An interview with Javier Fernández-Galeano and Mir Yarfitz, authors of “Serious Maricas and Their Male Concubines: Seeking Trans History and Intimacy in Argentine Police and Prison Records, 1921–1945”
Javier Fernández-Galeano is historian of twentieth-century Argentina and Spain. He has published Maricas: Queer Cultures and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942–1982 (2024), along with articles in the Radical History Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Latin American Research Review, among others. Mir Yarfitz is an associate professor in the Department of History and the director of Jewish studies at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (2019). You can read their article “Serious Maricas and Their Male Concubines: Seeking Trans History and Intimacy in Argentine Police and Prison Records, 1921–1945”—which has won honorable mention for this year’s Sylvia Molloy Prize, for best article about sexualities in the humanities, from the Latin American Studies Association—in HAHR 103.4.
Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles
1. What inspired you to turn to police and prison files as the source base for your article? What challenges if any did you have in working with these sources?
Police and prison archives are an entry point into the social history of sexual and gender nonconformity, particularly in urban areas where state power was concentrated. They offer fragmented yet crucial insights into the lives of maricas (a vernacular term for subjects assigned male at birth who adopted a feminized persona). These sources document direct encounters between state agents (police, criminologists) and maricas, revealing how authorities categorized, policed, and responded to gender and sexual nonconformity; but they also contain subjects’ own (mediated) words, such as Emilia Q.’s responses to interrogations and her personal love letters, a glimpse into her lived experiences.
Historians face several significant challenges when working with these types of archives. Archives like the Museo Penitenciario Argentino Antonio Ballvé contain uncatalogued materials and provide inconsistent access to researchers. Rosario’s police archives are primarily dedicated to internal use, but archivist Gisela Galassi relies on very limited resources to expand researchers’ access, supplementing what she lacks in funding with her own time investment. Many of the documents are physically deteriorated due to floods, making some fragments illegible or entirely erased. This “material deterioration” parallels the “erasure of historical subjectivities.”
Most importantly, these sources are mediated through police interrogations, official categorization, and archival processes. This means they fundamentally reflect the state’s perspective and concerns (e.g., public complaints, maintaining order), potentially obscuring the quotidian texture of affective relationships, and the subjects’ self-understanding. In addition, Spanish grammar’s gender inflection presents translation challenges, and police records often contain contradictory language, using both masculine and feminine grammar for the same individual (e.g., Emilia Q.), without specifying who preferred which. Methodologically we have tried to incorporate that inconsistency into our analysis rather than obviating it.
2. How does this article challenge previous scholarship on maricas in early twentieth-century Argentina, and what new insights does it offer?
There has not been a lot of scholarship in the discipline of history on gender and sexual deviance in Argentina between the 1920s and 1940s, in part due to primary source limitations. Foundational work on the early twentieth century, such as that of Daniel Bao and Jorge Salessi, generally interprets maricas as part of a homosexual to gay genealogy. Our framework here is more aligned with recent developments in trans studies, a field in which we hope to help grow the archival tendency. We don’t think it is appropriate to understand marica as an identity in the later-twentieth-century sense. The imposition of modern LGBTQ+ terminologies and categories onto historical figures risks misinterpretation and obscuring the specific, time-and-place-bound ways people understood and expressed gender and sexuality in the past.
Scholars have tried to go beyond identity in various ways; here we engage Kadji Amin’s framing of vernacular taxonomies, centering behaviors rather than a core sense of self. Emilia, Dora, and La Lita played with sociocultural norms of femininity in ways that were inconsistent: romantic, domestic, promiscuous, playful, and scandalous. Hence, they inhabited frames of meaning that remain messy, ever-changing, and tied to external behaviors and subcultural contexts, rather than rigid modern labels. Even though our source base here is police files, we find much evidence of agency in self-definition and interaction with criminologists and police.
3. How would you situate your article’s contribution to the broader turn to queer history and LGBTQ+ history? What does turning to Argentina contribute to the global historiographies on these topics?
This article contributes to the broader turn in queer and trans studies towards social and cultural histories outside the United States and western Europe and the ongoing methodological debates in trans history regarding anachronism and accuracy. Thus, it problematizes certain contemporary assumptions about the delineation between gender and sexuality, arguing for the inseparability of sexual acts and the sociocultural norms that give them meaning. Our approach embraces uncertainty and foregrounds the specificity of gender-variant experiences, engaging with archival evidence of situational pronoun use.
Turning to Argentina contributes to global historiographies on these topics by intervening in the “Latino-Mediterranean Sexual System” debates on the passive/active binary that supposedly structures identity instead of the homo/hetero axis in Latin America. Through our reading of police files we show how sexual behaviors produced gender differences and vice versa. We emphasize as well how Argentine state agents often focused more on public gender and sexual scandal and less on medical theories of “inversion,” showcasing different regulatory priorities and their impact on gender-nonconforming subjects. Rosario’s demographic growth, high immigrant population, and reputation as a “city of brothels” provide a specific context for understanding how maricas navigated urban spaces, sex work, and class dynamics in a rapidly modernizing port city. Finally, the Argentine context, particularly its robust history of legal and clandestine sex work, offers a rich ground to explore how maricas employed a repertoire of performances of femininity that blurred the lines between respectability and promiscuity.
