(“The Women I’ve Met”)

          “El macho latino es solamente macho para las mujeres,” said Carolita, pausing to draw in the white of her cigarette. “No para nosotras.”^[1]
          She was 6’3”, platinum blonde, matching eyebrows. She was usually pretty good at blowing smoke rings, but the wine had been too much, and instead the smoke was brimming over the corners of her mouth.
          She put out the cigarette on a wooden table, leaving ashes in the scratches.

Ana Maria

          We arrived at La Fundación^[2] just before closing. It was almost completely empty, the office space as well as the pensión.^[3] We were met by a short blonde woman who must have been in her late forties. We didn’t want to make any assumptions.
          “We’re working on a documentary about travestismo in the Autonomous City. We were wondering if anyone would be willing to talk with us.” My accent was off.
          “Where are you from?”
          “I’m from the United States. Juan is from here, from Buenos Aires.”
          “You are both very young.”
          “Yes. We’re students.”
          Someone turned on a television in the next room.
          “Most of the girls have already left to work. But I think Ana Maria might be here. Let me see if I can find her.”
          Ana Maria, la morenita, greeted us barefoot and in sweat pants. Her hair was knotted with a pencil, and she was neither painted nor plucked.
          Her bedroom in the pensión could have been that of a little girl. On the shelves were stuffed dolls, old photographs, and a pet fish. Tiny shoes, snacks, and pastels. The room was bright, despite having no windows.
          She noticed I was staring at her television set. It was an old black-and-white porno with an all-male cast.
          “This one’s my favorite,” she mentioned, muting it for the interview. “Me voy a producir. Querés filmarlo?”^[4]
          To ‘produce’ oneself, in travesti parlance, is almost synonymous to the word maquillarse—to apply makeup. The problem with maquillarse is that, frankly, anyone can put on makeup; for a travesti, it doesn’t quite capture the significance of the contents of her bolsito.^[5]
          Nearly all travestis in Argentina work in prostitution, more as a necessity than as a choice. It is often the only option afforded them—a literal or physical consumption that coincides with one based on identity and image. To ‘produce’ oneself implies an element of spectacle: producirse for the clients, who prefer to see them as women (which is very different, I would argue, from wanting them to be women). It is, like many other words typical to the travesti lexicon, a term of both empowerment and victimization that we can trace back to the beginning of the trans movement.
          In 1991, the first travesti activist group, ATA (Asociación de Travestis Argentinas)^[6], began to organize against various social and political fronts, the first of which called for the derogation of the Edictos Policiales and other provincial ordinances dating back to the Perón era (for example, laws prohibiting the public exhibition of clothing of the opposite sex). The majority of these edicts did nothing but arbitrarily empower the police, many of whom exploited—and continue to exploit—this power. With this agenda, ATA began to seek public spaces in which to address these injustices, finding an eventual platform in the Marcha del Orgullo LGBT.^[7]
          While the eighth Marcha was the first to formally recognize and include a trans discourse, there had been a considerable travesti contingent since the third. While they were expected to contribute funds to the event, the travestis were not acknowledged in the programs, flyers, and overall mission of the effort. Lohana Berkins, one of the founders of the trans movement, notes that “the lesbians rejected our ‘femininity’ and realigned us with the gays, seeing us as one of the many incarnations of their orientation. The gays, on the other hand, simply marveled at our glamour and simultaneously rejected us from their community. It was here that we fought our first struggle for visibilization.”
          The way in which travestismo began to make itself publicly visible was very much rooted in the problematic idea of produciéndose. The fabulosity of their dress and choreographed dance numbers—an explosion of plumage, sequins, and semi-nudity—was applauded in part by same public that continued to discriminate against them. Their producción relegated them to spectacle; always the performers, never sitting among the audience.

