Juan Gabriel Mami and Me
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| Billboard |
Ms. Garcia is the creator and host of the Juan Gabriel podcast “My Divo.”
The New York Times
In the thick of the pandemic, I moved back to El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, where I’d been raised, for what I thought would be a temporary stay. But then the desert whispered. After years away, my body hungered for the quiet wisdom of this land.
I’d changed since I’d left. In New York and Boston, I had lived openly as a queer woman. I found myself being more discreet around my family in El Paso and Ciudad JuĂ¡rez, Mexico, where I was born. There are plenty of queer people living full, open lives here. But none of them are in my family.
As soon as Covid restrictions eased, I began crossing the border into Ciudad JuĂ¡rez by foot to sing karaoke with my queer friends whenever I needed release. My favorite songs to sing were those by the iconic Mexican showman Juan Gabriel. I loved reveling in my queerness and my culture all at once. I longed for that liberation around my family.
Music has the power to help us understand ourselves. Juan Gabriel’s tender femininity was a radical quality in a Mexico entrenched in machismo and homophobia. He managed to embody his Mexican roots while also exuding queerness — two ideas that were for so long at odds in our culture.
I inherited my love for Juanga, as he was affectionately called, from my mother. He was her first crush and her ultimate hometown hero. On those nights in JuĂ¡rez when I’d belt out his songs the question would surface: If my Mexican mother could accept him as he was, could she accept me, too?
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When I explain Juan Gabriel to American friends, I tell them to imagine an artist as revolutionary, innovative and singular as Prince and as peacockish, prolific (he composed more than 1,800 songs!) and canonized as Elton John. Someone once told me no one has made Latin Americans cry, laugh and dance more.
As a child, he was the first person I’d heard relatives speculate was gay. His soft-spoken voice and titillating dance moves upended the rigid gender conventions Latin American artists had been confined to at the time. He also showed me that Mexican society’s understanding of queerness is rich and complex, and far from binary.
Juan Gabriel was born Alberto Aguilera Valadez in the Mexican state of MichoacĂ¡n on Jan. 7, 1950. His mother left him in a children’s home after she moved north to JuĂ¡rez in search of work. He ran away at age 13 and began performing in the bohemian JuĂ¡rez club scene in the early 1960s — the same strip of nightclubs where my mom partied in the mid-1970s and ’80s and where I now sing karaoke with friends.
His debut single, “No Tengo Dinero” (“I Don’t Have Any Money”), originally released in 1971, made him an instant pop prince. He went on to dominate the charts and gossip headlines in Mexico, Latin America and the U.S. Latino media until his heart gave way in California in 2016.
He never publicly admitted he was gay, and we will never truly know how he identified. But in the course of reporting on Juan Gabriel for a podcast I created about his life and legacy, I came across long-lost prison records at the Mexican National Archives, apparently stemming from teenage Juanga’s run-ins with the law, filed under a pseudonym that an archivist at the Mexican National Archives told me that he was known to have used. These records suggest that Juan Gabriel may have been arrested and charged with crimes like pedophilia, a common tactic used to persecute queer people in the late 1960s, according to the archivist.
Documents at the Mexican National Archives also show that La DirecciĂ³n Federal de Seguridad, Mexico’s equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, kept tabs on his romantic relationships.
Still, he was beloved, even if his queer identity remained taboo. I have been thinking about his legacy as I’ve wrestled with my own coming-out story. In U.S. media I saw portrayals of coming out that were either cathartic and loving conversations or tragic rejections. These stereotypical portraits fail to capture the chaotic: the well-meaning but blundering attempts by loved ones, the nonlinear progress, the inelegant molting of calcified bigotry.
I’ve lived through this awkward dance with my mother. I told her years ago that I’d fallen in love with someone who wasn’t a man, and she responded “I know” in a cryptic tone and simply never spoke of it again. I chose to accept her silence. Juan Gabriel once said to an interviewer who asked him outright if he was gay: “What can be seen shouldn’t be asked.”
More recently, I told my mother I wanted to get married — that I was in love outside the confines of gender. She wondered if she’d done something wrong when raising me. But she said she accepted me as I was. My life was mine, she said. “I’m here to support you and love you.” A win, albeit a checkered one, is a win.
In the end, Juanga’s songs were the thread that helped me stitch together different patches of my identity. At my last birthday party with my family, my partner joined us for karaoke. I sang “Vienes o Voy” (“You Come or I Go”), the racy deep cut I’ve sung countless times in JuĂ¡rez. I stared at my partner as I sang, and my mom cheered me on.
For many Mexicans, Juanga represents a connection to our homeland and our culture. He also showed us a different way to exist, even if the world didn’t seem ready for it. His connection to Mexico was too authentic to be written off, even by a society that had yet to catch up to the acceptance he deserved. Even the most macho of men danced to his music. The progress he made was not linear. But it was real.
His command of a mariachi while donning a sequined suit showed me that my Mexican roots and my queerness do not have to be at odds. Both can exist as exuberantly as Juan Gabriel did.
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