Finding Latina Lesbians: Queer Knowledge Production among Puerto Rican Youth in Midcentury New York City

Jessica Lopez grew up in the early 1960s peeking out the windows of her family’s Bronx apartment to stare at the teenage marimachas (butch lesbians) gathered outside. While they fell under the larger rubric of bad, “street” kids, they were also publicly acknowledged to be lesbians, inciting gossip and warnings throughout Jessica’s Puerto Rican neighborhood. Cautioning her about their sexual and gender deviance, Jessica’s mother and their neighbors told her that these girls were dangerous; although they were female, they acted like men and were not to be trusted. They would disguise themselves as normal young women in order to befriend naïve girls like her and then seduce and even rape them. However, it was through this talk that Jessica first learned about lesbianism and began to identify with it. She says, “The more they talked about it like it was something bad, the more I wanted to know about it.” Despite the warnings, she became infatuated with these older girls, wishing they would seduce her, and often defended them and challenged such threatening stories.

This paper explores the dissemination of queer knowledge among Puerto Rican lesbian youth in midcentury New York City. Analyzing oral histories and autobiographical writing reveals that young Latina lesbians like Jessica learned about queerness in their neighborhoods, from their families, and at school, from peers as well as older people in their lives. Discussions both positive and negative offered young women a framework for understanding their same-sex desires, while the visibility of groups like the marimachas transformed typical street scenes of people hanging out on their stoops into sites of lesbian identity, community, and cultural development. By examining this production of queer knowledge, this paper addresses the dearth of scholarship on Latina lesbians and engages age as a significant category of analysis in queer history.