the new stations set to open by 2028, art is relegated to 2-D panels along the walls of the stations. No mention is made of possible accommodations for artists working in sculpture or furniture.

Metro still has a great panel of artists, curators, and community members who have selected the artists for new stations. I don’t blame Metro Art for this shift; the limitations were likely imposed by some higher level in the bureaucracy.

Metro’s greatest strength as a public arts commission is in the unique I MG. 3 characteristics of its venues. Unlike the murals along LA freeways that cars zoom by, or the public sculptures that sit in front of government buildings downtown, rapid transit-oriented art occupies a rare idle space within the urban environment. People spend time with art at metro stations.

Public artworks don’t usually get that prolonged attention. Borofsky’s was the only artwork installed upon the opening of the station in 1993. The other

artworks were installed later: Reiquam’s in 2004, and Ringgold’s in 2010. Metro understood that public space is developed over time.

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SUBWAY ART IN THE SELFIE-MOMENT

Metro fully realized the potential for public art in subway stations further down the Red Line. The Civic Center station was built when Metro was following the same approach to station design that they had used on the Blue Line in 1990, in which station architects designed the basic structure, and then artists were commissioned to fill in the blank space.

In the second phase of the Red Line, which extends into Hollywood, Metro adopted a new approach that involved artists in the station design process early on. The collaboration between artists and the station architects resulted in what remain the most intricately designed and distinctive stations in the Metro system, such as those designed by Gilbert Lujan and May Sun [Img. 5]. No above-ground stations along the Green and Gold were designed quite to the extent as the subway stations. Metro, however, kept commissioning artists to design seating, fencing, and canopy structures in addition to sculptures and murals for the Green and Gold lines. Metro continued this practice for years, on every line until the above-ground Expo line.

Most new public art in LA is actually privately commissioned. The buzzword murals I passed daily along Pico Blvd on my way home from school were all the work of a private mural commissioning organization called Beautify Earth. The content of the art-buzzwords, selfie-moments is simply what art looks like when it is subordinate to local businesses and small-time city beautification projects. The Beautify Earth website focuses on the economic incentives of public art for business owners. Private businesses fund the art as a

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marketing investment, like a billboard. In attempts to attract and appeal to customers, the art is extremely palatable and direct, and nonspecific. There are few other avenues for public art to exist nowadays, after decades of cutbacks of the National Endowment for the Arts since the Culture Wars.

These relatively small new private arts commissions have had a transformative effect on the LA landscape in the past few years. Public art has experienced a boom in LA recently, but it’s of a very particular, ‘Instagrammable’ flavor, paid for by private business interests.

Metro is the last bastion for public, municipal art in LA. It is not severely underfunded like other municipal programs, and it is not at the mercy of business interests like private commissions. It is permanent and in charge of the land its art occupies. It’s also growing.

It’s so unusual to see public art command as much attention, priority and support as on the Red Line. That’s why it’s such a shame that they’ve adopted this new approach to station design. An architecture firm designs

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and repeats a template for every station, leaving space for art in the same place every time, on small overhead panels, or wall murals. The new station design wouldn’t support another installation like I Dreamed.

I Dreamed is unique for being, to my knowledge, the only artwork in the Metro system which is permanently installed in a separate location. Borofsky earlier showed rougher versions of the six flying men in art galleries and a state penitentiary in the decade prior to the Metro station. In 2003, a decade after the one at the Metro station, however, Borofsky installed another permanent version in an airport terminal in Toronto [Img. 6].

This version is completely different from all the versions before it. Borofsky changed the figures to not be in his image, but instead be in a flattened, nonspecific human silhouette. The figures are all different colors to suggest a mix of people from all different backgrounds converging and flying. Gone are the numbers written across their chests, and gone are the bewildering faces molded af-

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ter Borofsky’s. In the airport, they don’t appear as suicide jumpers at all, and the strange specificity of Borofsky’s experience in the Metro version has been stripped away. The new I Dreamed seems to fit the same demands Metro places on stations to be universal and straightforward.

In mockups for the Crenshaw/LAX line (opening 2020), the Regional Connector (2021), and the first stage of the Purple line extension (2023), art is only allowed along specific walls in underground stations, and overhead panels at aboveground stations [Img. 7]. And all the artists they’ve selected are working in two-dimen-

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sional mediums.

In Metro’s subways, however, the artworks have a function beyond mere beautification.

Developing the aesthetic identity of each station also serves a practical purpose: it gives each station a distinct sense of place. Between stations are only dark tunnels, and commuters cannot look out the window and locate themselves as they can in a car. Thus, the subway station is tasked with the unique challenge of visually translating the community into a single structure. Artists may choose to represent the place above by bringing its history down below, or, like Borofsky, develop the station as a unique place in and of itself.

METRO’S REBRAND

Metro stations used to change design at every stop, to represent the vast differences between different neighborhoods in LA. The stations are now like chain stores: concerned more with representing themselves consistently across wide geographical difference than integrating into their local surroundings. Now when metro executives talk about old stations they talk about things like “visual chaos”.

