“The almost magical nature of archival research”: Uncovering La Casa de Tijuana
Martín González Romero conducting research in the GLBT Historical Society archives. Photo by Andrew Shaffer.
This year the GLBT Historical Society launched the Allan Bérubé Memorial Research Stipend for the purpose of enabling researchers to consult our archives in San Francisco.
The stipend honors the legacy of Allan Bérubé (1946–2007), a queer historian and founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, and was created by the Allan Bérubé Memorial Trust for Historical Research, Preservation and Education and the GLBT Historical Society.
This year’s recipient is Martín González Romero, an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, in Tijuana. His research explores the Imperial Court System in Tijuana and throughout Mexico, building on a chance encounter in our archives during the 2019 Queer History Conference.
The selection process for the inaugural recipient was highly competitive, with numerous worthy proposals submitted. The Trust, which includes John D’Emilio, Estelle Freedman, and Waverly Lowell noted the connections between Bérubé’s work, and the research of this year’s winner:
A pioneering LGBTQ historian whose work began in San Francisco in the 1970s, Allan Bérubé reached beyond the mainstream and the respectable to uncover surprising arenas of community building and resistance to oppression in our history. Martín González Romero’s work on the Royal Imperial Casa of Tijuana with its transnational ties to José Sarria and San Francisco carries on and extends this tradition and makes him a very deserving recipient of the inaugural Allan Bérubé Memorial Research Stipend.
Read more about the Allan Bérubé Memorial Research Stipend here, and scroll down for insights into the initial research funded by this program.
Can you tell us about your project, and how you got interested in the subject?
Martín González Romero: My current research traces the history of La Casa Real Imperial de Tijuana (The Royal Imperial House of Tijuana), a drag organization founded in the 1980’s, that held runway shows and beauty pageants to financially support LGBTQ community projects. It was a part of the International Imperial Court System, a network of drag courts that is considered one of the largest LGBTQ charitable organizations in the world.
I first discovered the history of the Casa de Tijuana thanks to the almost magical nature of archival research. I visited San Francisco in the summer of 2019 to participate in the Queer History Conference organized by the Committee on LGBT History, where I talked about cross-dressing, effeminacy and travesti participation in LGBTQ social unrest in Mexico City. At the time, I was working on my dissertation about the sexual revolution in Mexico City, so I decided to visit the GLBT Historical Society Archives to try and find materials that might be relevant to my research. I photographed as many documents referring to Mexico as I could. In a brief file of the José Sarria Papers entitled simply “Mexico”, I discovered an invitation to the Casa de Tijuana’s first coronation. It immediately caught my attention.
How does the story you are uncovering resonate today?
MGR: The history of La Casa de Tijuana is a story of solidarity, community and creativity that is relevant to the contradictory times we live in. On the one hand, queer art, particularly drag art, has gone mainstream. That brings a lot of questions about its political character and subversive capacity to the table. Queer culture has reinterpreted mainstream culture as a way to create a parallel world of meanings. So what happens when this parallel world becomes the norm? The history of La Casa de Tijuana helps explore these limits of queer parody. It serves as an example of how this parody can reproduce exclusions. In a way, it is a cautionary tale that is relevant to younger generations who are alarmed by the way in which false beauty standards founded on racial, ethnic, social and ableist exclusion are reproduced in the midst of the boom of drag art.
What role did our archives play in your project?
Interior page from a 1986 Imperial Court of San Diego County coronation program, José Sarria papers (1996-01), GLBT Historical Society.
MGR: The GLBT Historical Society Archives was the starting point of this project. They helped me discover a fascinating topic that speaks to my research interests as well as to today’s interests in queer cultures. I found evidence of this network in San Francisco, which helped me understand the international dimensions of this story. It also made me realize that Tijuana’s participation within the Imperial Court System has a lot to bring to the table when it comes to writing the history of the System as a whole. As I made sense of the intricate parody practiced by the Imperial Courts — both of royalty and of gender — I also discovered the contradictions of how imperial protocol was displayed towards Mexican territories, making parody somewhat real through exclusion of Mexican peers. Interestingly, the existence of the archive itself is the product of how seriously protocol is taken care of within the Imperial Courts.
I am profoundly grateful to the GLBT Historical Society. A small finding in their vast archives became a whole route of exploration that is now a path for my career and will hopefully inspire students to pursue their interests in queer history. I would like to give a shout-out to the work of Isaac Fellman, reference archivists in the GLBT Historical Society who was kind enough to keep me posted about appointment cancellations to consult the archive during my visit to San Francisco. They were fully booked at the time and he found me a spot to consult the archive. This really made a difference to me, since the opportunity to visit the archive comes with important time and money investments that involve international travel.
