All Posts By

Yvan Oliva

Teresita La Campesina: Queering Ranchera Music, Performance, and Memory

Posted on April 29, 2020

A photo of trans Latinx performer Teresita La Campesina.

In 1996, in a Washington DC queer bar called Escandalo (which translates to “scandal” in English), the transgender ranchera artist Teresita La Campesina gave a performance of the Lola Beltrán song “Puñalada Trapera.” A heart-wrenching ballad that rebukes an ex-lover for stabbing the narrator in the back (so to speak), it is one of the few remaining recordings of Teresita’s live performances. She was never given the opportunity to record an album of her own. The rendition is pretty classical…

On ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Radical Reconceptualization of Black Female Iconography

Posted on March 12, 2020

“What’s past is prologue.” One of the first lines uttered in director Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but it is redeployed here by the character Viola Peazant. Used as a means of creating distance between herself and the islands from which she hails, the quote grounds the discourse of the film to follow. The past is a place, both physical and psychic, and how much of that place we carry forward with us…

Mi cuerpo es un mundo: Translating My Lineage, Language, and Body

Posted on January 24, 2020

At some point in time, somewhere in Guadalajara, Mexico, this picture was taken. My Abuelita Guadalupe, my mother’s mother, sits between her sons David and Moises. In 1973, she would take my mother, Patricia, and her son Carlos with her across the border here to Houston. Some of her other children were already in Texas, while some never crossed. Abuelita would be diagnosed with Leukemia just four years later and, as such, decided that she wanted to die in her…

‘On Body and Soul’: The Hesitations and Liberations of Touch

Posted on December 11, 2019

Imagine that you find yourself attracted to someone. Imagine the urgency with which they occupy your thoughts, the impulse of being drawn to them. And yet all the while, you remain incapable of vocalizing the force that belies your attraction to them. How did we become entangled like this? To desire another is to be left speechless with nothing to rely on but the language of want, a language that becomes imperfectly processed through the body. Moving between snow-covered dreamscapes…

Pain and Glory: The Queer Magic of Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar

Posted on November 5, 2019

It’s almost midnight. I’ve just walked out of the movie theater, but I haven’t quite returned to reality. There were only three of us at the screening, the last one of the film’s run at the River Oaks Theatre in Houston. This cinema, with its opulent 1940s interior, always has a profound effect on me. It’s in the way that it displaces me, more so releases me, while keeping my being intact. I can still respond to the blend of…