Metro art may not be at the mercy of business interests, but it is at the mercy of bureaucratic efficiency. This is why they’ve decided to build all stations the same, with the same basic materials and paint colors, and the same basic framing structure for station art. The sameness is about making it easier for Metro to maintain the stations, and, above all else, about maintaining their brand identity.

Metro’s shift to uniformity in station design is in an effort to develop its signature “look”. With the planned expansion of the Metro system over the next decade, LA is poised to become a city with a viable rapid-transit network. Metro thinks that they’ve gotta get with the program if they want to be taken seriously.

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They’re trying to legitimize themselves among the likes of the London Underground and the New York City Subway, whose iconic, coherent design has become synonymous with the whole city.

But, I like the old stations. I like the so-called “visual chaos” and I like artist-designed benches that aren’t always comfortable, and the huge art installations that haven’t aged so well. I like the occasional lonely bird sound at the Civic Center station and I like the blank expressions painted on the faces of suicide jumpers, and the numbers painted across their shirts that I initially thought were prison uniforms. I like that Metro let me make this mistake.

The Metro system houses one of the most eclectic collections of contemporary art in LA. The art is not housed in a single building, but in a continuous superstructure that spans the entire county. The Metro Art program has a significant I MG.7 voice in LA; it spreads like a web across the entire county. However, the formulaic approach to art integration along the new stations shows no signs of stopping in the mockups of stations currently under construction. Metro now has the opportunity to restore its support for a new generation of public art within the LA landscape, which, with the cutting of NEA funding, no longer has many other avenues for public patronage. Metro is the most powerful public arts

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commission remaining in LA because it is the last one that is not entirely enslaved to the beautification of commercial districts. Metro station art used to articulate differences between neighborhoods in LA. Now their uniform rebranding risks flattening out those differences.

References on Page 158.

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my earliest memories are from December 1999, when the world was filled with subversive doom. my mom was in disbelief that such superstition could affect her; my dad was deeply fearful of the omniscience in apocalypse. in American years i was six years old; seven years about to turn eight in Korean years.

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people with mongolian birth marks are color blind, emotionally and physically. it is due to the blue birth mark spreading on their back or buttocks. the blue often looks green when infused with yellow skin tone; the blue masks itself as green. this causes impairment in recognition. they cannot distinguish the temperature of the color between warm and cold, visually and physically. my name is 윤(yoon), 다진(da-jin) in Korean. 尹多珍 in Chinese. 多 means abundant, 珍 means treasure.

I can’t read chinese. In 2008, my first year here, the teaching assistant in my class insisted on calling me ‘Ta-Chin. he wrote Ta-Chin on a star-shaped paper and posted it on the bulletin board under ‘Student of The Month.’ he smiled and said that’s what my name sounded like.

for the entire time in high school I called myself Alice; which explained my displacement in this rabbit hole, here. some thought this went well. some didn’t. some told me it’s a white old lady name. i was embarrassed

by Dajin, which no one could pronounce properly in English and Alice, which wasn’t my name.

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these people reside in the territory of blue, where all things are displaced in the gradient of blue the spectrum of happiness and sadness lie in the gradient of blue happiness nor sadness was not actualized(felt) to be what it stands for the Implied pleasure and joy was felt literally (figuratively) but not sensually. nothing felt bluer than happiness, nothing felt bluer than sadness. i introduce myself to you. i say DAA jin. people say, Taajin? Gaijin? Naajin? Daijin? in fact it is dajin, a sound somewhere in between d and t. we don’t talk about the last name here

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[2] [4] [307]**************************

[ las palmas > sunset > hollywood > los feliz > hillhurst > back down sunset ]

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(0) ****MY TONGUE is Ash from​​Camp Fire:

last week i felt that orange sun nip at my nose I walked south on Hillhurst inhaling heavy irons singing > leaving residual > new freckles popping out where blackheads used to be: this time infused with Carbon.

Molecular dances all over my skin Long live the new flesh!!! radiation folk dance: particles holding hands doing a ring around the rosie carbon sink sweet kiss

[ fountain > e. sunset > vermont > hollywood blvd ]

(1) HA I think i wrote one time that everything is always spinning around me:

Circular actions always find their hands againi almost got into a car cash belching out my lungs, like i did in the water, out of a severely pressured elation >>> We sang thru screaming as all the lights down Fountain found their nesting place in my eyes: fuzzy but not soft; I found my catharsis at Cheetahs​/​as much as everything spins it also must cyclone down to the ground

I remember screaming so hard my mouth started to stretch itself outward like an inverse amphora: if my cheeks had pronounced dimples, they wouldve hurt a hell of a Lot too.

I forgot how many muscles it takes to smile but i remember that it was a lot (and its my favorite kind of labor)

I mustve used more than enough.

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[ hilgard > sunset > la cienega > de longpre > crescent heights > santa monica > la jolla] *(2) HA HA Los Angeles is imploding and I found a safe haven at the strip club.

and im on the 2​ ​​(> downtown LA broadway/venice)​again, Tilting down W. Sunset traffic like the whole bus is finally gonna take a tumble down La Cienega And, I’m dreaming of the way that Lucy looked at Rachel and how beautiful and potent love is. i find it in a lot of places : at the strip club, in the park, in the neighborhood, on the street, at the bust stop, in the sun, in the basin> I have love for everyone on this bus

but ESPECIALLY for the lady who knew to press the stop button

by just a nod and a glance in her direction​.

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West

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PaciďŹ c Palisades

West Adams

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Span

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Chicago

Westward Expansion Routes

St. Louis

Cowboy Boot Mythical Origin

New Orleans

Spanish Vasquez Riding Boot

“Often flexing to one another who can hit the most bougie places, as if to say ‘I am here I bet you wish you were’”

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This is an abridged version of an Artist’s interview with Interviewer, published April 2018 I Interviewer A Artist I: So we both live in LA, which I’m sure you would agree is an incredible place to be an artist. Are you originally from LA? A: I actually am! I grew up around the west side, mostly in the Palisades. Obviously Pali is a really beautiful place but it was honestly a bit boring when you’re a teenager. I have some great childhood memories from there though so I really can’t complain. Plus I went to high school in Santa Monica.

I: Ya, I could imagine that. Do you want to tell us a bit about your practice?

A: Firstly, I don’t really believe that artists today should identify with one specific medium. However, if you had to ask, I would say painting. The definition of that word is still very broad and I work with various types of wood and fabric, in both acrylic and oil, and I don’t adhere to the 2-dimensional plane. I also work a lot from and am always taking photographs.

I: I definitely agree! Do you have any preferences on material?

A: Probably oil because it’s real color! And it also takes forever to dry so it’s very forgiving. But I’ve been getting really into spray paint and recently found out you can spray oil.

I: That’s really interesting, I didn’t know that. You mentioned you went to high school in Santa Monica, can

you tell us which one?

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A: I was actually torn between a few options. Crossroads, New Roads, and this school Pilgrim in K-Town were all appealing. I ended up going to Crossroads. I actually knew a lot of kids there even though it’s K-12 so it had a very intimate feel.

I: What were your influences like in high school and how have they changed?

A: My influences have changed drastically. I really loved the classics like Cy Twombly, Egon Schiele, and Jasper Johns. Oh, and obviously Basquiat. I was also a really big fan of the photographs of Dash Snow. That man had a knack for capturing iconic situations, RIP. I still love all the names mentioned, but have actually since moved away from visual artists and am even more interested in cultural figures like James Dean, the legendary Lou Reed and the punk aesthetic, golden stars and the cinematization of the Wild West, and even people like Harry Styles lol. I’ve also gotten really obsessed with the colors and patterns of fruits and birds. I think art should be more accessible to everyone, especially those with less education. Music and film have always done better than us in that department.

I: Continuing the topic of education, you haven’t done your MFA yet. However, I read that you had attended UCLA for your BFA, how did you like it?

A: Actually, BA! UCLA was so truly lit. I met a lot of great people there, from both public and private art schools and humanities magnets all over Los Angeles, and a lot of kids with similar mentalities from the Bay as well. It was pretty fun having my own studio for a whole year my senior year, I really had space to produce and manifest. Shout out to the now retired James Welling, he was truly one of my favorite professors there. I real-

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ly feel like we were on the same wavelength, he even created a punk course that I had the honor of enrolling in. It’s truly professors like those, but also a lot of other amazing faculty, who helped me expand my taste and “open my chakras’ [laughter].

I actually met up with him in New York over the summer and showed him some of what I’ve been working on.

I: I read a recent statement for your solo show which stated, “he works through Snapchat to make multimedia works that originate in found imagery, over which he draws with Snapchat, prints the images out on canvas and finally paints into the image with gouache, crayon and flashe. Rooted in abstraction, his practice deals with the material culture he grew up in attending Crossroads High School in Santa Monica.” Can you expand on that?

A: Lately, I’ve been inspired to comment on my peers’ constant streaming on social media of what they are doing, often flexing to one another who can hit the most bougie places, as if to say, “Il am here I bet you wish you were.” Since this type of dialogue is taking place on social media, especially Snapchat, I thought it was only natural to create the work with the same tools.

I: That sounds very dense! And how big are these pieces?

A: They range in size, but anywhere from 6’ by 10’ to 9’ by 13’. Go big or go home! [laughter] I: Where are you producing and archiving these large-scale works now?

A: There were a lot of options around town, I’m from LA so I’m aware of the pro’s and con’s. I really wanted a live/work space so, although Ktown or Chinatown would have been fun, there’s a lack of space. Echo Park and Highland Park are way too hipster and the Little Tokyo, Arts District, Downtown region is becoming really bou-

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gie. I am also in solidarity with the protesters in Boyle Heights and am diligent about trying not to go to gallery openings there, let alone live there. I finally chose West Adams, which has a vibrant flourishing art community and is really historic. I love living in a diverse place with an array of culture. Everyone is also hanging out on the street so there’s an exciting city vibe. Me and four artists, three are actually friends from UCLA, have a pretty spacious house. We divided the backyard into studio spaces that can also double as a DIY gallery where we plan to host shows and community engagements. Some of the neighbors have kids so we can’t go until too late but it’s still very chill.

I: Sounds amazing! As Daniel Buren says, “every place radically imbues with its meaning the object shown there” and it sounds like such a collaborative, community oriented space poses new definitions for the meaning of objects. Can I ask, do you still have time to visit your parents?

A: Ya sure, I always try to make time. It’s actually not as far as people think! Sometimes I don’t even take the 10/405 and just cruise through the streets diagonally from southeast to northwest and take in the beauty of this city. I really do love LA!

*The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this literature are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

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HO ME (BO DIE S): 118 TR A NSI TO RY BE LO NGI NGS A T L A ’S O LDE ST L A TI N A /O DR AG BA R La Plaza nightclub was founded in 1975, making it the oldest operating Latinx gay bar in LA. According to Leo, the general manager, not much has changed in the thirty five years he has worked there. In fact, he said that nothing has changed, that La Plaza is like the Twilight Zone, and that customers who come back after a long time away are surprised to see the same people working there. In his book Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz also comments on the time warp sensation that you feel at La Plaza, “The codes that organize time and space are disrupted in this performance space. The first time I visited the club I felt like I was in 1950s Guadalajara” (Muñoz 2009, 107–8). Time, according to Muñoz, is disrupted by the atmosphere of the bar, the type of music being played, and the costumes, while space is disrupted because most of the songs performed are in Spanish, and the travesti1 performers are introduced according to their village or province in Mexico. Leo said that it is not only the performers who contribute to the transitory spatial phenomenon that occurs within the walls of La Plaarza. The customers, he says, hail from all over 1 In Mexico, and much of Latin America, travesti is a word used to describe persons assigned male at birth,

who present their gender as femme. I use it here to refer to the performers at La Plaza because

those that I spoke with self-define as travesti.

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Latin America—Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. He says that on Thursday nights, when the club has male and female strippers, the emcee will say, “Let’s hear it for the people from México,” and then continue to mention several countries. Groups of people will cheer loudly for every country mentioned.

From reading Muñoz’s work, as well as from my conversation with Leo, it is clear that La Plaza is in some ways a paradox, at once frozen in time, but somehow embodying spatial transition. With this in mind, I assess the relationship between drag performance, transgender identity, and migration as it manifests itself in the physical location of La Plaza, drawing on the scholarly works of Muñoz, Nael Bhanji, Vek Lewis, and David Román, as well as interviews with people who inhabit the space of La Plaza. Through sites like La Plaza, LA can be theorized as a border space where contradictory notions of liberation and homophobia are at play.

One article that examines these contradictions is “Forging Moral Geographies,” in which Lewis (2011)

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looks at the cultural context behind a 2002 law passed in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, criminalizing public non-normative gender expression. He asserts that the media attention given to the passage of this law essentialized the issue as being one related primarily to a macho, homophobic culture.

While he argues against this notion, he also looks at the ways in which legal discrimination against northern Mexico’s trans population also challenges the contemporary theorization of border spaces as sites of liberation. He writes that trans people are often compared to transnational migrants, with a focus on the act of crossing, and that his research focuses not on border-crossers, but border-dwellers: “But what of those who have stayed put or grown up in these sites and are also trans? Such questions are very rarely raised in scholarship that goes under the name ‘border studies’ in the Anglo-American academy” (34). Focusing on the anti-cross-dressing law in Tecate, Lewis explains that, counter to the idea that Mexico is a place of intolerance and homophobia, even the border-dwellers, those who live in Tecate and face

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discrimination firsthand, do not see the city as particularly oppressive: Hence Tecate was not seen—even by those who bore the brunt of the new anti-cross-dressing law—as being especially intolerant, something to which the gays and travestis I spoke to there testified. The well-known gay activist Max Mejia explained: “These days they don’t target the gays; years of gay male activism have secured a place in the discourse of human rights that would make reference to same-sex activity in a hypothetical prohibition impossible. Now, however, the most visible among the sexually diverse—the travestis—are targeted.” (51) Thus gay people in Tecate, through decades of activism, have won some rights and a place in society closer in from the margins, just as gay people in the United States have, and the trans community continues to be marginalized and targeted for violence, just as trans people in the United States continue to be.

Lewis’s discussion of survival and passing in Latin America resonates with the story told to me by Adriana, a performer at the club whom I interviewed in March 2014. Adriana, who migrated to LA from Guatemala six years ago, told me that her migration to the United States was a necessary act of survival. She said that her home country is the most difficult country for transgender people, that there is machismo and homophobia, and that it is corrupt country. She said that she would travel to the capital for (somewhat) safe spaces to be trans. Here, she said, there is more support for trans people. Adriana said that she now works as a hairdresser during the week, that it is going very well for her here.

She said that the two things that make her happy are working at La Plaza and recently becoming documented.

As evidenced in the experiences of patrons and per-

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formers alike, La Plaza is a place where people feel at home. In “TRANS/SCRIPTIONS: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizenship and Racialized Bodies,” Nael Bhanji (2011) asks just what home looks like for physical, national, and sexual border-dwellers. Arguing against an “‘imagined community’ of transsexual belonging” (157), Bhanji writes out of both skepticism of and respect for transgender theory, stating that there has been a trend toward theorists fetishizing and exoticizing transgender subjectivity. He writes that behind the stereotype of trans space as liberatory is the erasure of racial difference within the trans community, posing the question, “To what ‘home’ does the trajectory of transition, the act of border-crossing, lead the already in-between diasporic, gender liminal subject?” (157). This question can be explored in the context of LA and La Plaza through the experiences of Betty, a performer at the bar, and Presley, a longtime patron. I interviewed both in April 2014.

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Presley, a trans man from Long Beach, said that his aunt and her girlfriend took him to La Plaza for the first time when he was a teenager. He explained that he had been in a deep depression while coming to terms with his non-normative gender and sexuality, and that La Plaza was the first place he felt free to be who he was. Betty also spoke of the space of La Plaza as one of freedom. Tony, who has managed the performers for decades and whose partner designs all of the costumes, spoke to me about his first impression of Betty, “She started as a boy. She was so cute. I really thought she was a girl at first. She was so innocent, and look at her now! She’s a full-fledged queen.”

Betty herself said that working at La Plaza helped her to become a more confident woman. In her day job as an assistant manager at Jack in the Box she faced transphobia on a daily basis, but her job at La Plaza offered some relief: “They criticize you, but once you are here, you’re free. This is your place. It’s such a nice experience to get so much attention. They make you feel good, to see their faces. It’s just a blessing”

Even within the context of the performance, there are contradictions at play. The act of performing is at once freeing and paradoxically oppressive. The travesti performers at La Plaza are increasingly viewed through the gaze of the outsider—straight, upper-middle-class white people who have begun to frequent the bar in recent years. On the social media network Instagram, these new patrons have posted photos of performances with I MG. 4 captions that reveal how they view the space and themselves in it. One user, thepianofixer, posted the caption, “Mexican drag bar=best bar ever. #plaza #dragqueens #weho #ghettofabulous.”

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user suzieblock commented, “Amaze-balls!!,” and thepianofixer responded, “Tucked balls.”

While audience members like those posting on Instagram may be engaging in gentrification, cultural appropriation, and even transphobia, the performers are still having an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Both Betty and Adriana said that they feel tremendously happy when they are on stage. It is possible that that the love and gratitude emanating from the largely queer and migrant audience cannot be diminished by a few people who choose to inhabit the space to have some cheap drinks, laugh at what they see as a novelty, and leave after the first song.

The question of temporality is one that comes up both in Muñoz’s discussion of La Plaza and in Bhanji’s discussion of home. Queerness for Muñoz and home for Bhanji are in a constant state of becoming. Muñoz

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writes in his book Cruising Utopia: The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and “rational” expectations…the present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds. (27) Muñoz’s book, besides being the sole academic source I could find that mentioned La Plaza specifically, is vital to the formation of my research question. Writing about LA, Muñoz notes that, as a teen in Miami, being involved in the LA scene through music allowed him to envision himself as being in flux, and more specifically, feeling at home while in a constant state of change. He writes that the transitory nature of migration and of being transgender somehow come together, and are embodied by the physical location of La Plaza. “… I was able to imagine a time and place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live. LA and its scene helped my proto-queer self, the queer child in me, imagine a stage, both temporal and physical, where I could be myself, or more nearly, imagine a self that was in process, a self that has always been in the process of becoming” (100).

Muñoz as a gay teen in Miami was able to imagine LA as his queer home even though he was physically removed from the place of LA by thousands of I MG. 6 miles. Home for him was a place where he could be free and, paradoxically, that had to be somewhere far away from his “real” home. Bhanji explains this beautifully in his discussion of the contradictions

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inherent in the expression “home is where the heart is.” He writes that for trans people, and for people in diaspora, home is often not where the heart is, but wherever you can survive. Unlike the expected migration narrative in which the migrant leaves “home” for a place that is not home, trans migrants are always already in exile. According to Bhanji, “Thus, in a noteworthy reversal of the diasporic trajectory, the transsexual migrant must leave the space of unhomeliness to arrive at ‘home’” (165). Sometimes, as for the young Muñoz, that place of home is in the imagination. Bhanji makes this point powerfully in his book: In other words, we must pay attention to the different ways in which people (re)imagine and (re) create the edifice of homely belonging; where one’s “real” home can only exist as a romanticized cathedral of constancy—like a strongbox of memory kept safe from the siren dance of modernity through spatial and temporal sleights-of-hand that effectively render it, as Canadian poet Dionne Brand would say, “in another place, not here.” (161) In the space of La Plaza, you can observe firsthand this notion of the re-creation of home as a “romanticized cathedral of constancy.” As Muñoz suggests, the bar brings the atmosphere of 1950s Guadalajara to modern-day LA, and as Leo, the general manager stated, this nostalgic abmiance has not changed in thirty five years.

