The Ball of La LagunaClass, Race, and Gender in a Mid-Twentieth-Century Cross-Dressing Ball in Lima, Perú
The Ball of La Laguna was an infamous cross-dressing ball that ended in a police raid, media scandal, and public uproar on the night of January 31, 1959, in Lima, Peru. Hundreds of maricón (queer) couples attended the ball sporting masculine and feminine attire—unaware of the moral panic that would soon unfold across the city. How did class, race, and gender inequalities shape La Laguna? How did they shape heteronormative reactions to the ball? How can we understand the meanings of (homo)sexuality and cross-dressing at the ball? This essay answers these questions by conducting a content analysis of five newspapers, two magazines, a cartoon, an invitation to the ball, a video advertisement, and three oral history interviews. The Ball of La Laguna reveals that the class, race, and gender inequalities that have structured Peruvian society since colonial times also structured maricón social worlds and the policing of their communities. All attendees experienced homophobic treatment in the aftermath of the ball, but Indigeneity, femininity, and a lower-class status compounded these inequalities. La Laguna enables us to describe maricón social worlds in mid-twentieth-century Lima from an intersectional class, race, and gender perspective, which contributes to the growing literature on cross-dressing practices in twentieth-century Latin America and, more broadly, to the hemispheric turn in queer studies.
history of sexuality, intersectionality, scandal, identity, Latin America
Did you also go to the dance?Yes, sir . . .Were you one of the organizers?Yes, sir . . .How were you dressed?It was a baile de fantasia (costume ball), sir . . .Are you homosexual?Yes, sir . . .Take him—said the Prefect.
On January 31, 1959, hundreds of cross-dressed maricones strolled down a bridge to La Laguna, an elegant restaurant in the middle of an artificial lake in Lima, Perú. La Tribuna (1959), a local newspaper, recounted that "numerous couples of 'rich' and 'posh' homosexuals arrived in brand new cars."1 They swarmed the surroundings of the brightly lit restaurant from ten in the evening as they were joined by hairdressers, dancers, and dressmakers. Some patrons sported suits and Hawaiian shirts, while others flaunted elaborate gowns. They showed their invitation to the ticket inspectors—described as "three men of effeminate manners"—and made their way across the bridge. Few could predict that, a few hours later, the police would crack down on the celebration and launch one of the most violent campaigns of the century against its "abnormal" and "immoral" attendees. The police terrorized attendees enough that they threw themselves into the lake and [End Page 353] swam to the shore to avoid capture, even though Peru's civil code did not prohibit homosexuality. Neighbors ganged up on the swimmers, punched them, and threw them back into the water while police officers looked on. The press noted down their names. Officers prosecuted lower-class hembritas (feminine maricones) nationally and internationally, arrested them, subjected them to anal examinations, fined them, and outed them in mainstream media outlets throughout the two weeks following the ball. How did the media, police, residents of Lima, and attendees themselves react to the ball? How did class, race, and gender inequalities shape these reactions? What does the interplay of these disadvantaging categories reveal about doing and being a maricón in mid-twentieth-century Lima? This article documents the Ball of La Laguna for the first time in an academic publication and examines it from an intersectional perspective that simultaneously expands and challenges northern theorizations of queerness and intersectionality. Zooming into the ball, it proposes that the police, neighbors, and media, respectively, detained, harassed, and outed the working-class, cross-dressed, and mestizo (mixed race) or Indigenous attendees, not the upper-class, masculine-presenting, and white ones, even though the latter allegedly made up most of the guest list. These actors signaled, by and large, hembritas as the culprits of the moral crisis piercing the city: not the maricones who could pass as straight, upper-class, white, or a combination thereof, but those who could not. Newspapers are examined closely, owing to their role in the class-, race-, and gender-segregated policing of maricones at the ball.
One should note that maricón and marica2 did not mean the same thing as "homosexual" at the time of the Ball of La Laguna. Nor did hembrita, macho, travesti, or many of the other terms that circulated in twentieth-century Peru to name gender and sexual diversity. Considering the contextual specificity of terms such as maricón is a central step in understanding the nuances of non-Western sexualities and provincializing the LGBTQ+ umbrella that dominates twenty-first-century understandings of sexuality in the North. The term maricón has a long history in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, and its uses have changed considerably over time (Alegre Henderson 2009). When used in this essay, maricón and marica describe the men who behaved effeminately, engaged in homosexual behavior, or, more often, did both in mid-twentieth-century Lima. Maricón roughly translates to sissy, queer, or fag in English, and it accounts for the pre-gay, gender-unequal configurations of desire that were present at La Laguna—in contrast with the modern and respectable northern "gay" or "homosexual," which were not introduced in Lima until the late twentieth century (Arboleda 1995). These terms remained under negotiation in mid-twentieth-century Lima. Maricón, homosexual, hembrita, and pervert could be used interchangeably by some, but as wholly different [End Page 354] concepts by others. Criminologists and psychiatrists, in particular, seem to have purposefully opted for the term homosexual, although they, too, used terms such as abnormal and pervert occasionally. Maricones could call themselves maricón among friends as a term of camaraderie, but rarely in front of their non-maricón friends. One should thus not overemphasize what maricones labeled themselves but, rather, what they did with those labels. My academic use of the term also acts as a plea to strip maricón from its negative connotations. While I was growing up in Peru, maricón was weaponized as an insult against my friends, loved ones, community, and myself. Recoding the term maricón constitutes an act of resistance comparable to the positive resignification of queer in the late twentieth century. Uncovering this lexicon of mariconerías contributes to the transnational or hemispheric turn in queer studies, a growing field of scholarship that recently led to the publication of the "Cuir/Queer Américas" joint issue in GLQ, Periódicus, and El lugar sin límites and Transgender Studies Quarterly's "Trans Studies en las Américas" (Pierce et al. 2021a, b, c; Garriga-López et al. 2019).
The Ball of La Laguna emerges as an understudied case study of the vibrant maricón social worlds that unfolded in parks, alleyways, movie theaters, and other spaces in twentieth-century Lima—and the ways in which class, race, and gender categories structured them. "How many hidden lagoons [lagunas] may exist in this city of ours?" wondered the writers of a scandalized local magazine (Cahuide 1959: 40). The answer, as it turns out, was many. While the ball remains a unique case study because of the richly documented raid that followed it, it was by no means an isolated event. Over a hundred people managed to congregate at a cross-dressing ball in a deeply conservative mid-twentieth-century city. These many attendees did not pop out of thin air, nor did they vanish after the raid, leaving no trace. Última Hora (1959b), a local tabloid, warned its readership that the prefect of Lima had requested to "increase the campaign against the abnormals who during the night meet in some parks and central avenues of Lima" after the raid. These "abnormals" partook in a broader subculture of maricones, rosquetes, and locas and their masculine partners, machos and hombres, who have been systematically excluded from the annals of Peruvian history. By focusing on the Ball of La Laguna, this article aims to remove the historiographical veil of silence that suggests that local maricones left no trail either because they failed to come out or because they did not exist in the first place. In doing so, it disproves these myths and reveals that a vibrant maricón subculture existed in Lima as early as the 1950s. Shifting the foci away from studies of sexual history in the North, this article reexamines the history of maricones in Lima, an understudied case in Latin American academic queer discourse. [End Page 355]
The Ball of La Laguna fits in a broader Latin American genealogy of marica social practices that encompassed cross-dressing balls, even though the event has been ignored within Peruvian, Latin American, and Anglo-centric queer studies. The presence of these cross-dressing balls has been examined more indepth in other national contexts, such as Mexico's Dance of the Forty-One and Brazil's carnival3 celebrations. The Dance of the Forty-One, which took place in Mexico City in 1901, constitutes perhaps the most iconic raided ball in twentieth-century Latin America, and one that bears many similarities to La Laguna (Irwin, Nasser, and McCaughan 2003; Monsiváis 2001, 2002). There are multiple parallels between La Laguna and the Dance of the Forty-One: both events drew an upper-class clientele of cross-dressed and masculine-presenting maricones who were arrested in a raid that privileged certain attendees at the expense of others (Franco 2019: 67). The Dance of the Forty-One encapsulated these inequalities in the number forty-one that gives the ball its infamous name: rumor goes that forty-two maricones attended the dance, including the son-in-law of President Porfirio Diaz, but the police counted forty-one to avoid prosecuting him. Essayist Carlos Monsiváis (2002: 24) confirms that "every certainty has faded away" by the centenary of the ball, "except the presence of" the "son-in-law of the nation" and of the other "elite gays, 'invisibilized' by their status, who only suffered the stalking of rumors." The Dance of the Forty-One has transcended other events to become central to queer Mexican history—it inspired a "critical-social novel" in 1906; an academic anthology in 2003; countless academic and popular articles, events, and debates; and a feature-length film produced by the streaming powerhouse Netflix in 2020. The number forty-one has even acquired queer connotations in everyday speech in Mexico.
