Oye Loca: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami

by Susana Peña

Overview

During a few months in 1980, 125,000 Cubans entered the U.S. as part of a massive migration known as the Mariel boatlift. Drawing from first-person stories of Cuban Americans as well as government documents and cultural texts from both the U.S. and Cuba, Susana Peña reveals how a historical event shaped the formation of an entire ethnic and sexual landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816686681
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Susana Peña is director of the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and associate professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

1. From UMAPs to Save Our Children: Policing Homosexuality in Cuba and Miami
before 1980

2. Obvious Gays and the State Gaze: Gay Visibility and Immigration Policy during the
Mariel Boatlift

3. Cultures of Gay Visibility and Renarrating Mariel

4. Pájaration and Transculturation: Language and Meaning in Gay Cuban Miami

5. Narratives of Nation and Sexual Identity: Remembering Cuba

6. Families, Disclosure, and Visibility

7. Locas, Papis, and Muscle Queens: Racialized Discourses of Masculinity and Desire

8. ¡Oye Loca! Gay Cuba in Drag

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This wonderful work unravels the complex and messy strands of emergences, disappearances, visibilities, and erasures of the loca, the gender, and sexually transgressive Cuban male homosexual figure who arrived in America via the Mariel boatlift. Susana Peña carefully and sensitively excavates through layers of historical and cultural abjection in order to persuasively demonstrate how the loca’s stigmatized exilic trajectory is intimately connected to the advent of a Cuban American gay culture in Miami.
—Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

From the Publisher