This illusory constancy adds to the paradox of La Plaza, creating a space that at once is home and is not home.

The sensation of being in a time warp when you enter the bar is an illusion—a performance. In fact, the space itself is in a constant state of transformation because of the realities of deportation, AIDS, incarceration, and gentrification facing the communities who work at and patronize the bar.

In Bhanji’s examination of the contradictions inherent in the concept of home for transgender migrants, he

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also makes the point that many gender-conforming people in the United States find homelike places and spaces at the expense of these migrants. As Bhanji writes (164), “Of course, ‘home’ can easily be a space of exclusion, a space where the nostalgic dream of communal belonging depends on the ‘invisible labor of migrant border dwellers,’ and a luxury that belies the realities of those who cannot afford to dream of home (Halberstam 1998, 171).” It is precisely this luxury that the aforementioned Instagram posters are indulging in when they claim La Plaza as a homelike space.

The idea of outsiders to queer and trans communities claiming homes in LGBTQ spaces is by no means a recent phenomenon. Writing from 1990s LA, then in the throes of the AIDS epidemic, David Román discusses the ways in which Latinxo performance became a channel of expression for this crisis and offers an extensive discussion of camp and drag in his book chapter titled, “It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To” (Román 1998). He argues that the nostalgia of camp that for mainstream queer culture was no longer relevant in 1990s LA, as it pointed to a time before AIDS. La Plaza, which has always been a palace of drag and camp, enters into this conversation by posing the question of why this type of performance has maintained a very real relevance for patrons of the club who lived through the AIDS epidemic. Román argues that camp was a survival tactic for gay men in early and mid-twentieth century America, and offered them a way to distance themselves from the humiliation they felt in their daily lives while allowing them to create an aesthetic they could control: Mainstream spectators, some with no sense of gay and lesbian history, may leave with impressions that see gay men as entertainments. The success of drag on Broadway in the 1980s, in such commercial hits as Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, and even M. Butterfly, demonstrated

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the demand by mainstream audiences for this type of gay performance to such an extent, as Mark Gevisser argues, that “gay culture is presented to mainstream heterosexual America as a drag show.” The survivalist quality that so marks camp and drag for the gay spectator is reconfigured and depoliticized in the commodification process. (99) This reconfiguration is exactly what is happening at La Plaza when members of mainstream society post photos of themselves on Instagram withthe hashtags (by user gmenduni) #happyplace #heavenonearth #imhavingmybirthdaypartyhereforreal. As with gentrification, people who are not part of the cultural history of the space are entering La Plaza, and speaking of it, as if they have discovered something wonderful and exotic.

In my conversation with Tony, who managed the performers’ I brought up a bartender whom longtime patron Presley had mentioned to me. The bartender had worked at the bar for many years and had come in to his place of work seeking services for HIV. Tony informed me that the bartender had passed, saying that AIDS hit La Plaza hard, that there were plenty of sad times, and then he smiled and said, “But there’s mostly fun. And drama too. That’s where I come in. I’m the bitch.”

References on Page 159.

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They call my grandfather El Gato, the cat for his emerald green eyes which still glow, despite yellowed in an old album In the irises I try to find what makes my mother cry every time he is mentioned El Gato, the father of five, my father the oldest A man who had his family sit at the big oak table for every dinner and made sure the mother next door had dinner for her children too A man who drove trailer trucks along Guatemala’s blue green coast while helping his wife run the family bakery, buttering bread or counting quetzals, and when business was good bought my father a new bike for his tenth birthday.

2.

Business was good

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until it wasn’t El Gato’s health followed suit They sold one of the trucks, the bakery and the bike And my father, on the eve of turning seventeen drove his father’s truck along that same lush coast, his feet pressing those heavy pedals in the hot dark (El Gato’s legs stopped working the day before) He drove until dawn, staring into the sticky black night lit only slightly by the dim headlights, eyes strained never straying from the road, corneas glistening like honey baking under the warm sun, almost yellow if not rimmed red from heat and smog and exhaustion Eyes just like mine when I turned seventeen except mine were reddened from clouds of marijuana smoke, dewy mascara caked under each lid, the stench of lukewarm lime-a-ritas, and the rising steam of chlorine.

3.

On the first cool evening in months my father took the night off fearing he would not stay awake on the road Yet he was restless in bed and that’s when he heard the muffled voices on the porch He creaked open his bedroom door and listened to two men urging El Gato to let them use his truck to transport stolen coffee beans His cut would subsidize insulin for a few more months However he refused and his green eyes glistened as the men walked off into the night And my father watched his father standing at the front door choosing death over deceit because El Gato was no thief He was grand and good like the most beautiful shade of green and he was a giver He gave and gave until his body gave up.

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My dad, years later, (El Gato then long deep in the ground) now the man of the house and my mother’s husband This time tempted not with stolen brown beans but with fine white powder He brought my mother coffee with news of the gig and the money They debated until they witnessed a cat with honeydew eyes run across the road before them And then they knew what they had to do They packed their pictures and anything else that fit in their pockets and traveled to greener pastures.

