Ungrateful Citizenship: On Translatinas, Participation, and Belonging in the Absence of Recognition | Marcia Ochoa

How do you build a lucha (struggle) out of vulnerability? How do we create the basis for collective vision and being?

These are no easy questions to answer. Yet they remain some of the most urgent guiding questions for activist work and scholarship imagining and working towards the dignity, safety and respect of trans women (transsexual, transgender, transformista, transvestí, vestida, etc.), and towards the reimagination of the possibilities of citizenship.

In a recent CCSRE Faculty Seminar Series talk, Dr. Marcia Ochoa, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and CCSRE Visiting Scholar, argued that as translatinas (in the Bay Area) and transformistas (in Venezuela) are faced with multiple and consistent negations of citizenship and belonging, they persistently assert a “right to have rights.” Based on deeply engaged ethnographic and activist work in Bay Area and Venezuelan trans women communities, Dr. Ochoa illustrated the terrains in which rights, recognition, and survival are negotiated.

Dr. Ochoa is also co-founder and co-advisor of El/La Para TransLatinas (El/la), a social justice project for transgender Latina immigrants in the Mission District of San Francisco. In her talk, she discussed the work of the program as a way to understand “translatina” as a term to refer to trans women of Latin American and Caribbean origin who migrate to the U.S. and those that use the term themselves. As an organizing term that evolved into an identity, as Dr. Ochoa described, the term “translatina” signifies a journey of navigating survival in the wake of ongoing violence and exclusion inflicted upon trans women. From this understanding of translatina as rooted in translational trans politics and consciousness, Dr. Ochoa encouraged the audience to consider how trans women navigate multiple landscapes of being excluded from forms of belonging (national, state, and otherwise), while also refusing inclusion on normalized terms. In other words, as she asks, “is ‘the State’ possible without the imposition of order on vulnerable bodies?”

Cédulas (ID cards) are used every day, but rarely do we understand it as a material symbol of our citizenship and belonging within a place or nation. Building from her ethnographic study in her 2014 book Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela, Dr. Ochoa drew attention to cédulas as a productive problem-space for how and why citizenship should be reimagined. In Venezuela, for example, because of how cédulas document gender and image within normalized cis-heteronormative categories and images, transformistas whose identity and image do not fit these normalized logics face exclusion and constant surveillance as subjects that are “suspicious” to the State. As Dr. Ochoa explained, it is a context in which, “even if you ‘pass’ you are outed by your ID card.” However, rather than assimilating to the norm or abandoning the right to citizenship, transformistas persistently asserted the “right to have rights” as a space for intervention. From this, Dr. Ochoa argued for a reconceptualization of citizenship that reflects “ungrateful subjects” (those who don’t assimilate to the norm, but rather, demands things from it) and posed the question of what form of trans consciousness emerges from these sites of negotiations.  

For Dr. Ochoa, the organization El/la is a space in which interrogating and reconceptualizing citizenship opens spaces of vulnerability in which the possibilities of citizenship are reimagined. El/la has created a space of cultural resistance, safety, community, and survival for translatinas in the Bay area as reflected in the altars, speak out events, and the health and safety services offered through the organization. From organizing to stop street harassment and violence against translatinas, activism to protect the rights and safety of undocumented translatinas, to the transformation of public space for public visibility events of translatina image and identity, El/la demonstrates the emergence of an intersectional trans women politics and imaginary while dually showcasing how spaces of resistance and survival are being built.

The questions of how to build a struggle out of vulnerability and how to form a basis for collective vision and being may not yet be fully answerable. However, productive efforts and work persist to hold those questions at the forefront of activism and scholarship. For Dr. Ochoa, as for all of us dedicated to the lucha against racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and its transnational iterations, the continued call to action is to cultivate spaces and analytics that reflect the will of people to be (safely, respected, and dignified) in the world.

Jameelah I. Morris is a CCSRE Grad Fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology