Cover art by Mal Gallina Robert @mal.flash. “We will never go back to the dungeon." First used as background for the YouTube channel @CarrilcheActivismoTravesti.
This piece appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of NACLA's quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
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As I write this introduction from Charlottesville, Virginia, it is undeniable that we are living under global fascism. Across the hemisphere and beyond, we are witness to the accelerated collapse and evisceration of political institutions and politics as we know them. These processes are unfolding for many on unprecedented scale and at unfathomable speed. Yet for some of us, fascism is not new and has never ended. We continue to struggle across colonial, imperial, racial, and sexual fascisms that bridge continents and centuries. From our unceasing and unwavering resistance, we know that fascism has always required a transnational, multiscalar, and transhistorical approach.
These fascist projects of state transformation rapidly unfolding across the Americas are motored by what I am calling “anarcho racial capitalism”—linking Argentine President Javier Milei’s murderous anarchocapitalism from the South with racial capitalism as theorized in the North. This blend of hemispheric fascism and state transformation attacks (im)migrants, Black and Brown folks, travesti and trans people, disabled folks, non-trans women, government workers, sex workers, leftist activists, Palestinians, the elderly, the unemployed, and the poor. Such projects are also fueled by an attack on planetary life and on time itself, where the periodicity of life and the speed and scale of death are altered by pandemics, by climate devastation, and by forever wars. We are experiencing a vast and violent overhaul of our social, economic, and political relations—one that lays bare the stakes of transversal solidarity in our present conjuncture and highlights the urgent need for transborder coalitions grounded in universal struggle.
As this special Report shows us, travesti and trans politics respond to these conditions with potent and shattering force. They are also not primarily a politics of sex and gender. They constitute an antifascist and transversal politics with the power to reshape our world.As this special Report shows us, travesti and trans politics respond to these conditions with potent and shattering force. They are also not primarily a politics of sex and gender. They constitute an antifascist and transversal politics with the power to reshape our world. Like feminist politics, travesti and trans politics splice and weave connections across movements and territories, suggesting coalitional possibilities and strategies for resistance that scramble identity-based politics and movement organizing. Yet as I’ve highlighted elsewhere, mainstream feminist movements continue to de-center the political demands levied by the most perverse and disruptive subjects. In contrast, travesti and trans politics operate instead through what I’ve called “b-side transversality.” Their strategies and connections prioritize the imperatives of unruly Black, Brown, travesti, and trans cuerpos furiosos born of rage and forged in struggle. Here you will find articulations and tactics launched by an antifascist travesti-trans politics in revolt.
From Guatemala to the Dominican Republic, from Colombia to Brazil, from Argentina to Ecuador, travesti and trans politics contest not only shared historical and contemporary experiences of fascism and state violence, but, time and again, they also conjure fugitive and creative acts of resistance. These acts burst forth from ballroom to vogue, from creative mutual aid to community-based care, from spoken word to embroidered chapbooks, from performance art to documentary film—unfurling across city streets, gallery spaces, printed pages, and bodies in revolt.
Resistance is also about the “refusal to be intelligible,” as I have written elsewhere, even when travesti and trans people are rendered hypervisible by surveillance and security regimes. As guest editor, I have not standardized terms nor is there a glossary. This is a political choice to maintain opacity and resist the flattening of histories of naming—not only of ourselves, but also our politics and our practices of resistance. These are the terms that mark our lives and shape our encounters with the world. What’s in a name if not a lifeworld? What is a body if not an archive? No substitutions or glossary can do justice to these travesti-trans vernaculars. Instead, listen and read for resonances, pluralities, and adjacencies. Notice how others describe their politics, their art, their lives, their resistance practices. Pay attention: how we build resistance and strategies of survival with one another is at stake. Visibility or intelligibility is not—and has never been—the answer.
In its nearly 60-year history, this is the first issue of the NACLA Report dedicated exclusively to travesti and trans politics in the Americas. In its own key and with some important shifts, it builds on work that has come before, particularly the 2019 issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly titled “Trans Studies en las Américas,” which I also co-edited. Perhaps most notable in this NACLA Report is the sustained attention to transmasculine activisms and cultural production, which remain highly underrepresented and underresourced across the Latin/x Americas. This was an intentional editorial choice.