Rio de Janeiro's carnival celebrations constituted a site for the bailes de fantasia (costume balls) to thrive throughout the twentieth-century in Rio. One of their main attractions were cross-dressing contests. Historian James N. Green (1999) studied the development of these festivities between the turn of the century and the 1970s. Green explains that, from the 1940s onward, cross-dressing balls, which had heretofore held a marginal position vis-à-vis official celebrations, became a fixture of the city's carnival festivities (211). Guests did not need to cross-dress to attend the balls or, for that matter, to dress up at all, unless they wanted to compete for the title of queen of carnival, which the juries awarded to the best-dressed contestant. Certain balls attracted domestic and international attention from the media, local authorities, fellow Brazilians, and Latin American queers. One such traveler lamented, amid a cross-dressing ball at the São José Cinema, that "his native country of Venezuela did not host a ball 'so overflowing [End Page 356] in sensitivity' " (228). Certain Latin America queers were aware of Rio's rising reputation as the cross-dressing capital of the region and wanted to replicate these experiences at home—albeit, often within elite circles. The organizers of La Laguna referenced the Carioca celebrations, too, when the press questioned them about their motives for organizing the ball. Rio de Janeiro owes part of its ongoing status as a gay capital of Latin America to the twentieth-century homosexual appropriation of the city's carnival. Numerous academic studies, films, and museum exhibitions have explored this theme (Corrêa 2009; Dos Santos 2022; Lopes 2016; Rodrigues 2016).
The Ball of La Laguna, on the other hand, never acquired as central a role in the collective imaginary of queerness as the Dance of the Forty-One or Rio de Janeiro's carnival. The ball has received little to no academic attention in Latin American queer historiography and almost as little attention in Peru, where a photographic exhibition from 2008 and a historical fiction chronicle from 2020 remain one of the few stand-alone reflections about it (Buntinx, Contreras, and Durand 2008; Alvarez Chávez and Jaramillo Huamán 2022). Considering the parallels between the Ball of La Laguna, the Dance of the Forty-One, and the carnival celebrations in Rio, it remains puzzling that the last two have attracted so much more attention than the ball. Numerous factors contribute to explaining this imbalance, chief among them, the limited focus on Andean4 countries in research on queerness in Latin America. Queer academic discourses in Latin America have traditionally focused on Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, rather than on the Andean region. Ochy Curiel situates queer studies in "Argentina, Chile, and parts of Brasil as having a kind of knowledge production that is different from the rest of Latin America, in terms of access to and consumption of the theory of the North" (in Sacchi et al. 2021: 126). This narrow geographic focus risks producing an equally narrow picture of the marica past. La Laguna holds a strong potential to spotlight cross-dressing practices in Peru and, in doing so, explore questions of pre-gay (homo)sexualities, inequality, and masculinity from an understudied angle.
One explanation for the collective amnesia regarding La Laguna within Peru might be that the emerging Limeño5 discourse on queerness has been overtly focused on political mobilizations at the expense of expressions of pleasure and celebration—even raided ones. Until recently, most scholarship on sexual history hailed from the global North and, in particular, from a tradition of US LGBT historiography that emerged in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall riots (Stein 2005: 606). George Chauncey's (1994) historical ethnography of sexuality, Gay New York, constitutes one of the most representative works in this tradition. Cross-dressing balls appeared in this gay and lesbian historiography in settings as "diverse" as [End Page 357] New York, Chicago, and London (Chauncey 1994; D'Emilio 1983; Weeks 1977). Chauncey and many of the Anglo-American and northern European cultural historians who followed in his footsteps addressed the gendered structure of same-sex sexual relationships in urban enclaves throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, their reliance on data from industrialized, urban Western societies limited its applicability to Latin America—a critique that resonates with the geopolitics of the social sciences more broadly (Falconí Trávez, Castellanos, and Viteri 2013; Macharia 2016; Wieringa and Sívori 2013). Only toward the end of the twentieth century did the first historical account written by a Peruvian scholar and exclusively focused on same-sex sexualities see the light (Ugarteche 1997). Despite these essential contributions to kickstarting an academic debate, most of the early authors who followed Óscar Ugarteche's lead seem to have been more concerned with repression, violence, and sexual political movements than with long-forgotten balls, parties, and orgasms—as if resistance could not emerge from dancing or fucking. Colonial and early republican sexualities have attracted the most academic attention compared to the contemporary period, reflecting the dominance of the former periods in Peruvian historiography (Alegre Henderson 2009, 2012, 2019; Campuzano 2007; Pamo Reyna 2015; Mori Bolo 2020). Other periods and geographies have received much less attention, including the twentieth century and areas outside Lima. Notable exceptions exist for late twentieth-century lesbigay social movements (Cornejo 2014, 2015; Herndon 2016; Marreros Núñez 2021; Mezarina 2015; Moromisato 2004; Rodríguez Pinedo 2017: 156), early twentieth-century police raids and mediatized sex scandals (Buntinx, Contreras, and Durand 2008; Díaz Santiesteban 2017; Velásquez Castro 2020), and heterosexual sex work (Drinot 2020), among others. Some of these contributions dabble in the frontiers between academic, public, and artivist sexual history (Alvarez Chávez and Jaramillo Huamán 2022; Campuzano 2007; Ponce Gambirazio 2022). These path-breaking works contribute to articulating a history of gay politics in late twentieth-century Lima, but they offer little in the way of a history of the balls, celebrations, and parties that made marica lives worth living. The Ball of La Laguna affords such an opportunity to glance at these pockets of marica celebration, as well as the racial, class, and gender politics that led to the ball's tragic end.
This article is organized into four sections: (1) before La Laguna, (2) during La Laguna, (3) after La Laguna, and (4) the conclusions. The subsection "Hembritas and Machos," which is contained within the second section, explains the gender play that unfolded during the ball. The subsection " 'Unprecedented Scandal,' " which is contained within the third section, details the role of the media in shaping the classed, racialized, and gendered aftermath of the ball. This article [End Page 358] is based on a content analysis of four newspapers (Última Hora, La Crónica, La Tribuna, and Verdades), two magazines (Cahuide and Caretas), a cartoon, an invitation to the ball, a video advertisement, and three oral history interviews. Using this chronological framework to map race, class, and mariconadas (adj., maricón things) in Lima illuminates that the events leading up to the ball and its aftermath were nearly as important as the ball itself. Periodizing La Laguna in this manner also highlights the temporal dynamics of cross-dressing balls. Some elements, characters, and developments may not fit this lineal scheme. Maricones seem to wield an innate ability to short-circuit simplistic distinctions between the past, present, and future, pointing at the limitations of historiographical periodifications and temporal orientations. Hembritas and machos' gender play, for instance, spans multiple temporalities. These sections should thus be understood as referential periodifications, rather than as black-and-white distinctions.
