In the midst of the pandemic, I returned to El Paso, Texas, the border town where I grew up, intending a temporary stay. However, the desert whispered to me with a wisdom my body craved after years of absence.
My life had changed significantly since I left. In New York and Boston, I lived openly as a queer woman, but I found that in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, I was more reserved in my behavior. While there are many queer people in the region who live fully and openly, none of them are part of my family.
As soon as COVID restrictions eased, I began walking across the border into Ciudad Juarez to sing karaoke with my queer friends, seeking a release that only music could provide. My favorite songs to perform were those of the iconic Mexican showman Juan Gabriel. I enjoyed combining my love for my identity and my culture through his music, longing to share that release with my family.
Music has an immense power to help us understand ourselves. Juan Gabriel’s tender femininity was a radical quality in a Mexico deeply rooted in machismo and homophobia. He managed to incorporate his Mexican roots while openly expressing his homosexuality, challenging two concepts that were often in conflict in our culture.
I inherited my love for Juan Gabriel, affectionately known as Juanga, from my mother, who was his first fan and biggest local admirer. As I belted out his songs in Juarez, I wondered: If my Mexican mother could accept him as he was, could she accept me, too?
When I tell my American friends about Juan Gabriel, I ask them to imagine him as a mix of Prince in terms of revolution and innovation, and Elton John in terms of exuberance and prolificacy (he composed more than 1,800 songs!). Someone once told me that Juan Gabriel is the artist who has made Latin Americans cry, laugh and dance the most.
As a child, Juan Gabriel was the first person I heard my relatives speculate about as gay. His soft voice and energetic dance moves broke the rigid gender conventions that Latin American artists of his time were subject to. His life and career demonstrated that the understanding of queerness in Mexican society is rich, complex and non-binary.
Juan Gabriel, born Alberto Aguilera Valadez in Michoacán on January 7, 1950, was abandoned by his mother in a children’s home after moving to Juárez in search of work. He ran away at age 13 and began performing in Juárez’s bohemian club scene in the early 1960s—the same environment my mother enjoyed in the mid-’70s and ’80s, and where I now sing karaoke with my friends.
His debut single, “No Tengo Dinero,” released in 1971, catapulted him to stardom. He dominated the charts and headlines in Mexico, Latin America and the United States until his death in California in 2016.
He never publicly admitted his sexual orientation, and it’s something we’ll never know for sure. However, while researching his life for a podcast I created, I found prison records in Mexico’s National Archives, which could relate to his troubles with the law during his teenage years, filed under a pseudonym known to archivists. These documents suggest that he may have been arrested and charged with crimes such as pedophilia, a common tactic to persecute queer people in the 1960s. It’s also revealed that the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico’s equivalent of the CIA, kept tabs on his romantic relationships.
Despite the stigmatization, Juan Gabriel was much loved, even though his queer identity was taboo. His legacy has stayed with me as I grapple with my own coming out experience. In American media, I have seen depictions of the coming out process that are either cathartic and loving or tragically rejecting. These stereotypical portraits fail to capture the complexity of the experience: the well-intentioned but clumsy attempts of loved ones, the non-linear progress, and the calcified intolerance.
I have experienced this complex dance with my mother. Years ago, when I told her I had fallen in love with someone who was not a man, her cryptic response of “I know” and her subsequent silence were my reality. I accepted her silence as a form of acceptance. Juan Gabriel once told an interviewer who asked him directly about his sexual orientation, “What you see should not be asked.”
More recently, I told my mother that I wanted to marry someone who didn’t conform to my gender. She worried that she had done something wrong in raising us, but she assured me that she accepted me as I was. My life was my own, she said, and she was there to support and love me. It was a victory, albeit one filled with ups and downs.
In the end, Juanga’s songs were the common thread that tied together the fragments of my identity. At my last birthday party with my family, my partner joined in on karaoke. I sang “Vienes o Voy,” a bold and profound song I’ve performed countless times in Juárez, while looking at my partner and receiving encouragement from my mother.
For many Mexicans, Juanga represents a connection to our homeland and our culture. He also showed a different way of existing, even when the world was not ready for it. His authenticity to Mexico was too strong to be ignored, even by a society that had not yet achieved the acceptance he deserved. Even the most macho man danced to his music. Although his progress was not linear, it was real.
His mastery of mariachi while dressed in sequined outfits showed me that my Mexican roots and my homosexuality can coexist as exuberantly as Juan Gabriel did.
My love for Juan Gabriel, affectionately known as Juanga, I inherited from my mother, who was his first fan and biggest local admirer.
(María García is the creator and presenter of Juan Gabriel’s podcast ‘My Divo’)
#mothers #favorite #music #taught #live #bravely
