Miss Mira Mira was a well known drag queen in the New York City gay club and performance “cuchifrito circuit” (this term was also used to classify the salsa clubs around the city) and it can be argued that she was among the first ones to transform the world of gay transvestites by moving away from recreating the grand dames of Hollywood, and engaging in a transgression of the drag queen’s world in itself. As the Spanish post modern theatrical word calls it: “desdoble” - to unfold the character and reflect upon it while recreating it.
She was Puerto Rican and by the time she was making a name for herself -late sixties, early seventies-, this community was not longer on the margins of the city, but had entered into fully participating in the discourses and narratives and institution building and language shaping of New York City’s cultural and political world. The facts are there: poverty or not, the Puerto Ricans were building and talking and talking loud. At the time, outside of the Puerto Rican community, bodegas were still known as “the Spanish grocery store”. Decades later, the term is even used by the stuffy New York Times. I do not think that newspaper have written about Miss Mira Mira, but have done so with quite a few who benefitted from Miss Mira Mira’s cultural transformation of the city, including how drag queens are perceived and what a bodega is all about.
She was Puerto Rican and by the time she was making a name for herself -late sixties, early seventies-, this community was not longer on the margins of the city, but had entered into fully participating in the discourses and narratives and institution building and language shaping of New York City’s cultural and political world. The facts are there: poverty or not, the Puerto Ricans were building and talking and talking loud. At the time, outside of the Puerto Rican community, bodegas were still known as “the Spanish grocery store”. Decades later, the term is even used by the stuffy New York Times. I do not think that newspaper have written about Miss Mira Mira, but have done so with quite a few who benefitted from Miss Mira Mira’s cultural transformation of the city, including how drag queens are perceived and what a bodega is all about.
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