Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes has written something that is part history, part theory, and part love letter. At its heart, Translocas is a meditation on the role of drag and transgender performance in Puerto Rican cultural life, both on the island and in the diaspora. La Fountain-Stokes introduces the transloca, a figure that defies gender, colonialism, and the rigid expectations of what it means to be Boricua. The word itself is a reclamation, combining trans, with all its layered meanings, and loca, a term that has long been used both as an insult and as a badge of queer defiance. To be a transloca is to exist in a space of fluidity and resistance. It is to be both too much and never enough in others’ eyes. La Fountain-Stokes asks, “Who is the transloca? … The effeminate, feminine, rebel one; the one who laughs too much and loves without control. … The transloca I carry inside. The transloca I do not or you did not want to be. The feared transloca. The transloca of alterity”(La Fountain-Stokes, 2021, p 45).
But to call the book just a meditation would be to undersell it, as Translocas is a mirror held up to a culture that often renders its biggest contributors invisible. La Fountain-Stokes peels back the curtain on a performance world where gender nonconformity is both celebrated and punished. Drag performers and trans activists like Nina Flowers and Freddie Mercado move through these pages as revolutionaries crafting performances that are both deeply personal and politically urgent. Through their stories, we see how performance serves as a tool of survival, and how stepping onto a stage, claiming space, and demanding to be seen, are acts of defiance and extraordinary creative power.
La Fountain-Stokes reminds us that the performers he writes about navigate not just gender and sexuality but the burden of colonialism. Boriken itself being deliberately and systemically stripped of its independence and the experiences of so many translocas who are caught in these liminal spaces, justifying their existence to a world determined to erase them, mirrors the parallel between the geopolitical and the personal. At the heart of this work, as he observes, is “the central paradox of contradiction: la loca as a sign of life and death, joy and suffering, mediated through violence”(La Fountain-Stokes, 2021, p 46).
Another of the book’s most pertinent theoretical contributions is the idea of archival drag, which is the way in which translocas use performance to access, embody, and preserve queer and trans histories. When a drag artist channels a long-gone queer ancestor, or when a performer steps into the pain and joy of ancestors who came before, they are not just entertaining, but engaging in acts of historical transmission. It is affective labor, it is resistance. And as La Fountain-Stokes shows us, to do drag is to remember, “serving as a mechanism for historical memory and for intergenerational transmission of knowledge”(La Fountain-Stokes, 2021, p 6).
Still, Translocas does not present a romanticized vision of queer and trans life in Puerto Rico, but insists on complexity. The book is haunted by loss: the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret, and the countless others whose lives were cut short by anti-queer violence. La Fountain-Stokes does not flinch from these realities but names the violence, holds it up to the light, and insists that we reckon with it.
And yet, there is joy here too. The kind of joy that lives in between the stitches of a handmade costume. The joy that erupts in the chaos of a crowded dressing room. The joy of being seen, truly seen, on a stage and in a mirror. As I read, I found myself thinking about the first time I ever felt seen as a trans Boricua; that moment, that feeling, is woven into every chapter of this book. As academic work, Translocas is personal, political, and more necessary now than ever.
Translocas is a conversation, an invitation, and a challenge. What does it mean to carry the legacy of those who have come before us? How do we, as queer and trans Boricuas, honor our ancestors while carving out space for ourselves in the present? For me, reading this book was as familiar as landing in SJU to the chorus of homesick hands. It was a reminder that my identities as Taino, Boricua, and trans do not exist in isolation. It is part of a lineage, a whole identity part of a story still being written. I saw myself in these pages, not always in ways that were comfortable, but in ways that felt necessary.
What makes Translocas so powerful is its refusal to separate the personal from the political, the theoretical from the affective. La Fountain-Stokes writes with the insight of a scholar, the clarity of a storyteller, and the heart of someone who has lived, and will continue to live, this history. His writing moves fluidly between analysis and memoir, documentation and devotion. The book is rigorous in its scholarship, but it also pulses with life, with drag, with joy, and with grief.
La Fountain-Stokes has given us a book that is as urgent as it is beautiful. It is a book for those who have been told they are too much, and for those who have been made to feel like ghosts in their own histories. It is a book that insists on our presence and demands we be seen in all our complexity. I end this review with gratitude for the performers who came before me, for the ones who are here now, and for the ones who will come after. For the translocas who refuse to be erased, and for the promise that we will continue to dance, to fight, and to live.