4. How does this article relate to the LGBTQ+ community in Argentina today?
Argentina today, like the United States, is in the throes of a backlash to the recent years of progress, particularly trans community organizing and visibility. Since 2012, Argentina has had some of the most progressive laws in the world for trans folks and travestis. In 2021 it became one of the first countries in the world to offer an X option on official documents, and created a quota system for trans employment in the public sector that had only just begun when Milei took power. Milei’s government has pushed back against these developments with similar ugly anti-trans rhetoric and policy rollbacks that we see in the US; in addition to pushing trans folks out of these public sector positions, it banned gender-affirming care for minors and excluded trans women from women’s prisons. Our article, like other trans history, discredits culture war arguments about the strawman of wokeism, the idea that “gender” was invented on TikTok. Even though we argue that our subjects a century ago didn’t name a coherent trans feminine identity, in part because that would have been anachronistic, we are helping make “trancestors” visible. Folks today with various relationships to gender might see parallels between their own and past experiences, which can be a source of strength in a time of increased targeting and policy regression. Emilia, Dora, and La Lita also demonstrate creative resistance to state control, which is a much-needed inspiration today.
5. Would you tell us a bit more about the process of cowriting an article? What made you both decide to collaborate, and what advice would you give to other scholars considering such collaborative research?
We ended up together on a conference panel a few years ago, and realized that we were both looking at some similar sources and individuals, coming at them from different angles. Mir had been working for a long time on early twentieth-century sex work in Argentina, and was increasingly involved in trans studies, while Javi compared Argentine and Spanish archives on maricas in the later twentieth century. When Javi felt that he had hit a wall with his writing about Emilia, he reached out to Mir to see if they might fruitfully bring these contexts and approaches together. Mir had just concluded writing a set of articles with a team of librarians about the collaborative pedagogy they had been doing together and was curious about trying to co-write about archival materials, and Javi had done some other collaborative research writing. Working together brought both of us new energy when we were feeling pretty worn down by the pandemic and was a good reminder to reach out to colleagues about writing in process.
We started our collaborative process by reading a couple of more theoretical articles and books together, by Judith Butler, Kadji Amin, and Jules Gil-Peterson. Then we explored how their frameworks might be relevant to our source base, which centered on Javi’s archival visit to the police archives in Rosario, complemented by cases that Mir had been gathering mostly in the popular press. Each of us drafted different sections, which we would trade and revise, and then work together in Google docs to integrate the sections. While we both read and write in English and Spanish, we appreciated getting to lean into Javi’s native Spanish for interpreting sometimes barely legible primary sources, and Mir’s native English for writing style. Having this and other complementary forms of expertise was also useful in case of disagreement; we didn’t get stuck in wrestling over word choice too often. While sometimes we got slowed down by one or the other’s conflicting commitments, neither of us wanted to let the other person down; we may not have finished faster than writing alone, but certainly both feel that the process and product were richer for the collaboration.
6. Read anything good recently?
As we mentioned, the larger field of trans studies has been growing in exciting ways. Given our work, we are paying the most attention to new archival excavations. A recent edited volume brings into conversation some classic articles in queer and trans Latin American history with emerging approaches to twentieth century archives. Pasados queer en Latinoamérica: Historias de la sexualidad en el siglo XX, edited by Santiago Joaquín Insausti, signals queer and trans studies’ care for institutional and nonconventional archives that contain traces of dissident experiences. Many of the chapters focus on the relationships among current identity and radical politics, subjects’ voices, and methodological dilemmas. Marce Butierrez’s chapter, for instance, provides a nuanced and touching oral history of travesti sex workers on the Pan-American Highway, showing how labor, geography, sex, identity, and corporality appear indissolubly entangled in travestis’ memories and praxis.
Daniela Ferrández’s recent publications—A defunción dos sexos as well as her multiple articles—situate trans history in nonmetropolitan areas of Galicia, offering a complex portrait of community-based mechanisms of resistance. Her work also converses with Butierrez in that both place geographic displacement, embodiment techniques, and labor niches at the center of trans studies across Europe and Latin America.
This brings us to Patricio Simonetto’s groundbreaking A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina, which is nothing short of essential to understand the interplay of scientific discourses, popular representations, state policies, and individual lived experiences of gender transformation across the twentieth century.
In a more interdisciplinary space, Cole Rizki is fostering dialogues on trans visual archives and their significance for travesti radical politics. The NACLA special issue he edited on “Cuerpos Furiosos: Travesti-Trans Politics for Counterrevolutionary Times” and the article he published in JLACS on “Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism and Travesti Resistance” showcase encompass bodily performance, the tactics of travesti visuality, and trans resistance to necropolitics. Konstantinos Argyriou’s Los pánicos morales de género: Las personas trans como chivo expiatorio is also a methodologically exciting intervention that builds its own social media archive to undo transphobic discursive violence.