Before La Laguna: An Artificial Island, a Manor House, and an Invitation
La Laguna was a recreational casona (manor house) located on an artificial island in the seaside district of Barranco in Lima (fig. 1). Doubling as an exclusive restaurant and, later on, a cultural center in the middle of Confraternidad Park, the casona stood between 1947 and 2002 in what is now the Museum of Contemporary Art. La Laguna served as a safe haven for "an elite anxious to walk away from an environment [the city center] that started to be taken away by mestizos, negroes, migrants and other subaltern groups" (Alvarez Espinoza, Caballero Fernández, and Pineda Durand 2015: 10). Dubbed "la Lagunita" by the locals, La Laguna was beloved by the residents of Barranco who organized picnics, praised its idyllic nature, paddled along its shores on paddle boats, and wandered in the adjunct zoo. Panagra Airways (1951) even advertised the restaurant of La Laguna as one of three venues that foreign visitors must see in Lima. Panagra's advertisement displays waiters in white suits serving smartly dressed patrons and a middle-aged, white man walking along its "tropical gardens" with a similarly white, female companion. "La Laguna," tells the narrator, offers "all the cuisine of a swank Manhattan rendezvous and the atmosphere of old Spain in a setting of tropical gardens." Diners, however, were not sipping wine in the Iberian Peninsula but at an elite establishment in poverty-torn Peru. All these factors turn La Laguna into an unlikely location for a maricón party—until one considers the class and racial background of the maricones who attended it.
Around two hundred guests received carefully crafted invitation letters for a "fantasy" ball entertained by the Orquesta Villanueva to be held in the restaurant [End Page 359] La Laguna on January 31, 1959, at 10 p.m. Club Vive Como Quieras (Club Live as You Want) signed the invitations, turning them into the first-known written records penned by a maricon collective in Peru (fig. 2). Nothing in the invitation distinguished the ball from the city-wide carnival parties held throughout the month. One of the attendees would later claim that, "just like other girlfriends, I received special invitations to go to the party, I thought everything was ready and with permission, I never imagined that this would happen and that I would be treated like a vulgar delinquent" (Última Hora 1959h).
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Black and white photo of a lakeside building with a tower and covered veranda behind rowboats on the shore with two people nearby](/article/901761/image/fig01?format=thumb)
Front shot of La Laguna. https://fatimarodriguez.blogspot.com/2012/11/centro-civico-y-laguna-de-barranco.html (accessed December 22, 2021).
Fernando Galindo Rojas, the leader of the organizing committee, reserved the restaurant for 1.500 soles (local currency) with the explicit purpose of hosting a carnival party. Organizers of the ball modeled it after the cross-dressing parties at Rio de Janeiro that filled the pages of the magazine O'Cruzeiro (Última Hora 1959h). Club Vive Como Quieras was able to pull together a guest list of more than a hundred maricones and deliver the invitations, suggesting that a well-established maricón network existed in Lima. Following their arrest, Galindo Rojas declared that a cross-dressing carnival ball akin to La Laguna had already been orchestrated the previous year at Club Kontiki, a members-only, upper-class beach club in Lima.
La Laguna survives in the public imaginary because of the rumored presence of high-status, upper-class, white guests who suspiciously avoided the list of detainees. "White," "Indigenous," and "mestizo" need to be understood as more than epidermic descriptions in Peru, where race is inextricably tied to class. Whiteness in Lima stands as an indicator of economic privilege, while Indigeneity stands as an indicator of economic marginalization. Linguists Virginia Zavala and Michele Back (2017: 13) confirm that "color" in Latin America "is usually perceived differently if the person has money, speaks in a certain way or wears [End Page 360]
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Black and white newspaper titled TRIBU with Spanish text in columns. Headline 'Díaz Marín eleg. de la Convención' (Díaz Marín elects the Convention).](/article/901761/image/fig02?format=thumb)
"The V.C.Q (Live as You Want) Club is pleased to invite you to the great Fantasy Ball that will offer in the restaurant La Laguna on January 31, 1959 at 10 p.m. Thanking you for your presence in advance, always yours [unintelligible] and at your service, The Board. Note: The party will be enlivened by the competent 'Villanueva' Orchestra.' " Letter by Club Vive Como Quieras, February 3, 1959. La Tribuna, Lima.
a particular type of clothing." These categories cannot be thought of as static or independent of each other—it is not that race correlates to class, but that race is already always class, and class is already always race. Northern theorizations of intersectionality, burdened by their metaphor of separate, preexisting intersecting lines, cannot quite account for the nuances of this racial configuration. Class operates in Peru as an inseparable dimension of race—the more affluent, Spanish-speaking, and creole macho you are, the more relatively white you will be perceived to be (Avilés 2021; Portocarrero 2013). Each of these racial categories "is measured by its distance from the racial pinnacle: pure whiteness," and from its articulation with class (Weismantel 2001: 87). "Money whitifies," goes a popular saying, which reveals that upward social mobility holds the potential to "whitify" the beholder. This plastic notion of race has real consequences for the intersection of race with other axes of identity. Skin color might, in certain cases, be only weakly correlated to race (De la Cadena 2004, 2008). For example, local elites across the Andes who could be safely described as epidermically mixed race, if [End Page 361] not brown, were unquestionably white vis-à-vis their Indigenous serfs. The Ball of La Laguna needs to be placed in the context of this racial configuration—and in the context of the rapid changes that this racial framework underwent in the twentieth century.
Lima remained a city structured by class and racial inequalities throughout the republican period and into the twentieth century. "Ethno-racial, class, regional origin, employability, spatial location, among other" factors determined residents' experience of the city (Aguirre and Panfichi 2013). Class and race continued to define one's position in the social hierarchy, as "race, and its inevitable companion, class" remain "at the core of persistent questions of who is a Limeña or Limeño" (Gandolfo 2009: 4). The privileged treatment that the police granted white, upper-class, and masculine maricones at the ball made perfect sense within the racial logics of Lima in the 1950s. During this decade, the deep-rooted racial anxieties of an Andean invasion of Lima that had pestered the minds of its white inhabitants since colonial times reached an all-time-high. From 1940 to 1972, the occupied area of the city increased by 111.2 percent, and its population grew by 419 percent, while the population of rural areas shrank by 24 percent. Lima went from having 661,500 inhabitants in 1940 to nearly 2,000,000 by 1961: its population tripled in twenty-one years. By 1972, Lima's population had already risen to 3,481,500 (Matos Mar 1986: 25–35). New Limeños immigrated from rural areas in Peru, largely from the sierra (highlands), and settled at the margins of the city. Some landed in the historical center, while others made their way into the dunes and constructed barriadas (slums) with shacks made from tarps. Indigenous migrants transformed the "village with aspirations to a city"—where German intellectual Alexander von Humboldt "learnt nothing of Peru"—into a city of ten million that constitutes, in many ways, a complex, yet significant, synthesis of the country at large (Degregori, Blondet, and Lynch 1986: 22, 290). The migrants spearheaded "the most important historical rupture of Peruvian society of the century" (Franco 1991: 194). White elites in Lima reacted to this rupture with classed and racialized fears and anxieties. La Laguna occurred at the height of these migratory movements and moral panics.
