By Alejandro Escalante.
A loca (“madwoman”) named Willian danced and sang boisterously as she swept the ground and lead the procession of sacred images of Santiago Apóstol in Loíza, Puerto Rico. As she swept, she blew kisses and twerked provocatively with festivalgoers, enticing some and vexing others. Willian was a “loca,” a festival personage that Loiceños take on during Las Fiestas Tradicionales en Honor a Santiago Apóstol, the yearly festal celebration held in honor of St. James. Called locas for their dress and mannerism, these carnivalesque personages mix and remix gender and racialized identities through costuming and makeup as they help honor the patron saint of Loíza. Through their boundary crossing behavior, locas reveal one way that the “sacred” is constructed, maintained, and negotiated, and the potentials of transgressive behavior.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas outlines in her book Purity and Danger how categories like “sacred” and “profane” relate to human-made systems that attempt to manage life’s anomalies, the things that do not seem to belong or fit neatly with expectations, such as disabilities or twins. These incongruities are often awe-inspiring—terrifying, even—insofar as they disrupt our perceptions of “normality.” As such, she argues, we avoid interacting with them, subsequently making rules about how to avoid contact. Through avoidance, people, places, and objects become set apart—they become “sacred.” But Douglas is also aware that life is not so simple and we sometimes cannot avoid coming into contact with the sacred. In these cases, we again construct rules and rituals to prepare ourselves and our communities to engage the ambiguous. In turn, everyday things are made to be “profane,” or so commonplace as not to require such rules and regulations regarding interaction.
In this sense, Willian’s genderbending performances can be understood as enacting Douglas’s sacred-profane world systematization. Day-to-day, Willian worked the counter at a bodega-style café and was a delivery driver for a multinational pizza company. While delivering food or making coffee, he wore stereotypical men’s clothing and aligned himself with sartorial expectations. In other words, his quotidian life was profane. However, as a loca, Willian transgressed a boundary, moving from the realm of the everyday to the realm of the sacred, the awe-inspiring anomalous. To engage in the sacred world of Santiago, Willian had to prepare himself by becoming a loca, by transforming into a madwoman, appearing as she was not meant to, bending gender rules and regulations. Following Douglas, Willian opened new possibilities for understanding the “sacred” as transgressive, as boundary-crossing and rule-breaking. Willian, like twins or disabled people, disrupted the normal flow of things and introduced confusion—and, sometimes, mischief.
Willian, my teacher in all things loca, once told me that her personage was “a time when I can be a kid again. I can play games, flirt, mess around without getting into trouble.” And mess around she did. Willian, like other locas, preceded the procession, sweeping opening the way for Santiago and his devotees, all while simultaneously dancing, drinking, and singing raucously in minstrel-esque makeup, in a dress stuffed to give the impression of large breasts and buttocks. However, with a slap of her behind and a flirtatious wink, she doubled over laughing as she qualified her outfit. “I don’t need to do all that, though, because I already have a large enough ass,” she said. She liked to crack a joke when explaining something otherwise serious, smiling knowingly and flashing a quick, suggestive wink. Her flirtatious behavior was part and parcel part of her sacred transgressions. As a loca, she was free to cross more and more boundaries and often made the opportunities to do so. Mischief, then, was part and parcel to her sacred transgression.
As a loca, Willian playfully remixed categories as she opened the path for Santiago. In her playfulness, she also demonstrated that the “sacred” is not always as we perceive it. Instead, the sacred is messy, confusing, and transgressive. It was her transgression, then, that broke open the space of the sacred. Douglas and Willian illustrate the complex way that the “sacred” is formed and maintained. Further, that transgressions open other, often unthinkable, potentials like fêting a patron saint with flirting and twerking. Beyond colloquial notions of “purity” or “morality,” Willian showed me that life’s uncertainty holds powerful potential for reimagining our world, our relationships to it, and our relationships with each other.
Alejandro Escalante (PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill) is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His work draws from Caribbean theory and philosophy and gender and sexuality studies, tracing the ways in which we make, re-make, and unmake ourselves as human through makeup and costuming. Inspired by the Jamaican philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter and French ethnographer Georges Bataille, his works seeks to understand how religious space can be utilized to refashion the self beyond “Man.” His work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Africana Religions, and Feminist Theology.