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NO­— TE S

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Adam Green lives in Hollywood with his best friend and her chihuahua, Suzy. He also studies art at UCLA. Aleksey Kondratyev (b. 1993 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit and is a current MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kondratyev’s work has been exhibited at the Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome; Les Rencontres d’Arles; the Benaki Museum in Athens; and the Galleria Foto-Forum in Bolzano. His work has been published in the Financial Times, CNN, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, Vogue, and National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles.

Amara Higuera Hopping is an artist developing a practice based on image making, through the relationship between other people’s images and her own. She is trying to understand how the histories of places and people shape our separate yet intertwining presence and is interested in the undefined living space between what Claudia Rankine calls our “historical selves” and our “self selves.”

Ava Kling is an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon in pursuit of a BFA. Her work in film and portraiture stems from her experiences of being a woman in a capitalist society with themes of queer narcissism, girlhood, and absurdity.

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Bob Vieira is a student in pursuit of a B.A. in Art at UCLA interested in nature’s role in urban enviornments.

Brittney Leeanne Williams is a Chicago-based studio artist who is originally from Los Angeles. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008–2009).

Most recently, Williams was the recipient of a 2018 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant.

Camille Claire graduated from The UCLA School of Arts and Architecture in 2019. As an artist, she feels invested in allegory, especially concerning destruction and loss, and is obsessed with dust. Though she works primarily in video and sculpture, she is currently writing a play.

Christian Hincape was born in Pereira, Colombia and today lives and works in the South Bronx and New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hincapié is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2013. Hincapié is currently an MFA Candidate at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Cianne Fragione In combinations of oil paint, drawing materials, collage, and an unpredictable range of found objects, Frigone strives to uncover the intimate interactions that can occur between individual and cultural identities, and between specific natural and human landscapes.

Dajin Yoon is an artist from South Korea. She is interested

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in phenomenology, narrative circularity, and multiplicity of meaning. She graduated with a BA in Art from UCLA. Emilio Chapela Living and working in Mexico City, Emilio Chapela has a background in science, film, and arts. He is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the connections between art, science, technology, and living things. He is especially interested in moving image, sculpture, writing, astronomy, physics, weather, walking, and stargazing, among other things.

Emily Miller is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Miller began painting after she received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2013. Her work has been published in Playboy and ArtMaze Mag. She recently was in the group exhibition Seed, curated by Yvonne Force, at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City.

Francine Banda Born and raised in Los Angeles, Francine Banda is a second-year transfer student at UCLA whose art practice focuses on painting and digital media.

Francisco Garcia is an undergrad at UCLA studying art. He grew up in San Diego, which isn’t a far drive, but it can take a little longer on the train.

Hyangsook Kwak (b.1996 in New York) is a Korean-American artist based in Seattle, Los Angeles, and (currently) Seoul.

She studied Fine Art and Sociology at UCLA (graduated 2018) and is interested in making works through video, photography, drawing/painting, and writing.

Jenny Polak Jenny Polak’s art includes public and socially engaged projects, architectural installations, drawings, and useful commemorative objects amplify-

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ing demands for social justice. Her family history of migration drives her work about citizen/non-citizen collaborations and accommodations, and her fictional firm Design for the Alien Within creates hypothetical structures for people dealing with hostile authorities.

Jonathan Chase makes work about black queer bodies in relationship to private and public spaces.

Karen Achar is a photo-based artist working in Los Angeles. Her work often looks at the way in which urban infrastructure mediates our relationship to land. In her photographs, she considers concrete as a central subject a material that is intrinsic to the urban landscape and one which embodies the abstraction of land through its production and its origins.

Katherine Steelman is pursuing a Ph.D. at University of California, San Diego in Ethnic Studies.

Katheryne Castillo is a student at UCLA and poet.

Maya White lives, works, and studies in Los Angeles. Working in painting, she interrogates skepticism ingrained in us by higher education and secularism as a culture. Using astrology and tarot as a gateway for understanding the astral and eventually coming to God, White hopes to bring the loving, positive side of religion (particularly Christianity and Christian themes) through painting. By borrowing Christian iconography, as well as symbols found in tarot and astrology, White creates a spirituality, which suits her and makes sense for her and the world she navigates.

Megan Broughton is an LA/Napa based artist, cellist, writer, and edi-

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tor interested in geopoetics, bardic politics, and human impact on culture and climate. She is the cofounder of the new literary journal Two if by Sea and her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Napa, New York, and Barcelona.

Michael Bala is a working and living artist in Los Angeles, working primarily in mixed media, incorporating photography and sculpture.

Michael Stamm is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Nico Young is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles who never learned how to drive. Now at UCLA studying art, his interests include documentary, geography, public transportation, and public art.

Noon Tran is an artist based in Los Angeles.

Omer Yosef is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Patricia Zambrano is a photographer who lives and works in San Diego, California.

Rachel Lester Trend is 21. She lives in Hollywood.