By hosting a carnival ball in La Laguna, maricones were transgressing not only gender and sexual norms in one of the most exclusive venues of the city but also a legal ban against carnival. Just one year prior, in 1958, President Manuel Prado had outlawed carnival festivities and turned the days of its celebration from public holidays into working days through Supreme Decree No. 348. President Prado, and the economic and racial elites that he represented, framed carnival as a violent diversion of the masses that could end in a fatal accident. Carnival in Lima [End Page 362] had traditionally served as a holiday that gave underprivileged Limeños free rein to throw dirty water, talcum powder, and bitumen at pedestrians and dance "licentiously." Afro-Peruvians and mestizos could temporarily reverse racial and class hierarchies and throw water at the white pedestrians that they had to respect all year long—echoing linguist Mikhail Bakhtin's (1984) famous accounts of the carnivalesque. Prado warned that the water that participants threw could cause them to either slip down the stairs or hit uninsulated electric cables in the street and electrocute them, and canceled carnival celebrations as a result (Hansen 2013: 31–32). Carnival parties in Barranco, including La Laguna, differed from these popular celebrations. Barranco "coated [them] in an aristocratic, elite tone . . . in a decorated environment with paper ribbons and colored balloons; ladies and gentlemen entered this place masked to dance to the beat of tangos" (Muñoz 2001: 195). These celebrations reached their climax with the awarding of a prize to a carnival queen "who carried a symbolic crown that indicated that she had taken command of the institution that elected her and which she represented during the days of carnival" (12–13). Organizers modeled the Ball of La Laguna after this elite form of carnival rather than the popular classes' outlawed one. The attendees met in a private space on a set date and time, had a guest list, and elected a queen—they did not spontaneously throw water at each other in the street, as was customary among the popular classes. The organizers of the ball set it up as an elite celebration, even though the establishment lacked even the most basic permit to operate at night. Galindo Rojas managed to bypass these restrictions with the help of his brother-in-law, police captain Carlos Padilla, whom the press would later point to as one of the culprits of the scandal. Galindo Rojas signed a contract with Augusto Postigo, the restaurant's licensee, on January 14, sixteen days before the party, on behalf of the Comité de Señoras y Señoritas Lima No. 1, which roughly translates to the Committee for (Married) Women and (Unwed) Young Women No. 1. Little is known about this organization, aside from its campy name. The tabloid Última Hora (1959e) lists it as another name for Club Vive Como Quieras (Live as You Want), but no additional information about it is provided.
The Night of La Laguna: A Dance, a Crown, and a Raid
The Ball of La Laguna began on February 2nd at 10 p.m. as couples started strolling down the bridge to the venue. Security personnel positioned at the Confraternidad Park let in only the holders of invitation letters, although organizer Galindo Rojas would later point a finger at the "malicious" maricones who entered the party without one. News reporters told a different story: "The ticket was worth 100 [End Page 363] soles and any person willing to pay that amount could enter freely" (Última Hora 1959b). Orquesta Villanueva received them with the latest mambos and boleros from La Sonora Matansera, prompting them to dance amidst paper ribbons, balloons, and camera shutters. Some of the guests participated in a beauty pageant and walked the runway dressed as odalisques, tigresses, and princesses, wearing costumes that they had ordered months in advance from local dressmakers or imported from foreign designers. These were hembritas, the feminine-presenting maricones who went to the ball cross-dressed. More conventionally masculine patrons, or machos, opted for the domino, "a two-color satin robe that . . . was, with your hood and mask, what all Lima wore [during carnival]," although no magazine bothered posting a picture of them.6 Patrons posed for photographs, paid the photographer for copies in advance, and gave them their home addresses.7 "Liquor ran in abundance."8 It is easy to imagine the attendees' excitement: rarely, if ever, could they see so many maricones in the same room.
Coco Geis, the winner of the contest, received the grand prize because of her "singularly exact costume which got to trick observers" (Última Hora 1959a). Coco attended the ball "dressed as an Eskimo,9 with a small skirt full of hairs here, of skin here," joined by her close friend Johny, who dressed up as a tigress.10 Cahuide (1959: 7), a lifestyle magazine, published a picture of them before their detention along with the caption, "The 'Queen' of the party and a 'female companion,' hand-in-hand, are a challenge to society and a reproach to an absurdly liberal education." Johny, her "female companion," wears a tigress costume and gazes directly at the camera (fig. 3). Cahuide seems doubtful of their gender performance, placing the title of "Queen" and "female companion" in scare quotes, but they seem not to care. Coco holds up a mask with her right hand and holds tight to Johny with her left, with a defiant smirk plastered over her face. Her white furry boots graciously match the furry lining around her hoodie, skirt, and sleeves. Every piece of her outfit, down to the smallest detail, seems like a conscious decision. Johny parades proudly by Coco's side in a cheetah print bodycon dress that lets the photographer catch every contour of her silhouette. She holds her chin up, as if she was posing for a Christian Dior catalog rather than the lens of a crime news photographer (perhaps, in Coco's and Johny's minds, there was not much difference between the two). One of the other pictures from Cahuide (1959: 7) displays a group of four anonymous " 'Ladies' who were taken from La Laguna to the police station posing for their own defamation" (fig. 4). The four hembritas in the picture wear pompous gowns, collars, and earrings. They stare at different points outside the boundaries of the photograph—two straight at the camera, one into the horizon, and the remaining one at the bottom-right corner. One cannot help but stare at the hembrita in the front whose gown [End Page 364] ends in a siren tail. She toys with her gloved hands, and a bag hangs over her right shoulder. Only the hembrita at the back seems to be wearing a wig; the rest sport short hair. Ladies is written with scare quotes in the caption, mocking their attempt at femininity. Much like Coco and Johny in the previous photograph, they chose to pose for their own defamation in an obvious sign of defiance. If they were going to go down, they might as well go down in style.
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Two women holding hands on steps wearing a fur-trimmed dress and a leopard print catsuit;caption:Party queen & escort challenge liberal education](/article/901761/image/fig03?format=thumb)
Coco and Johny. Photograph by Cahuide, 1959. Cahuide, 7, Lima.
Outside the premises of the manor, a crowd had started to gather. Manuel Campodónico, the mayor of Barranco, burst into the restaurant past midnight after receiving calls from concerned citizens, "without imagining that soon after he was going to make desperate and useless efforts to stop the party, after reporting the entrance of men who had as partners men dressed as women with denigrating makeup" (Última Hora 1959b). Other versions circulating among maricones accuse somebody who did not get invited or got thrown out of the party of calling the police or theorize that the raid formed part of a complot to draw attention away from a political ploy. Nevertheless, the result remains the same: the mayor called the prefect of Lima, Mr. Cox Larco, and asked for the closure of the venue. As Larco related:
The Mayor of Barranco, Mr. Campodónico, called me at 1:40 in the morning on Saturday, 31 January (it was almost Sunday) to report a very serious [End Page 365] incident. There was taking place, at a restaurant called La Laguna, a ball with inverts, some dressed in feminine attire. Immediately, I called the head officer of the Civil Guard and I notified him of the incident. This officer called, by phone, captain Carlos Padilla, from the Commissioner of Barranco. . . . In total five minutes must have been employed, that is to say, the orders were given when it was already 1:45 in the morning. However, the ball was suspended at 3:00 in the morning.
Carlos Padilla, the chief of police of Barranco and brother-in-law of organizer Galindo Rojas, arrived at the restaurant at 2:30 a.m.—forty-five minutes after the prefect ordered him to do so. Última Hora (1959b) reported that "the mayor was getting desperate, calling the chief of police [Padilla] so that he could put a stop to the spectacle, without him following his orders." Once inside the venue, Padilla avoided stopping the party, warning the mayor, "If you wish I can suspend the party but under your responsibility. . . . Can you assure me that those girls there are not women?" (Última Hora 1959b). Padilla, trying to save his own skin, suspended the party at three in the morning and only under direct orders of the prefect of Lima. These events unleashed the media, civil, and legal outrage that started to bubble up just outside the doors of the manor.