Here you will find work on transmasculine experiences of police violence, of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of forced internal displacement and exile. This special issue also highlights transmasculine cultural production and community-based archives that are forging activist ties across the Americas. Together and across authorial positions and topics, all the articles gathered in this issue represent a historic body of work that is likewise a body of collective knowledge that serves up travesti-trans politics in revolt.
"Cuerpx en Vela: Say My Name Loudly." A performance by Germa Machuca in Ayacucho, Peru, featured in an article by Malú Machuca Rose on travesti performance against the Peruvian necro-state. (Joseph D. Araujo) 
Transversal Affiliations
Opening the Report and tracking the transversal connections across anti-trans and anti-Indigenous violence, Malú Machuca Rose’s analysis stretches from Perú’s internal armed conflict to the present, where current president Dina Boluarte and the Fujidinista pact legitimate disproportionate use of force against those the government deems “terrorist” (“terruco”) and therefore expendable. Machuca Rose centralizes travesti artist Germa Machuca’s stunning performance piece “Cuerpx en Vela” (“Body in Vigil”) to surface the imbricated racialized, classed, and sexualized logics of deathly historical and ongoing political violence against travesti, Indigenous, Quechua-speaking, and popular class subjects.
Moving us into the streets and foregrounding the transversal connections across labor organizing and activist histories, co-authors Francisco Fernández Romero, Pato Laterra, and Víctor Sánchez highlight the work of Zaguán TranSindical, a trans, travesti, and non-binary (TTNB) labor union formed in Argentina by and for TTNB formal sector state workers. With Milei’s election and the massive layoffs and institutional restructuring that have ensued across government sectors, Zaguán TranSindical has emerged as a pivotal force articulating with other non-TTNB unions to expand the imaginary of labor and drive collective action against fascism.
In a piece that likewise foregrounds the centrality of labor to trans resistance—in this case the informal labor practices and spaces of working-class, sex-working, and sexually dissident trans people—Alejandrina M. Medina’s autoethnographic piece moves us through a transnational analysis of the sexual, racial, and class politics of transfeminine life and resistance in the face of rainbow-washing and neoliberal erasure in Mexico City. Medina shows us how trans resistance is a spatial, material, and affective practice grounded in the intimacies of the everyday, focusing on the closure and police surveillance of the former open-air market La Tianguis Disidente and the intimate bar space Travesura.
From Colombia, Nikita Dupuis-Vargas Latorre illuminates highly understudied transmasculine experiences of state violence in a piece that highlights the deleterious impacts of police and security force surveillance on trans communities.From Colombia, Nikita Dupuis-Vargas Latorre illuminates highly understudied transmasculine experiences of state violence in a piece that highlights the deleterious impacts of police and security force surveillance on trans communities. To do so, he examines a wide range of government and community-based quantitative and qualitative data across a nine-year period to document security force violence against transmen. Dupuis-Vargas Latorre’s transversal investigation suggests that mandatory military service in Colombia, COVID-19 lockdown measures, and mass mobilizations such as the 2019 national strike and the 2021 estallido social have led to increased profiling of transmen in public spaces. From these conditions, transmen are in sustained and compulsory relation to state agents, and they are exposed to differential and systemic forms of gender-based violence in these interactions and in detention.
Moving us to creative practices of resistance and writing from the vast lands of Abya Yala, curator Ange Cayuman documents a rich audiovisual movement emergent from the cultural production of sexually dissident Indigenous filmmakers and artists that Cayuman connects through the concept “Ancestral Diversities.” Cayuman’s contribution—itself an act of curation—highlights these artists’ wide-ranging practices of self-representation and foregrounds the multiplicity of relationships and convergences between dissident corporealities, communities, and territories in resistance.
In a piece that likewise centers networked practices of trans care across media and platforms, Cello Latini Pfeil’s autoethnographic contribution analyzes underexamined transmasculine experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring how longstanding networks and existing practices of mutual aid between transmen in Brazil helped sustain and foster transmasculine life and health during this global emergency. With the closure of community health clinics, the absence of government and non-profit aid directed to transmen, and the lack of attention to transmasculine embodiment and embodied experiences of the coronavirus, these crucial community networks and forms of knowledge-sharing were vital to keeping transmen alive in the absence of resources from the state and community organizations alike.
