Oye Loca: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami

(Paperback)

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During only a few months in 1980, 125,000 Cubans entered the United States as part of a massive migration known as the Mariel boatlift. The images of boats of all sizes, in various conditions, filled with Cubans of all colors and ages, triggered a media storm. Fleeing Cuba's repressive government, many homosexual men and women arrived in theUnited States only to face further obstacles.Deemed "undesirables" by the U.S. media, the Cuban state, and Cuban Americans already living in Miami, these new entrants marked a turning point in Miami's Cuban American and gay histories.

Reviews

This wonderful work unravels the complex and messy strands of emergences, disappearances, visibilities, and erasures of the loca, the gender, and sexually transgressive Cuban male homosexual figure who arrived in America via the Mariel boatlift. Susana Pea carefully and sensitively excavates through layers of historical and cultural abjection in order to persuasively demonstrate how the locas stigmatized exilic trajectory is intimately connected to the advent of a Cuban American gay culture in Miami.Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Author Bio

Susana Pea is director of the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and associate professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University.