          Not too long after I met Ana Maria, I began to participate in talleres—health and anti-discrimination workshops designed for travesti sex workers—where I met a number of girls in poorer neighborhoods such as Flores and Constitución. It was not easy, at first, to get them to open up, especially with a camera in hand; they did not want to be studied. Instead, there would have to be some degree of reciprocity. If I asked them about their personal and sexual histories, they would want to know about mine, as well. If I was filming a protest, the girls would want me to switch off holding the three-lane-wide banners as we marched down Corrientes in the middle of winter. If they invited me over for mate, I would bring the facturas.^[8]
          As we accustomed ourselves to each other, so too did we start to speak a shared language. Things made more sense this way.
          The chicas had their own way of talking about themselves. As with any subculture, self-definition becomes an important means of resisting the limiting definitions (in this case, the binarism) of an oppressive dominant culture. The ability to ‘produce’ oneself, then, boasts an entirely different significance for a travesti.

          Until now I have conveniently avoided an obvious question: what is a travesti? The literal English translation is ‘transvestite,’ one who vests him or herself in clothing of the opposite sex. But alas, Spanish already has a word for this: transformista.^[10] A ‘transformist’—an identity (often associated with drag performance) that is indeed transient and ‘removable,’ whereas travestismo is not. When the curtain drops, a travesti is still a travesti. That is, she does not need to ‘produce’ herself to be a travesti, and with this we are heading in the right direction.
          A logical starting point to define la identidad travesti would be the body, el cuerpo. While the intention is not to reduce the travesti identity to an anatomical physicality, the travesti body serves as an entity of symbols that we can use to talk about this subjectivity.
          El cuerpo travesti is itself a sort of tabula rasa, a gendered composite upon which the rigidity of a dominant gender-sexual conscious may encounter both relief and conflict. The body is both sexual entity and political camp. Beyond that, it is a paradox: a feminine form with the power to access male genitality. This relationship will become clearer through a discussion of travestismo versus machismo.
          In terms of travestismo, the word ‘production’ refers not to the body itself, but to the relationship between the internal and external manifestations of travestismo, such as those between travesti and client. The body, on the other hand, is not said to be ‘produced’ but rather it is ‘realized.’

          I continued to meet with Ana Maria until I left for the States. She no longer worked the streets. Like some of her close friends, she had a marido (literally, husband) and only worked with preferred clients via phone, e-mail, and instant messenger. As with her, the unproduced girls—without the brick-red theatrics that adorned their lips and matching heels—were entirely different from those in the zonas rojas.^[14] Indeed they were often the same girls, fabulous both in and out of their nightly ensemble, but in private spaces there was little focus on performance; the girls were more willing to relate to themselves and their bodies. This is where I learned how to speak travesti—in the limited comfort of the pensión, not on the street.
          There was a knock on the door. One of the girls had forgotten her eyeliner and came to borrow Ana Maria’s. “They like it when your eyes look bigger,” she said, navigating around her eyelids in the mirror. “They say it makes me look like Bettie Paige.”
          The resemblance was uncanny.