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Black and white photo of four women posing against a wall. Spanish caption 'Grupo de Damas...' (Group of ladies taken from La Laguna to police station)](/article/901761/image/fig04?format=thumb)
"Group of 'Ladies.' " Photograph by Cahuide, 1959. Cahuide, 7, Lima.
[End Page 366]
Hembritas and Machos: Performing Gender and Sex Roles at the Ball
Couples at the ball predominantly consisted of masculine-presenting men, or machos, and their feminine-presenting partners, hembritas. These terms translate to male and (little) female, respectively, but with a connotation that is usually reserved for animals (male/female) rather than for humans (man/woman). Hembritas were the maricones who, like Coco, Johny, and the "group of Ladies" photographed by Cahuide, queered the boundaries of acceptable dress by wearing feminine attire and projecting a feminine image. Most hembritas at the ball participated in a pageant for the title of carnival queen, which Coco Geis won. Machos were the masculine partners of hembritas who could retain the privileges afforded to "normal men" as long as they wore masculine attire and projected a masculine image. Some of them might have seen themselves as masculine maricones, while others as normal men who could fuck a maricón without becoming one. One of my informants, who was well-acquainted with many attendees, describes this division as follows: "Do you want to be my boyfriend tonight, do you want to be my man, do you want to be my prince? Okay, I am your hembrita. You dressed up yourself because, additionally, allegedly, you had a tuxedo. I had my long dress made to order or got it somewhere and we arrived together in your car or in my taxi, wherever."11 Some guests of La Laguna performed the roles of machos and hembritas in their everyday lives, while others enacted them solely within the boundaries of the ball or in other marica spaces. Hembritas, for instance, were known to "tone down" their feminine gender expression in everyday life, since they could be punished or mocked for it—which did not constitute a problem for machos, whose masculine gender expression society celebrated.
Most of the attendees at La Laguna were upper-class, white maricones, which extended to the subset of machos and the hembritas. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a higher concentration of hembritas among the strata of working-class, mestizo, and Indigenous attendees. These hembritas would later be prosecuted at a higher rate than machos not only because of their working-class background but also because they were feminine and nonwhite. There were also certain machos and upper-class, white hembritas whom the police prosecuted—not least the organizers and the queen of the ball. More often than not, though, their whiteness and their privileged class background outweighed their responsibility as organizers, in the case of the prosecuted machos, or their effeminacy, in the case of the hembritas. Only the most flagrant offenders—the posing queens and the organizers—shared the dire fate of their less privileged sisters. [End Page 367]
Machos were expected to top the hembritas or, at least, to give the appearance of doing so. This is not to say that all machos were unequivocally masculine or that, behind closed doors, the hembritas could not top them. These ideal typical categories could be negotiated and even subverted outside the public gaze. Some machos' gender performances even seem to have had a touch of flamboyance—a "feathery something," in an informant's words, that gave them away as the machos of maricones rather than the partners of cisgender women. Nor did hembritas necessarily fathom themselves as feminine men outside the context of the ball or as proto-trans women. Coco is reported by an interviewee to have gone by a campy combination of masculine and feminine pronouns without fully claiming a female identity—much in the same way that contemporary maricones in Peru, including myself, identify themselves among marica and female friends. These terms thus need to be understood in their contextual specificity without trying to fit them into the LGBTQ+ acronym, or into categories such as top and bottom, which carry northern assumptions that did not exist in mid-twentieth-century Peru.
One of the central transformations that La Laguna unveiled was a gradual shift from a gender-stratified to an egalitarian model of same-sex desire. Until the 1950s, Peruvian men's (homo)sexual object choice need not label them as homosexuals as long as they maintained a masculine demeanor and (appeared to) penetrate their partners (Galdo-González 2021). Nevertheless, in the aftermath of La Laguna, media outlets, police officers, and the public started to name some of these machos as homosexual. Masculine-presenting attendees who would have traditionally perceived themselves, and would have been perceived by others, as "normal," nonhomosexual men, started to acquire the label of homosexual. Organizer Fernando Galindo himself appears in the press as a sober character "dressed in a black suit, brown pants, plaid shirt . . . polarized spectacles," "a fine moustache," and without "affected behaviors," but, in a turn of history, receives the label of homosexual (Última Hora 1959d). His surprise at this labeling is understandable: a significant portion of middle- and upper-class machos saw themselves as respectable men with an unfortunate interest in hembritas—the only aspect of their identity that alienated them from their spot at the top of Peruvian society. Some might have even seen themselves as "masculine homosexuals," a term increasingly popularized by the medico-legal discourse of the time, but certainly not as criminal maricones. Hembritas, on the other hand, embodied a heavily stigmatized, feminine-presenting, and, presumably, sexually receptive position that significantly underprivileged them—lest their class and racial privilege save them. Most hembritas attended La Laguna dressed as princesses and odalisques with costumes whose quality indicated their class and race. Masculine-presenting [End Page 368] attendees commanded more respect than hembritas not only because of their masculine demeanor but also, as the next section demonstrates, because of the privileged intersection of their class, race, and gender identities: the press and the authorities perceived them as masculine homosexuals but opted not to prosecute them.
After La Laguna: A Media Scandal, a National Campaign, and a Legacy
La Laguna challenged public morals and good customs: it unleashed a "scandal that shames Perú and that no man with moral and patriotism could stand" (La Crónica 1959b). Who shamed Perú's "good customs"? Were "good customs" under the attack of upper-class, discrete homosexuals, too, or only working-class hembritas? Despite its elite setting, the ball attracted two hundred homosexuals from heterogenous socioeconomic backgrounds, all of whom swayed to the beat of Orchestra Villanueva on the dance floor. Some were the sons of high-ranking government officials, others, dressmakers, hairdressers, or foreign dancers. Some were dressed in "white tuxedos, dominos, Hawaiian costumes" or "as sailors." Others were dressed in "feminine costumes with surprising result" (Ultima Hora 1959b). One could mistake La Laguna for a marica utopia where the poor and the rich, the province boy and the aristocrat, and the hairdresser and the businessman swayed under the same roof. Despite this heterogeneous composition, however, the police mostly arrested working-class, mestizo, and Indigenous hembritas rather than the masculine-presenting, white hembritas and machos who made up the majority of the guest list. Society stigmatized all attendees for their sexuality, but Indigenous and mestizo hembritas positioned at the intersection of these marginalized class, racial, and gender axes of identity carried the worst burden. Officers arrested these guests, both nationals and internationals, prosecuted them, subjected them to anal examinations, fined them, and outed them in mainstream media outlets throughout the two weeks following the ball.
