The Mother, the Daughter, and the Cow: Venezuelan Transformistas’ Migration to Europe

Abstract

Venezuelan transformistas migrate to Europe in order to occupy the lucrative niche of transgender sex work. With their earnings, they enhance the process of transforming their male bodies towards perfect femininity. Various forms of liminality are inherent both in transformistas’ migration and in their bodily transformation. This paper aims at an understanding of how they arrived at their present situation by following their lives through time and space. It explores motivations for migration as well as the economic and affective dimensions of relations evolving from recruitment practices that are based on sexual identity and gender. The negotiation of love for their natural mothers through economic transactions is interpreted as a change of status that became possible in the context of migration.

Key Words:

• Venezuela
• homosexuality
• transformistas
• migration
• liminality
• sex work

Notes

1. For a discussion of the application of the tripartite Rites de Passage model in the context of transsexualism and in an urban setting, see Bolin (1988).

2. I started my PhD research within the Venezuelan transformista community in a Spanish city in spring 2005, with its most intensive period in 2006 and 2007. Fieldwork also included several stays with Venezuelan transformistas in various call‐in apartments in Germany, and living with three different transformista families in Venezuela for a total of six weeks.

3. ‘Hotel Glamour’ – and later, as a result of charges by the magazine Glamour, ‘Hotel Glam’ – was the title of a popular reality show that was broadcast by the Spanish TV channel Telecinco in 2003. Akin to ‘Big Brother’, 15 Spanish B‐celebrities were living together under the continuous gaze of television cameras in a luxury hotel. The audience voted on evictions from the hotel and a cash prize awaited the winner. Venezuelan transformista Daniela transferred the name of the TV series to Frufru’s apartment and thenceforward its inhabitants would sometimes call it jokingly ‘Hotel Glamour’. Venezuelan transformistas are very creative and humorous at finding nicknames for each other, but when discussing the use of pseudonyms with them, except for ‘Frufru’, all informants cited in this paper insisted on being introduced with their ‘real’ female names. They are still anonymous in the sense of not figuring in any official documents. For those transformistas, however, who use more than one name, I chose the less common one for this paper.

4. In Europe, Venezuelan transformistas sometimes call themselves ‘transsexuales’, but mainly in formal situations. They seem to perceive the term to be politically correct since some NGOs apply it.

5. I call transformistas ‘maricos’ when referring to the time before their bodily transformation. I am aware of its negative connotations, but understand marico as an emic expression.

6. In Latin America, cross‐dressing and other practices associated with ‘transgenderism’ occur during ritualistic events as well as on a quotidian base. The question as to whether there is a distinctly Latin American pattern of ‘transgenderism’ can hardly be answered – perhaps it is best avoided, as it represents a complex range of phenomena (Kulick, 1998b). Shared contexts and material conditions do produce repeating forms of sexual culture. ‘But those forms themselves vary: from country to country, from class to class, from block to block’ (Lancaster, 1998, p. 262). Ochoa (2006, p. 10) points out the risk of homogenising and colonising the experiences of people at other times and places by the application of ‘transgenderism’ as an identity category. For a critique on simplistic conceptualisations of Latin American homosexuality in terms of a machista culture, an ever‐present family and a hierarchical binary of active/passive, see Bustos‐Aguilar (1995).

7. For Ekins (1997, p. 61) male femalers are ‘males who in various ways transgress the binary divide between the sexes’.

8. I explicitly do not insinuate that maricos and transformistas who do not migrate lack agency, but that agency must be acknowledged in their migration projects.

9. In this respect, transformistas’ holidays in Venezuela are similar to ‘la déscente’ of Congolese Sapeurs who return from Paris to Brazzaville in order to demonstrate how many clothes of internationally recognised fashion houses they had accumulated. After these demonstrations of identity, their struggles through life in Paris would begin again (Gandoulou, 1989). Ali Ahmad describes similar costly performances of success on the part of returning Pakistani migrants in his contribution to this special issue.

10. Deeper insights into transformistas’ social mobility can be gained when taking questions of race and colour into account. In his book on race, class and national image in Venezuela, Winthrop R. Wright (1990) points out that Venezuelans do not accept exact definitions of race. With regard to Venezuelan transformistas I share Wright’s (1990, p. 3) observation that colour rather than race – appearance rather than origin – influences Venezuelans’ perceptions of individuals. In Venezuela, where racial equality is the official doctrine, race represents more a state of mind, as well as an economic condition, than a physical fact. The connection between racial and economic status is crucial since Venezuelans usually do not attribute anti‐black feelings to racial attitudes, but to the fact that blacks tend to live in poverty while whites tend to do better economically. Whiter Venezuelans claim that they discriminate against individuals for economic reasons alone. Consequently, when blacks escape poverty, they cease to be socially black. Since respect for whites is not so much based on racial sentiments but on an admiration for people who are successful, the adage ‘money whitens’ has considerable significance. In the materialistic and multiracial society of twentieth‐century Venezuela, individuals’ jobs, clothes, education, language, social position and accumulation of wealth determined their opportunities for social mobility and combined to make an individual whiter in the social context. Wright (1990, p. 6) concludes: ‘In such a setting the term blanquear (to whiten or bleach) has tremendous social significance’. Following Bonnett (2002), modernity is associated with a European, and hence white identity. This is why to be modern, to be forward‐looking, demands a break with a non‐European past and an immersion in the new ways and attitudes of European civilisation. Against this background, Venezuelan transformistas’ social ascent, individually perceived in the context of migration to Europe, can be read in terms of ‘whitening’ – an economic and hence racial transformation recognised and acknowledged by the Venezuelan public. As sex workers in Europe though, some Venezuelan transformistas tend to present themselves as exotic, Latin beauties. Katy, for example, emphasises her whiteness by avoiding getting tanned when in Venezuela, while she takes extended sun‐bathing sessions just before returning to Europe in order to arrive as dark‐skinned as possible. The self‐presentation through her racialised body changes according to place and in each case tends to highlight what can be perceived as ‘the other’ – beyond sexual identity and gender.

11. Following this practice, transformistas themselves import their competitors in the area of sex work. Therefore, earning money gets more and more difficult. These days, they say, there is an ‘inflation’. In order to get along, the ‘old ones’ bring more daughters: ‘I have to live from something!’ (Frufru, 14 February 2008).

12. In Spain, male‐to‐female transgendered persons are usually referred to as ‘travesti’. Venezuelan transformistas in Spain often adopt this common parlance.

13. Bonnett (2002) links consumerism in Latin America to white identity and understands whiteness as a part of today’s ‘symbolic economy’: through much of Latin America, neoliberalism has emerged as the dominant economic paradigm over the past 20 years. According to Bonnett (2002, p. 85), ‘whiteness has come to be associated […] not simply with the ideals and norms of the old elite but with a more contemporary phenomenon, namely consumerism. Whiteness is connoted as a lifestyle, symbolically tied to the pleasures of a consumption‐led identity (pleasures such a freedom and choice). The figure of the white consumer is not an entirely novel one in Latin America. Indeed, the “white shopper” has been a normative model in the construction of elite female roles in metropolitan cultures of modernity in the region since the late nineteenth century. However, as the ideology and practices of consumerism have become more globalized and socially extensive, this aspect of white identity has become available to a much wider range of people’. In this sense, Venezuelan transformistas’ passion for consumption can be interpreted as a way of constructing and embodying whiteness and femininity, irrespective of president Hugo Chávez’ current Bolivarian revolution policy, which aims at beating back neoliberalism in Venezuela.