Lucía Cavallero’s work moves us back into the streets of Argentina and, through a transfeminist analysis, interrogates how debt has become a violent tool of everyday social control and dispossession that primarily impacts feminized laborers and LGBTQIA+ people. As Cavallero shows, under Milei’s extraordinary austerity measures, the meaning of debt itself has shifted such that “indebting oneself to live”—a concept Cavallero coined with Verónica Gago—becomes a necessary component of everyday existence and survival. Cavallero takes us from a public trial of the “starvers of the people” to transfeminist and villera organizing against anarcho-capitalist mechanisms of eviction that occur through urbanization and real-estate speculation.
Across the Americas, in the absence of formalized care and with medical systems historically shaped by anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-trans practices, community-based forms of care are vital to sustaining and fostering trans and travesti life.Across the Americas, in the absence of formalized care and with medical systems historically shaped by anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-trans practices, community-based forms of care are vital to sustaining and fostering trans and travesti life. In an autoethnographic piece echoing Cello Latini Pfeil’s, Ezekiel Acosta turns to his interviews with Guatemalan transmasculine activists of El Colectivo Trans-formación, one of 10 transmasc collectives that form part of the Red Centroamericana del Caribe de Hombres Trans (REDCAHT+), to examine how they have cultivated transmasculine community healthcare in the face of institutional abandonment. Acosta’s work likewise highlights the importance of self-representation practices and transition imaginaries to crafting trans life in the Americas beyond imperial and Global North trans narratives.
Taking up this latter thread and by turning our attention to other forms of self- and collective representation, Andrea Alejandro Freire, founder of the archival-activist project Las Maricas No Olvidamos (LMNO), combats the erasure of sex-dissident struggles and experiences in Ecuador through the collection of archival materials surrounding the 1997 decriminalization of homosexuality. As Freire suggests, dissident archives evince alternate organizational logics, affective possibilities, and ephemera that rewrite grand and minoritarian histories.
As so many of these pieces demonstrate, material and economic demands are central to travesti and trans politics in the Americas, and travesti and trans cultural production is also shaped by its material conditions of production, enunciation, and circulation. As one example, Carmen Alvaro Jarrín shows us how the economic models of trans of color and travesti ballroom cultures in São Paulo, Brazil contrast with those of some U.S. houses by prioritizing redistribution and racial justice. Forming part of what Jarrín considers a “global gender revolution” led by travesti and trans of color cultural producers and activists from the Global South, these ballroom practices are acts of trans liberation that respond to racialized and economic state violence.
Benjamin Swift and Laura Barriga Dávalos’ contribution highlights the work of researchers, activists, and dancers David Aruquipa Pérez and Andrés Mallo of Familia Galán, who have written about folkoric dancer Barbarella’s revolutionary 1974 kiss delivered to Bolivian military dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez. Swift and Barriga Dávalos link this subversive kiss to the lesser-known contemporary history of the first Pride March in Potosí. Focusing on the history of the march through the reflections of one of its primary organizers, trans activist Maya Alejandra Vasquez Vargas, the authors consider the state of trans politics in Bolivia today.
An archival image of Alma Violeta (right), an influential trans figure in Honduras in the 1970s. For more see Yuri Fraccaroli and Cole Rizki's roundtable discussion with 5 dissident archives in Latin America. (Archivo Honduras Cuir)
As a number of these pieces also show us, the struggle is not only body-to-body or in the streets: it is also archival and affective.As a number of these pieces also show us, the struggle is not only body-to-body or in the streets: it is also archival and affective. In a roundtable I co-organized with scholar and archivist Yuri Fraccaroli of Acervo Bajubá, we spoke with five community-based archives located across the Americas from the Dominican Republic to Brazil to explore the relationships between archival and memory politics and between state violence and travesti-trans resistance. With particular focus on the contemporary fascist turn across the hemisphere and its impact on travesti, trans, and cuir community-based archives, our conversation also highlights the relations of archival care and intimacies that each project offers.
