The Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series Presents: “Jayá con Macha Colón: Jayaera and Punk Self-Becoming in Community” with Larry La Fountain-Stokes
This event will take place via Zoom on Wednesday, March 11th from 4:30-6:00 PM. Register here.
In the context of Puerto Rico’s collapsing infrastructure, corrupt government, brazen gentrification, notable power outages, increasing crime, out migration, growing poverty, natural catastrophes, rising conservatism, femicides, homophobia, transphobia, persistent racism, and religious intolerance, Macha Colón (the alter ego of performer, musician, and film director Gisela Rosario Ramos) offers “jayaera” as an empowering collective strategy of survival and as an embodiment of hope, not as a long-term political solution but as a means of self-preservation and temporary respite that goes hand in hand with grassroots community activism. Macha Colón’s brazen declaration of being “jayá” (found) and her embrace of “jayaera” (self-actualization) and of “gozo radical” (radical joy) posit culture (particularly music and performance) and environmentalism as spaces of utopia in ways that anticipate but also significantly differ from the more commercially successful Bad Bunny. In this presentation, I explore the over-the-top, punk, drag-queen-like, large-bodied, transloca, indie performance artist rock star Macha Colón’s queer, feminist, alternative, DIY philosophy of “jayaera,” her relationship with her fans, and how “jayaera” serves as a collaborative strategy for survival.
“Larry La Fountain-Stokes is a Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. His main research interests are theater and performance studies, queer/LGBT Hispanic Caribbean (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican) studies, and U.S. Latina/o/x and Latin American literary and cultural studies. In his first book, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), he analyzes portrayals of migration, sexual diversity, and gender nonconformity in Puerto Rican cultural productions (such as cartoons, dance theater, film, literature, and performance art) both on the island and in the United States, focusing on the lives and work of artists such as Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, Arthur Avilés, and Elizabeth Marrero.
In his more recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), he focuses on migration, transvestism, and performance and argues that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, cyberspace, diasporic displacements and reenactments of home, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. Here, he discusses the lives and work of artists and activists such as Javier Cardona, Lady Catiria, Kevin Fret, Monica Beverly Hillz, Erika Lopez, Freddie Mercado, Jorge Merced, Sylvia Rivera, and Holly Woodlawn, as well as the recent phenomenon of Puerto Rican participation in RuPaul’s Drag Race. He also looks at documentary films such as Paris Is Burning (1990), The Salt Mines (1990), Mala Mala (2014, dir. Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles), and at the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret.
Currently, La Fountain-Stokes is working on a book on contemporary performance in Puerto Rico and is writing on artists such as Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, Awilda Rodríguez Lora (“La Performera”), Gisela Rosario (Macha Colón), Eduardo Alegría, and Mickey Negrón. He has also continued to publish on additional transloca performers such as Walter Mercado and Fausto Fernós.
He has served on the board of directors of the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (www.clags.org), on the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Literatures of People of Color of the United States and Canada (www.mla.org), and on the Executive Committee of the MLA’s Puerto Rican Literature and Culture Discussion Group (2001-05). He was the chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Section (now known as the Sexualities Studies Section) of the Latin American Studies Association during 2003-04 (https://lasaweb.org/en/), and is also a member of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (https://www.ricanstudies.com/), the American Studies Association, and the Caribbean Studies Association.