Gender and sexual discrimination cannot be disentangled from racism and classism at the Ball of La Laguna. One elderly informant who attended the ball as a young man recalls that "everybody [at the party] were people like us, whites," although "there were some who had something of a capulí (cherry) color."12 These working-class, cherry-skinned guests bore the brunt of the consequences of the ball, despite the higher number of white, high-class guests in attendance. The maricophobic (maricón-phobic) violence enacted against these attendees needs to be understood as the result of the intersection of their class, race, gender, and sexual identities. Most of the detainees, observed this informant, were "the travestis [End Page 369] and a small group who must have been the organizers, who protested against the police." Organizer Galindo Rojas could be counted among the latter group of organizers—a small group in comparison to the sizeable number of detained hembritas. Class and racial oppression shaped authorities', media outlets', and scandalized crowds' reactions to the ball. "None of us were taken [by the police], do you realize that? They took the ones who called the most attention," confirmed the attendee. "Calling the most attention" could mean organizing the ball or being crowned queen of carnival as a white maricón, but, more often than not, it meant simply existing as a nonwhite, working-class hembrita or a "travesti." He was not friends with effeminate cross-dressers; "it wasn't my world." None of his friends at the ball attended cross-dressed, as "it would have been unconceivable to me, and to them," he explained. Not to say that only working-class, mestizo guests dressed as women: upper-class guests also behaved effeminately and could cross-dress their way into the ball. Another informant, who was but a kid in 1959, recounted that many of his older friends who attended the ball in scandalously feminine costumes "had not one, but [often] two of the most prominent family names in Lima."13 Some of them turned up to the ball cross-dressed, but, as the first informant succinctly put it, only the ones "who called the most attention" spent the night behind bars and were outed in the newspapers. His testimony leaves no doubt about the classist and racist character of the gender oppression at the Ball of La Laguna.
Claudio's deployment of the term travesti when describing which attendees were arrested by the police is worth looking into. Travesti is a term commonly used in Latin America to refer to a person who transitions between genders through cross-dressing—typically from a masculine starting point. This identity label plays an important role in working-class cultures in which terms such as transgender or transsexual have not completely penetrated. Other authors have already discussed the difference between travesti and the northern transgender (Cavagnoud 2014; Kulick 1998; Machuca 2019; Prieur 1998). Whereas the latter assumes that trans people cross from one pole of the gender binary to another (from gender a to gender b), travestismo (travestism) relishes the in-between. Travestismo concerns itself with the gender crossing itself, instead of the "gender destinations" at which people may arrive through such a crossing. Nevertheless, most of the hembritas at the ball seem to have identified as effeminate, working-class maricones who cross-dressed for concrete occasions, such as carnival, not as hembritas who cross-dressed in their everyday lives. Some hembritas might have cross-dressed more frequently than others, but, by and large, most identified and dressed as men outside the ball—if effeminate ones or, more accurately, maricones. The term travesti [End Page 370] itself seems to have come into broad circulation in Peru only in the 1970s, two decades after the party. Other terms, such as hembrita and peluquera (female hairdresser), predominated at the time of the ball. Claudio could have swapped travesti for them, yet he did not. For Claudio, travesti seems to have retrospectively designated working-class hembritas. Travesti does multidimensional work in Claudio's memorialization; it highlights the working-class effeminacy of the arrested maricones, but also their genealogical relationship to modern-day travestis in Lima. Travesti comes to index the effeminate, working-class maricones who were arrested during the raid—in a similar way as has been reported in other contexts. This conceptualization of lo travesti complicates the northern urge to force non-Western identities into an LGBTQ+ straitjacket without attending to its internal complexities and contradictions. Regardless of his reasoning, Claudio's choice reveals the capaciousness of travesti and other long-forgotten twentieth-century terms to name gender and sexual diversity in Latin America.
"Unprecedented Scandal": The Role of the Media in the Aftermath of the Ball of La Laguna
One of the arenas in which the classist, racist, and maricophobic discourses around the Ball of La Laguna appeared with the greatest force was the press. Newspapers displayed detainees' full names, occupations, photos, home and work addresses, and even their license plates, which made them vulnerable to retaliation. Five newspapers and two magazines alone published forty articles, some of which spread over several pages, in the span of two weeks. Their sensational headlines channeled the feelings of the population: "Unprecedented Scandal," "The Police Will Imprison the Abnormals," and "More Immorals Fall" (fig. 5). Newspapers outed the attendees by disseminating their personal information and headshots. They "propagated a culture of accusation and suspicion, of humiliation and shame, stalling any potential reaction for the legal and human rights of those who that same media would later term 'the vulnerable' " (Buntinx, Contreras, and Durand 2008). Many young maricones first encountered homosexuality in the public sphere through the media-sponsored panic and public scorn that followed the ball. One of my interviewees found out about the ball through the newspapers during high school.14 His innocence blinded him: he could not understand why the police would raid La Laguna. After all, he saw but a harmless carnival party. He did not dare ask his mother about the ball—he already knew that he "liked the affair." Would the same fate await him?
Only five out of twenty addresses published by the newspapers pointed to [End Page 371] locations in the upper-class districts of Miraflores and San Isidro. The remaining fifteen addresses were located in La Victoria and Downtown Lima, which, at the time, were considered lower- and lower-middle-class areas. These segregated maricón geographies suggest that the authorities overwhelmingly arrested underprivileged maricones who lived in working- or middle-class areas of the city. Many of them lived close together on Moquegua Street in Cercado de Lima and Manco Cápac Street in La Victoria, near the areas where some travestis continue to labor as sex workers today. Anthropologist José Matos Mar confirms that Miraflores and San Isidro cemented their status as homes to the aristocracy of Lima between the 1940s and the 1960s, which left the once-aristocratic Historical Center to lower-class immigrants. Miraflores became the new symbolic center of the city and Park Kennedy its main square precisely around the time of La Laguna. The Historical Center and its colonial Main and republican San Martin squares were losing their symbolic importance—they underwent a long-term process of decay. Most of the detainees inhabited these working-class spaces, despite attendees' overwhelmingly white and upper-class positions.
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Black and white poster of Spanish insults in varied fonts listing terms such as Homosexuales (Homosexuals), Femeninos Anormales (abnormal feminine) and Repudio (repudiation)](/article/901761/image/fig05?format=thumb)
Digital collage based on newspapers' coverage of the Ball of La Laguna, 2021. It reads, "homosexuals / a party / of immorals / passive pederasts / feminine / abnormals / embarrassing / effeminates / offense against good customs / repudiation." Collage by author, Amsterdam.
Magazines such as Caretas (1959: 13) justified their refusal to publish the names of certain attendees by framing them as the victims of another group of queers: "A shameful act happened in Lima that we did not want to publicize because we believed it was unnecessary to punish the shameless, scandalous [End Page 372] attendees of La Laguna. . . . This has resulted in a series of youth who are not responsible for their disease to suffer prison or persecution, mostly corrupted people and not corruptors." Caretas unequivocally described the upper-class attendees as "corrupted people," while rendering the working-class maricones their "corruptors." The tabloid Última Hora (1959f) justified its coverage of the ball by arguing that silence "would have tarnished the name of many innocent people and, perhaps, those truly responsible would have avoided their guilt." Caretas and Última Hora reasoned that not all maricones were equally responsible for their perversion: those born rich and white were being corrupted by lower-class hembritas and deserved to be reedemed. Hembritas, on the other hand, posed a real threat to public order and decorum and deserved jail time and their names to be tarnished. Only La Tribuna (1959), a left-leaning newspaper, denounced the presence of maricones from the upper echelons of Peruvian society and demanded their arrest.
One of these tabloids dedicated their "Cartoon of the Day" to mock the attendees of the ball (fig. 6). Última Hora's cartoon depicts a house on an island in the midst of a calm lake. Considering the newspaper's extensive coverage of the ball, one can safely interpret that it refers to La Laguna. Multiple elements in this cartoon point toward the upper-class maricón nature of the ball: the written signs on the walls announcing a "carnivalesque," "pituco" (posh), and "exclusive party" with "no women," and the masks of comedy and tragedy that decorate the corners of the house. "No women" is written in English, as if to stress the upper-class background of the maricones and the international aura that this status granted them. "There are only decent people here!" warns a long-bearded character with a mischievous smile from inside the manor. His pinky finger hovers seductively over the corner of his mouth. His feminine mannerisms, clothing, and posture correspond to the stereotypes around maricones. Next to this queer character, the hairy legs of an individual in high heels peaks through the curtains. Última Hora's joke lands because it exaggerates the contradiction inherent in the image of a gender-transgressive, yet allegedly "decent," maricón. "How could maricones assure bystanders that their gathering is 'exclusive' while wearing eccentric costumes and heels, posing provocatively, and exposing a hairy leg?," the cartoonist seems to be asking us. "How could they claim to be 'decent people' when their sexuality and gender presentation suggest otherwise?"