Our Web Exclusive pieces unfold through various modes of racialized trans and cuir kinship and collectivity expressed through cultural production and performance. Grounded in autobiographic and artistic practice, artist Morgan Londoño Marín offers a deeply poetic reflection on transmasculine experiences of forced displacement due to Colombia’s longstanding internal armed conflict expressed through two embroidered chapbooks. From friendships Londoño Marín forged with other internally displaced transmen now living in Bogotá, Londoño Marín weaves connections between his own destierro, or forced internal displacement from the mountains of Manizales, and his friend Valentino’s experience of desmar, or forced exile from the coastal city of Puerto Colombia. Londoño Marín enacts a beautifully woven play on words: destierro is a noun whose root is grounded in tierra or land, while the neologism and interrelated concept of desmar stems from displacement from the sea, linking together territories of loss, grief, internal armed conflict, and belonging.
Through “trans sisterhood” as a mode of exchange across racial and imperial formations, Kerry M. White shares an interview with Black trans Cuban activist and artist Max Fonseca. Through conversation, White and Fonseca highlight the relationships between Black trans life, poetry and artistic practice as sustenance, and the possibilities and impossibilities for trans life in Cuba under current economic and governmental crises.
Georgie Sánchez’s contribution is likewise grounded in sisterhood, offering us a diasporic and queer meditation on “sharing the blood” with friend and fellow visual and performance artist Carlos Martiel. Sánchez’s poetic meditation on diasporic cuir/kuir/queer performance practices, racialized colonial and imperial violence, and the ravages of epidemics turns to practices of blood sharing across borders to pose a critique of racialized, colonial, and imperial violence through what Sánchez names the “grammar of the heart.”
Finally, Cecilia Azar’s transfeminist analysis returns us to Colombia, focusing on the street performance practices of the collective Toloposungo (Todos los policías son una gonorrhea, All Cops Are Gonorrhea). Azar highlights the transnational and transfeminist aesthetic strategies and resistance practices, like voguing, that Toloposungo employs to directly confront the police in public spaces. Poetry by transmasc authors gaita nihil (Argentina) and Élian Cabrera (Paraguay) close the special issue in print, moving us poignantly across affects and across struggles.
"Marik." Woodcut print by Bayardo Loredo Cárdenas. (IG: @cosimoroots)
Angustia & Cumbia
The articles gathered in this Report offer up emergent creative strategies and resistance practices from expansive and transversal travesti-trans politics across the hemisphere, foregrounding the incredible grit, ingenuity, and collective tactics of survival and political resistance that travesti and trans people have developed across time and across struggles. Importantly, while many of our contributors offer radical hope and fierce dreams for liberation, some also highlight the angustia or deep pain and anguish they feel when confronted with our material and political present and its radically foreshortened possibilities for trans and travesti life across the hemisphere.
Trans activist Fonseca’s final words are perhaps the most devastating: “But the future here in Cuba for trans people, truly… no hay. There is none.” Azar’s reflection that Toloposungo has largely disbanded over heightened security concerns likewise underscores how these accelerated processes of state transformation and fascism are materially and physically impeding collective action and threatening to expunge travesti and trans lives.
As we continue to dream up, enact, and revise our revolutionary strategies, it is worth remembering that travesti and trans politics are also about ambivalence, impasse, sadness, and no future. And even under threat of violence and in despair, there is also everyday survivance and joy. As travesti activist Alma Fernández reminds us: “Today we march, tomorrow we pray, the day after tomorrow we protest, but today we dance cumbia riding on the motorcycle of life.”
As we variously shift and downshift together, we will be moving in and out of lanes and even across continents. At times, we will be straddling the quiet hum of politics in neutral where the future feels (and is) curtailed. Yet at other times, we might find ourselves grinding into the roar and thrust of full-throttled revolt, rising up and raging together—even if (and when) we risk stalling or spinning out.
Cole Rizki is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2024-2025 ACLS Fellow. He is co-editor of TSQ’s special issue “Trans Studies en las Américas” (2019) and TSQ’s current Translation Section editor. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Feminist Theory, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Balam, TSQ, and Radical History Review, among others. This special issue of the NACLA Report was made possible in part by the support of the American Council of Learned Societies.