Richard Nam is an artist and student at UCLA. His current work uses United States’ Folk Agrarian Culture. Much of his work illustrates stories of a rodeo spectacle that represent the struggle for control: the bull-rider against the bull, the audience reacting to the spectacle, and including strange cats inside the arena.

River Casteneda is an artist from San Francisco and student at Bennington college.

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Ruby Murnik is an artist from Los Angeles who will attend The New School in New York City next year.

Sarah Ross is an artist who works in sculpture, video, and photography. Her projects use narrative and the body to address spatial concerns as they relate to access, class, anxiety, and activism. Sarah also works collaboratively with other artists on projects such as Midwest Radical Cultures Group, Regional Relationships, Chicago Justice Torture Memorials, and Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project.

She has co-curated exhibitions at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland; Sea and Space Explorations, Los Angeles; and PS122, New York. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a co-organizer of the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project, an arts and humanities initiative at Stateville Maximum Security Prison.

Zack Endoso Born in the culturally rich Bay Area and always in transit, Endoso thinks a lot about how bodies are beautifully intricate vehicles traversing our physical plane. They are vessels and baskets, constantly exchanging metaphysical currency: energy, spirit, emotion, and passion.

156 GR APHI TE E DI TO R IA L STA FF 2018—2019 GRAPHITE Readers — Ashley Kim Christal Perez Dario Apodaca Elizabeth Nakumura Francesca Consagra Gabriela Freid Geneveive Pflueger Gozié Ojini Gwen Hollingswoth

Lizzie Rutkevich Savannah Marshall Louise Buckley Samar Saif Sarah Chess Savannah Winans Sonia Hauser Sophie Gu Tiernan Hugh O’Neill

Haley Penn — CoHead, Print Editor Michelle Kim — CoHead, Online Editor Stefanie Tam — Print Design Issue No. 10 GRAPHITE Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts is published with support from the Hammer Museum www.graphitejournal.com graphitejournal@hammer.ucla.edu All rights reserved. May not be reproduced.

Content does not reflect the opinions of GRAPHITE editorial staff or Hammer Museum.

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RE FE R E NCES

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Flying Underground I Dreamed I Could Fly and the Future of Metro Art Corwin, Miles. 1992. Subway showcase public art: Metro red line stations will have murals, neon sculptures and other works with distinct designs at each stop on the route. officials say installations will curb vandalism. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext), Nov 15, 1992. https:// search.proquest.com/docview/281733914?accountid=14512 (accessed March 30, 2019).

Davis, Mike. 2006. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso Books.

Kiefer, Kurt, and Jenny Heishman. “An Informal Assessment of the Los Angeles Metro Art Program.”

Sound Transit ELE Lead Artist Team, May 14, 2013. www.slideshare.net/kurthkiefer/s-tart-los-angeles-metro-assessment-2013-0513-1 Klein, Michael. 2004. “Jonathan Borofsky On a Grand Scale.” Sculpture 23, no. 10 (December).

Kwon, Miwon. “Sitings of Public Art: Integration Versus Intervention.” In One Place after Another: SiteSpecific Art and Locational Identity, 56-99. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Masters, Nathan. “The Lost Hills of Downtown Los Angeles.” KCET, October 13, 2011. www.kcet.org/ shows/lost-la/the-lost-hills-of-downtown-los-angeles Nelson, Laura J. 2013. Design is key part of station planning; the train stops of three future projects will give metro sites a uniform identity. Los Angeles Times, Dec 21, 2013. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1469945803?accountid=14512 (accessed March 30, 2019).

Roots, Garrison. 2006. “MTA Metro Art.” In Designing the World’s Best Public Art, 142–143. Shanghai: Images Publishing Dist Ac. Rosenthal, Mark, and Richard Marshall. 1984. Jonathan Borofsky. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Soja, Ed. “Los Angeles 1965-1992: Six Geographies of Urban Restructuring.” Paper presented at the Annual Colloquium Series: The City, UCLA, April 1994.

Images 1-6 taken by Nico Young Metro Art Program. “Crenshaw/LAX Update, May 28, 2015.” Accessed May 3, 2019. https://media.

metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/presentation_crenshawlaxart_2015-0528.pdf IMG. 7 Metro Art Program. “Crenshaw/LAX Update, May 28, 2015.” Accessed May 3, 2019. https://

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Bhanji, Nael. 2011. “TRANS/SCRIPTIONS: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizen ship and Racialized Bodies.” In Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, edited by Trystan T. Cotten, 157–75. New York: Routledge.

Brand, Dionne. 1996. In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.

Gevisser, Mark. 1990 “Gay Theatre Today.” Theatre 21:3 4-51.

Lewis, Vek. 2010. Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. “Forging ‘Moral Geographies’: Law, Sexual Minorities and Internal Tensions in University

Press.

Román, David. 1998. “It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To.” In Acts of Intervention: Performance,

Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Northern Mexico Border Towns.” 2011. In Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics

of Transition, edited by Trystan T. Cotten, 32–56. New York: Routledge.

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Images taken by Patricia Zambrano

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