Weekends in Mexico City are peaceful. I don’t feel the urgency to finish errands, complete workout classes, or have a “take advantage of the weekend” mindset—which I often experience in the States. Instead, weekends are treated as they should be–an opportunity to relax after a busy week. As a friend’s mom told me recently, “Saturdays are like Sundays in Mexico.” So, on Saturday mornings, I often see couples and families walking slowly and congregating at coffee shops near my apartment. Many of these couples are queer. Queer life in Mexico City is not bounded by la Zona Rosa, the de facto LBGTQ+ neighborhood in the city, instead, queer people are everywhere, and there are plenty of unofficial queer spaces and queer-friendly establishments. Mexico has been a trailblazer in LBGTQ+ rights both in Latin America and across the globe, legalizing same-sex marriage in December 2022, while a majority of Mexican states also favor same-sex adoption rights. Mexico City, in particular, predated the rest of the country and much of the United States by legalizing same-sex civil unions in 2006. 

My queerness has been on my mind recently, as I heard the tragic news of a woman in California shot and killed by a homophobic man for displaying a pride flag at the window of her business. Even more than all of the other attacks against LBGTQ+ rights happening across the U.S., this story resonated with me viscerally. I was horrified that someone who is homophobic could act on it—thanks to a gun he should, in my view, have never owned. At the same time, I was also struck by the bravery of the woman, a mother of nine and an ally who defended LBGTQ+ rights at an enormous risk. However, I was troubled that she needed to be brave at all in 2023. I’m not sure I would have been as brave.

Spending my summer here has awakened the Latinx parts of my queer identity. My queer icons aren’t limited to Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Kylie Minogue.

While homophobia is present everywhere, I have been grateful to be in a city where my queerness does not become a target for hate crime, and where displaying it publicly has never been a source of anyone’s interest, benign or otherwise. I have several openly queer colleagues at work and I have never felt like my coworkers value me differently because of my sexuality. If anything, me being gay feels as natural as them being straight–as it should be. Yet I also recognize there’s a part of me that is deeply attuned to the safety of my environment because I have felt targeted for my sexuality in the past. I’ve processed these experiences and largely moved on from them, but like many openly gay men, I won’t deny that I pay close attention to comments people make in reference to queerness and how they treat me. From my perspective, the sixth sense queer people develop serves as a layer of protection and is also a symptom caused by the persistent inequality we face in a heteronormative society with large swaths of the population still opposing some form of LBGTQ+ rights. It wouldn’t be necessary in a world where homophobia, transphobia, and queerphobia were relics of another time.

As I navigate being queer and Latinx in Mexico City, I have also felt safe from another source of inequity often silenced in narratives about LBGTQ+ rights back home–the dominance of White, American, European, and cis-male identities within LBGTQ+ spaces in the US. One clear example where this dominance manifests is in the queer nightlife scene in the States. Rarely are Latinx and/or African-American artists played at clubs in iconic gay neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen (NYC) or the Castro (San Francisco), and they only make it to the dance floor once White audiences “discover” them (like the recent phenomenon of Bad Bunny). While music on the dance floor might appear to be a frivolous issue, I would argue the privileging of the White experience in LBGTQ+ narratives in the US has an array of consequences. It flattens the diversity of queer experiences to a single narrative and marginalizes queer people of color for their ethnicity and race. It also has a nefarious impact on a global level. In creating a universal LBGTQ+ identity inaccessible to most of the world, queerness is easier to characterize as an unfamiliar and a Western (or in rural and conservative areas of the US, metropolitan and liberal) import, further fanning the flames of homophobia, transphobia, and queerphobia, and ignoring the diversity of queer histories across different timespans, cultures, and societies. 

This is why I’ve been so pleased to experience being queer in Mexico City. Spending my summer here has awakened the Latinx parts of my queer identity. My queer icons aren’t limited to Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Kylie Minogue. I also fangirl over Alejandra Guzman, Paulina Rubio, Selena, among others. I experienced bullying for being queer as I grew up both in the U.S. and in Perú, and while I have largely healed from these challenging memories, it has been refreshing to see queer people here redefine what it means to be Mexican, and more broadly, Latin American, by pushing aside outdated notions of machismo. This isn’t to say there aren’t challenges for queer people and the LBGTQ+ rights movement in Mexico. Progress is never linear, and as LBGTQ+ people become more normalized in any society, the risk of backlash can intensify, as seen in the recent outrage from Ron DeSantis in Florida about LBGTQ+–sensitive curriculum changes in schools. In Mexico, particularly outside of the metropolitan area of Mexico City, trans people face enormous hurdles in employment discrimination and street violence, and LBGTQ+ people overall are targets for hate crimes, as detailed in a recent report (2022) by the NGO Letra Ese.

They created a space where we all could forget about needing to feel safe. It was a space where our queerness, femininity, and gender fluidity was the default.

Despite these setbacks, there are so many reasons to be inspired and to have hope. During one of my first weekends here, I visited el Salon Los Angeles, a legendary cumbia establishment where the likes of Celia Cruz and La Sonora Santanera (a famous Mexican cumbia band) have performed. I was there for a special performance by las Musas Sonideras, an all women, queer-friendly DJ group there to lead a crowd through original cumbia mixes and popular songs. As my journalist friend, Madeleine Wattenberger, describes in a piece about the group, sonideros are MCs or DJs that brought the beats to street dancing emerging in working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City. This particular sonidera is unique because it is entirely women-led in a male-dominated space. I felt the immediate impact of a more feminine-led cumbia musical space, the beats weren’t necessarily different, but the space felt safer as it was removed from the pressures of the dominant, heterosexual male gaze. Women and queer people were dancing together. Some people even danced alone. A couple swayed softly to each beat, as they had been for years. Passions were exchanged, along with laughter between old friends. Dancing doesn’t always come easy for me, but feeling comfortable in a space to be myself and dance with whomever I choose is fundamental to any progress I’ll make. After all, dancing requires a mix of passion, vulnerability, and trust. As I watched the people dance until the last song and into the encore, I realized the sonideras had cultivated something as equally important as legal recognition and protections for LBGTQ+ people. They created a space where we all could forget about needing to feel safe. It was a space where our queerness, femininity, and gender fluidity was the default. A space for us to feel the full extent of ourselves.