The GLBT Historical Society is an example of community effort to make local queer history relevant and accessible to the public. I am grateful and honored to have received the Allan Bérubé Research Stipend. I am inspired by Bérubé’s life and devotion to historical research that is significant to the community. I hope my work can do it justice.
Why is it important to tell this story?
MGR: Uncovering the history of La Casa de Tijuana makes it clear that this organization is an important component of the history of the first LGBTQ mobilization in Baja California; a component that has been overlooked by narratives that focus on more traditional politics. This story contradicts the idea that the liberation movement rejected most of the elements of gay subculture and nightlife. It did not. La Casa de Tijuana is an example of how organizations leaned on subculture and nightlife to solve community problems. In Tijuana during the 80’s and 90’s, these problems included the dramatic effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
It brings complexity to established narratives about LGBTQ mobilization. The story of LaCasa de Tijuana is not just one of a hostile relationship with the American courts — most of the time this relationship was apparently rather smooth — it also shows and documents a history of solidarity and community within LGBTQ communities.
What’s the most powerful/interesting item or story you uncovered in your project?
MGR: Parody campaigns were run during Mexican elections that were filled with caricatures of Mexican culture. Masked as El Zorro, portrayed in mugshots, charged with made-up criminal charges (such as “burrito busting” or “enchilada excavation”), and referencing traditional corruption during the Mexican elections, visitors ran a fun campaign, but their humor was built at the expense of their Mexican counterparts. This made clear to me that there had to be some sort of limit to the parody displayed by the Imperial Courts. If they played to be an Empire, and this game somehow reclaimed the power and the glamor that has been historically denied to marginal queer subcultures, they might as well not exclude their Mexican peers. When this parody included pretensions to consider Mexico as part of their “territories”, as I found in documents by the neighboring Court of San Diego, this imperial parody acquires a somewhat serious and perverse undertone.
Tijuana’s history has been marked by its relation to the border, a border that materializes global inequalities. It has been described as a playground for tourists from the North and as a necessary stop for migrants from the South. Sex work has been part of this character and it has long involved trans and travesti sex workers trying to make a living while excluded from most activities and networks. As far as I can tell, Tijuana’s involvement with the Court System started through the leaders of Tijuana’s first LGBTQ organizations. They were mostly well off young gay men who might have been seduced by the glamor of the courts, as well as by its gender transgression.
How has this project impacted your views on how queer history is documented and preserved, especially Mexican queer history?
MGR: This project is a reminder that there are still a lot of stories about LGBTQ past in Mexico that remain to be told. It has also made me reflect upon the profound material differences of archives globally. Mexican archives are years behind the technological solutions applied to information management in the North. LGBTQ activists in Latin America guard community archives carefully, but they are often skeptical about solutions that might help preservation. And rightfully so! They have experienced first hand how our archives are sometimes disregarded as irrelevant or not precisely historical. They know how queer past is in constant danger of being erased, as families of their late friends deem their sexuality as something to be hidden in the name of a false sense of honor. They are also aware that efforts from established institutions might reproduce global inequalities.
Lastly, can you tell us more about yourself and your hopes for the project?
MGR: I am an interdisciplinary scholar, conducting research regarding different topics of gender and sexuality in Mexico’s contemporary history. Earlier this year, I started working as an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of El Colegio de La Frontera Norte, in Tijuana, where I have been able to dive into the rich history of queer culture and politics of the Californias, as well as to guide graduate students through their own research on the field of Cultural Studies. I was born in the city of Monterrey, one of Mexico’s most populated urban areas, just an hour and a half drive from the border with Texas. Growing up in Monterrey, I always felt that the city’s industrial and commercial spirit shaped the expectations of its youth.
The opportunity to continue pursuing my career as a historian in Tijuana, on the border with California, has brought new interests to my personal research agenda. It involves an effort to write a queer history that surpaces the national realm and to understand queer culture and solidarity as a space that is not untouched by global disparities as well as racial and ethnic injustice.
I am excited to share the results of my project through research papers in open access journals, both in Spanish and in English. I am also looking forward to presenting excerpts of my work in academic conferences as well as in community forums both in Mexico and in the United States. Hopefully, my findings will take the form of a book in the years to come. But what I am most excited about is collaborating with protagonists of this story in the creation of oral history sources that can fill the gap between the archive and today’s echoes of this story. Reverberations of the tradition of La Casa de Tijuana can still be found in today’s LGBTQ local activism, and I am hoping that my research will reveal that very particular character. Most of all, I believe that collaboration with the protagonists of this story is the route to make this project helpful to the work they have devoted their lives to.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.