La Pía

          ”La Pía,” as they called her, was a force to be reckoned with. The night the Federal District passed an act prohibiting travesti sex workers from soliciting in Rosedal—the most popular and profitable zona roja in Buenos Aires—she put to use her most valuable weapon: her cell phone.^[15]
          “If you kick us out of Rosedal, we’re coming to the Plaza!” La Pía led the girls in militaristic fashion—the scene, an olive drab cabaret of go-go boot and miniskirt regimentals. The resulting protest forced the mayor to reconsider.
          Juan, my collaborator at the time, tracked her down at the headquarters of ATTTA soon after the protest. She was dressed in camouflage, with a hip-purse full of condoms. She invited us to one of her workshops, and so we went.
          We were the only men in the room, as per usual.
          “Do you know the life expectancy of una chica trans?” she asked.
          One girl raised her hand, Silvana.
          “Thirty-three.”
          It was common knowledge. I had heard the number before before. When I asked where it came from, most of the girls drew a blank. I later traced it back to a survey done by ALITT, which experienced the death of 420 compañeras during the period of the study. According to the study, the average life expectancy of a travesti was just over thirty, and only one percent were above the age of sixty.
          About 65% of these deaths were AIDS-related (in a country with ostensibly free access to AIDS medication through the public health care system). Of the rest, half were murders—police and clients most common among a host of perpetrators. Other major causes included drugs and surgery malpractice.
          Due to poor access to health services in Argentina, many travestis resort to self-medication and tend to avoid medical establishments altogether. When they do make it into the hospital room, they have trouble verifying their information, as the government refuses to recognize their chosen names. The girls do what they can to distance themselves from the nombre de varón, or birthname, listed on official documentation. The process of identification is often slow and tedious, and to make matters worse, many travestis arrive as critical patients, having waited too long to seek medical attention.
          The first recorded cases of travestis seeking medical attention in public hospitals occurred in 1994. There was commotion in the hospitals; the other patients would not share a bedside with them, nor did the doctors want (or know how) to treat them. They arrived with little money, no family, and a name that was listed nowhere. They left behind troves of unclaimed bodies.
          While improvements have been made over the past ten years of trans mobilization, the health care system in Argentina leaves no reliable structures for travesti evaluation and treatment, and its extensive decentralization makes any change both slow and ineffective. Furthermore, due to a reluctance to formally acknowledge a trans presence in health care, travestis are often made invisible to official statistics. They are included as men or, more specifically, “men who have sex with men.” The effect of this severe misrepresentation ripples far beyond the trans community, especially on the issue of sexual health.
          The nature and extent of the AIDS epidemic in Argentina has great potential to expose a sexual domain that has long been kept secret, especially in a country where safe sex in not the norm, and where many misconceptions exist about HIV and its transmission. Consider, for example, that the majority of the travestis’ clientele tends to be heterosexual, oftentimes married men who put their families, as well as other travestis in a certain barrio, at risk of HIV and other diseases.

          On the side, Xamira worked as “public relations” in a three-story boliche^[16] on the city’s outskirts, where Tuesdays drew large crowds. Tonight, however, we spotted her near the American embassy—high heels and cheekbones, scratching stilettos against the pavement on a cold night in Palermo. It was a busy time for her, and so Juan and I decided to tour the zona roja solo.
          The girls were lined up on the roadside, sometimes in groups of two or three, topless in the coldest winter Buenos Aires had seen in ninety years. Meanwhile, I was wearing three layers, and my fingers were too frozen to operate the camera.
          Nothing seemed to phase the girls, not the cold nor the dark roundabout, which pullulated with boisterous clients and onlookers. The entire ballet struck me as odd: for being so consistently excluded from health and education, for not being able to buy groceries without paying four times the price on the register, for the discrimination that has become so banal to the travestis, they really did own the street. The exchange between the girls and their would-be clients was playful. Some of the men arrived on motorbikes with an extra helmet. The girls left with them, perched on the side, legs together.
          “Ay, mami! Vení, vení!”
          One of the girls I had met in the workshops, Silvana, approached four friends in a van. She negotiated for a moment, turned back to Juan and me, and winked sheepishly as the men pleaded with her.
          But alas, no luck for the four friends tonight. “They said they had two more back at the hotel. Six is too much.”
          She flipped her hair.
          “Could get a girl pregnant.”

          I leave undefined, but somehow implicit, the larger relationship between machismo argentino and travestismo argentino. The social and institutionalized discrimination that affects travestismo indexes a social world that is not, as a night in Rosedal might suggest, playful and ordered. There is a more complex relationship between the dominant culture and a minoría muy minoritaria,^[18] evidenced by the strong presence of physical and sexual violence against the girls. The physical abuse, rape and murder of travestis, which often goes unpunished, becomes a way to dehumanize them—to reverse or nullify sexual relations with them.
          And if you listen to the their accents, you will notice that many come from Salta, Jujuy, and other provinces far outside the pseudoliberal ripple of Greater Buenos Aires.^[19] Travestismo is migrating and evolving out of poorer pueblos, in which more traditional ideals of Latin American “heteronormativity” are preserved. It is here that we begin to identifty the paradox of machismo: why it creates what it ultimately aims to destroy.