Medicine operated as a tool to determine whose bodies showed signs of perversion. "All [detained] subjects" were ordered to "undergo a medical exam that establishes—faithfully—their condition as homosexuals" (La Crónica 1959b). [End Page 373] Newspapers did not specify what these "faithful" medical examinations entailed. Nevertheless, their results led inspectors to describe detainees as "passive pederasts" and, thus, certify them as "homosexuals," collapsing these categories into one another.15 Most detainees were arrested at the ball while wearing feminine attire, which should have sufficed for the police to label them as perverts. Authorities felt the need, regardless, to set the "real homosexuals" apart from a group of presumably "unreal" ones through an external medical examination. Medical examiners, whom the police tasked with conducting these tests, located a person's homosexuality in their adoption of a receptive sexual role, which, presumably, the shape, texture, and aperture of their anuses could indicate. Their definition labeled anally receptive partners (i.e., "bottoms") as homosexuals, excluding anally insertive men (i.e., "tops") from this condition and sparing them from legal prosecution.
![[AI Generated Alt Text] Cartoon of a doghouse pavilion with comedy and tragedy masks on the roof and the caption Parroquianos exclusivos (Exclusive parishioners)](/article/901761/image/fig06?format=thumb)
"The Cartoon of the Day." Cartoon in La Tribuna, February 1959.
Several of these detained maricones were domestic migrants who had emigrated from inner regions of Peru such as Cajamarca, Huánuco, and Ica. [End Page 374] Newspapers made their migration status clear: Filemón, a sixteen-year-old hembrita from the province of Dos de Mayo in Huánuco, appeared multiple times in the news coverage of the ball. Police surveillance forced these maricones to flee the city or lock themselves inside their homes. Organizer Galindo Rojas himself had been born in Cajamarca. Not all maricones were of Peruvian nationality, either. Three out of the four members of the organizing committee of Club Vive Como Quieras had traveled to Lima from other countries—namely, Italy, Chile, and Ecuador. Newspapers portrayed these foreign maricones as "the 'technical brains' " of an "organization of perverts that could have ramifications of international character" (La Crónica 1959b). One of them attempted to commit suicide by ingesting muriatic acid to avoid being arrested. Another tried to escape the country, but the police captured him using "wired messages and calls—encoded—that have gone out to all frontiers of Perú" (La Crónica 1959b). The Foreign Affairs police expelled the Ecuadorian and Italian citizens on February 19—perhaps the first deportation from Peru on grounds of sexual orientation. All attendees that the press outed had Peruvian citizenship, except the three organizers and a student from the Canary Islands.
Representative organizations condemned the party in numerous official statements. For example, the Peruvian Association of Social Hygiene published a communiqué on February 2 asking for prevention against immoral behavior (Última Hora 1959g). The Peruvian Red Cross and the Legion of Decency of Callao, among other institutions, signed this document. The Peruvian National Assembly of Catholic Action, alongside other religious groups, signed the text: the arrest was "worth highlighting, taking into account that we are getting used to not punishing public immorality" (La Crónica 1959b). The Catholic newspaper Verdades warned that "when this relaxation [carnival celebrations] enters the violent or the nefarious, it must be repressed" (Verdades 1959). The Artistic Cultural Center of Peruvian Hairdressers also issued a statement condemning the incident at La Laguna. Most arrested partygoers worked as hairdressers, which turned their statement into a necessary public defense of "respectable" hairdressers who feared being mistaken for maricones. "They think that their moral deviations allow them to exercise a profession that, since it is public domain, requires a high technical and moral capacity," claimed the center (Última Hora 1959c). Nobody wanted to be associated with the attendees of La Laguna.
On February 16, 1959, sixteen days after the party, a judge freed the ten attendees who remained in custody under allegations of corruption of a minor present at the party. The total number of maricones whom the police arrested remains unclear, but, based on information from the interviews and the sizeable number [End Page 375] of guests outed in the press, it seems that many more bargained for their freedom prior to the trial. Peru's civil code lifted the ban on homosexuality in 1924, but police officers retained "the power to detain alleged homosexuals for exercising acts against decorum and public order" (Tirado Ratto 2019: 75). Order, in the law enforcers' view, required "following the majority's behavioral patterns," while " 'disorder' [entailed] all alternative expression[s], therefore sanctioned by eradication" (Montalvo 1997: 4). This unclear definition of order gave room to the subjective interpretations of police officers, who could then prosecute nonnormative behaviors on a meager legal basis. Police officers could also instrumentalize the open-endedness of the law to not prosecute—that is, to tolerate—the nonnormative behaviors of otherwise privileged individuals, as in the case of La Laguna. Despite these legal loopholes, accusers ultimately had to face that "the [penal] code does not contemplate sanctions for this class of outrages" (Última Hora 1959i). Judges tried to press other charges on the attendees but failed to sustain their accusations. Editors of Última Hora (1959i) lamented that "it was impossible to put together a vagrancy report since all of them worked, mostly as stylists–hairdressers in beauty salons of a lower standing." The Municipality of Barranco canceled Postigo's contract and licensed the space to the restaurant Caballo Negro (Black Horse) and eventually turned it into a cultural center. Carlos Padilla, police captain and Galindo Rojas's brother-in-law, was dismissed from the police department. The Foreign Affairs police division closed the case shortly after deporting two Ecuadorians and one Italian. Their deportation operated as a purge of immoral sexual deviants from the nation—the concluding stroke in a weeks-long moral panic. These arrests and deportations "put an end to the scandal that was the topic of conversation of Limeños for entire days" (1959i).
Conclusions
The Ball of La Laguna reveals that the class, race, and gender inequalities that had structured Peruvian society since colonial times also structured maricón social worlds and the policing of their communities. Maricones experienced homophobic treatment in the aftermath of the ball, but Indigeneity, femininity, and lower-class status compounded these inequalities. Newspapers' unequal representations of white, upper-class guests and nonwhite, working-class hembritas evidence the extent of their classist and racist biases, as this article has documented. One's intersectional position along these axes could determine whether one would spend the night at home after the raid, albeit scarred, or a week in prison while newspapers disclosed one's personal information. These disadvantaging categories [End Page 376] operated on a spectrum: the closer a maricón got to an underprivileged position, the greater at risk they were of being subject to policing, public outings, and prosecution. La Laguna enables us to describe maricón social worlds in mid-twentieth-century Lima from an intersectional class, race, and gender perspective: the detainees' crime lay not only in being maricones but also in being nonwhite, poor, and effeminate ones. Members of the city's ambiente16 who inhabited Indigenous or mestizo, poor, and effeminate positions were stripped of their humanity at a systematically higher rate than their white, upper-class, and masculine presenting "sisters." Newspapers, municipal hearings, photographs, a video advertisement, and extracts from two life history interviews substantiated these arguments. La Laguna thus offers queer studies an alternative site from which to think through notions of sexual and gender behavior and identity in history, and their intersection with class and race relations. Broadening the scope of the hemispheric turn in queer studies, this article foregrounds the importance of attending to race, class, gender, and sex in the global South.
Who transgressed the social order at the Ball of La Laguna? Nobody would have raised an eyebrow at a posh white maricón sipping a martini in male apparel in broad daylight at the terrace of La Laguna. Waiters would have asked to hang their coats. Long-time straight friends would have greeted them. Socialite photographers would have snapped a picture of them. Hembritas, on the other hand, would have stuck out like a sore thumb—day or night, lunch service or maricón ball. Their presence in La Laguna, an upper-class establishment, during a traditionally elite celebration of carnival challenged class and racial structures as much as heteronormative ones. Hembritas were cross-dressing not only as women but also as upper-class ones. This cross-dressing put them at greater risk of policing; they "called attention to themselves," as one attendee put it. Upper-class maricones also challenged sexual and gender scripts by cross-dressing in a semi-public space, but their presence in La Laguna left class and racial norms mostly untouched. Officers, neighbors, and newspapers reacted against the intersection of attendees' class, racial, gender, and sexual positions, rather than to their cross-dressing and deviant sexual behavior. Carnival, a celebration of inversion and resistance, offered the ideal time-space for these transgressions. Maricones whom neighbors harassed, newspapers outed, and officers detained appeared out of place on multiple, intersecting levels: they wore formal feminine attire, came from working-class districts, and opened up their bodies to masculine men. Caretas' distinction between detainees who "corrupted" and those who were the objects of corruption, for instance, illustrates the class- and race-segregated forms of repression that hembritas' presence at the ball engendered. [End Page 377]
The Ball of La Laguna is a window into the social worlds that maricones constructed across Lima in the 1950s. Attendees attached feelings of comfort and belonging to their visits to the ambiente, which became "part of a process of searching for collective references," that is, of role models, "by people who have opted for alternative lifestyles" (Montalvo 1997: 44). Raids, alongside other attacks to spaces on ambiente, constituted attacks against the community at large. Recovering La Laguna as a site to think through mariconadas may allow us to approach a question that a local magazine posed back in 1959 and with which this essay began: "How many lagoons may exist in this city of ours?" The Ball of La Laguna is an entry into the maricón social worlds that spread out across the ports of El Callao and La Herradura, the main square of Lima, the canteens, and the cinemas of the Rimac, among other spaces. European and US sailors in El Callao, young beachgoers in La Herradura, upper-class maricones and cholo soldiers on leave in the main square, and "normal" men and their admirers in the canteens dwelled in these underworlds. Maricones found comfort and company in the anonymity that these transitional spaces provided. Their subculture flourished well into the second half of the twentieth century into complex social worlds with dedicated bars, bathhouses, clubs, drag shows, cruising areas, theatre groups, and other spaces of ambiente, such as the Ball of La Laguna. Modern urban growth set the conditions for this maricón subculture in Lima, which remained unimaginable in rural areas. Lima acquired a new urban landscape throughout the twentieth century—and maricones were an integral part of this new landscape. The anxieties that La Laguna produced among Limeños need to be placed in light of the broader anxieties against working-class, mestizo, and Indigenous migrants. This process unfolded throughout Latin America and, more broadly, the world. Challenging the erasure of La Laguna within Latin American and Anglocentric queer studies, this article reinserts La Laguna into this circuit of maricon cross-dressing balls that popped up in capital cities in Latin America throughout the twentieth century.
La Laguna, as most of maricón history in twentieth-century Peru, remains wholly under-researched. Many people born before the 1960s remember the ball, but it seems that they would rather forget it. Old residents of Barranco avoid revealing the names of the "créme de la créme" maricones who attended the party. One user replied to a post that I wrote on social media urging me to "leave the past in the past [because] there are many grandfathers today who would not like it if this event came to light for respect to their families." Memorializing a maricón past carries grave consequences for the present and the future that Limeños imagine. Another resident recognized that he "knew who was the Carnival Queen, a reknown Barranquiño, but for respect to the family I will not be able to mention [End Page 378] [it]." Nobody levied the same defense of the unrespectable maricones whom authorities detained, newspapers outed, and the public ostracized. Nobody pondered that respecting the attendees' memory may entail recognizing their central place in the maricón history of Peru. Memory and history work constitute an effort to honor the memories of this generation of maricones. Our embrace of maricón histories, however, should not come at the cost of romanticizing their communities as utopias free of inequalities. Not all maricones in La Laguna had to jump in the water to escape the angry neighbors who gathered around the establishment. Not all of them spent the night behind bars. The Ball of La Laguna remains firmly embedded in the structures of racism, classism, and gender discrimination that continue to undergird heteronormative Peruvian society. [End Page 379]
Diego Galdo-González is a research master's student in the social sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests lie at the intersection of sexual history, sexual cultures, and urban studies in Lima, Perú. He also works as a junior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and coordinates the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality.
Notes
1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
2. Marica is used as a synonym for maricón in this article.
3. The term carnival refers in this article to the city-wide celebration that unfolded in Lima during the month of February, not specifically to the Ball of La Laguna, unless stated otherwise.
4. Andean is used here in its geopolitical sense to refer to Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, not to every country that the Andean mountain range connects.
5. Limeño is the demonym for a resident of Lima.
6. Oral history interview with Person 2, which was conducted in June 2018.
7. These pictures were not found at the General Archive of the Nation in Peru, as the files that could potentially hold them have not yet been made available to users. The pictures of the attendees that are used in this article come from newspapers and magazines, but not from the official photographer of the ball.
8. Oral history interview with Person 2, which was conducted in June 2018.
9. Coco's performance constitutes an example of racial impersonation of the Eskimo people, whom his performance reduces to an "Eskimo costume," as a reviewer cleverly noted. Nevertheless, the analysis of this racial impersonation is complicated by the lack of references to the Eskimo people in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian culture. There is a growing scholarship on Chinese and Japanese migration in twentieth-century Peru, but, to the best of my knowledge, no such equivalent exists on images of the Eskimo people. There is no sizeable Eskimo diaspora that could be the direct source of inspiration of the performance. The degree to which Coco and her contemporaries had any image at all of the Eskimo people is thus unclear; it is difficult to pinpoint which stereotypes and images Coco was referencing through this choice of a "costume." There is interesting literature on red-face performances in Anglo America that could help advance this analysis.
10. Oral history interview with Person 1, which was conducted in April 2018. Person 1 heard this information from a friend who attended the party. Person 1's knowledge of Coco's triumph, right down to her costume, even though he did not attend the party himself, attests to its enduring significance in maricón culture.
11. Oral history interview with Person 3, which was conducted in October 2020.
12. Oral history interview with Person 2, which was conducted in June 2018. The informant uses cherry color here as a metaphor to refer to the skin color of mestizo and Indigenous people. I had never come across this term for mestizo or Indigenous up until this interview. Nevertheless, using euphemisms to speak about race is commonplace in Peru, since explicitly naming race can be seen as a breach of etiquette.
13. Oral history interview with Person 1, which was conducted in April 2018.
14. Oral history interview with Person 1, which was conducted in April 2018.
15. Newspapers used the term homosexual sparingly and instead opted for terms such as immoral, pervert, abnormal, or effeminate to refer to the attendees of the Ball of La Laguna. Homosexual is a term that circulated widely in the medico-legal discourse in Peru since the early twentieth century, but not so in popular culture. It is thus in character that La Crónica would use it in the context of a medical diagnosis of the sexual role of the attendees.
16. The term ambiente remains in circulation as of 2022 and refers to the set of maricón spaces throughout Lima. These spaces need not have been exclusively marica (e.g., a twenty-first-century gay bar), since they could have also been used by people who remained unaware of the homosexual possibilities that the city offered (e.g., parks). They turned into spaces of ambiente when maricas started to frequent them more than others.
