“The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse…”
Emmanuel Levinas

By Carmen Oquendo-Villar

Chance led me to the genre with which I am currently enamored: portraiture. I say that I “stumbled” into it because my very first project was an apparently easy, short observational piece. I immediately recognized the genre’s potential to engage with individual faces, to depict succinctly the ever-elusive essence of somebody’s life story, or an emotive, tiny detail of it. That is how Boquita, and Mizery were born. Boquita—whose name is a Spanish diminutive of “mouth”—is a window into the life of a brash but tender transsexual performer and social worker from the Dominican Republic. When I went to film Boquita lip-synch in Spanish to English songs at one of Boston’s drag establishments, we needed to get permission from the club’s hostess. That’s when Mizery came into my picture and I came into hers. “Certainly,” Mizery said at the time, “you may film Boquita,” and later mumbled, dismayed, “yet, I do not understand why the film is not about me.” Quick to recognize a persona, I promised to come back. This Panamanian drag performer is a local celebrity who became the subject of the latest portrait, Mizery, about the arduous nightlife of this drag queen.

I dove into the world of “my” subjects. Boquita and Mizery tolerated me, although they seemed to be aware that our relationship was not symmetrical. While I had the privilege of pointing the camera at them, they exercised power by controlling how much of themselves they would allow to be seen. Whether covered by make-up, earrings, artificial coloring or scarves, I searched for their faces. Fascinated by their countenances, I eventually faced a mirror that was flipped back at me. This confirmed for me the notion put forth by visual anthropologist MacDougall that the ultimate subject of a documentary is the unfolding relationship between subject and artist. Triangular in nature because of the presence of the camera, our relationship was defined by a correspondence between their make-up and the camera, my own technological mask.

After I completed these two portraits, I began to receive invitations from Latino transgender communities to make films with them. I was thrilled to receive an invitation to work on my current project set in Puerto Rico (La aguja/ The Needle ) about an illegal beauty clinic where transgender sexual workers alter their bodies. La aguja/ The Needle won second place in the 2009 HBO Documentaries Competition. The purpose of this award is to find the next great Latino documentary film of uncompromising quality and honesty. The recent hate crime (November 14 2009) in Puerto Rico of a john who murdered, decapitated, dismembered and burned Jorge Steven López Mercado for not being a “real woman” has made my work so much more urgent. We are diligently working to finish this project in 2011.

From the start, my work has been interdisciplinary and invested in having an impact in the art world and academia, as well as in the larger public sphere. Trained as a filmmaker and an academic, with a specialization in gender, sexuality and media studies, my work has mostly focused on the Latin@ transgender experience. In fact, gender and sexuality has been part of my academic, artistic and curatorial agenda for the past eight years. As a curator, I was in charge of three itinerant film and video exhibits and of the transgender film series for Performance Studies’ Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ 2007 Encuentro in Buenos Aires. That Encuentro was dedicated to theories and practices of Body Politics. Academically, I have organized and presented in panels dedicated to the study of gender and sexuality.

Besides making documentaries that are screened in festivals and museums worldwide, and writing articles and curating shows about this community, I have also explored transgender issues politically, including conducting workshops around police violence against transgendered sex workers. In 2005 I was invited to Colombia to lead a workshop addressing acts of violence by the Colombian police and military towards the transgender sex workers population in Bogotá and Medellín. Leading this workshop was one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences in my life. The situations I encountered were much more complex than my preconceived, and sometimes misguided ideas, about the Colombian police, and even the transgender community itself. This groundbreaking workshop has been documented in the Harvard Review of Latin America’s special issue on violence ( http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/1038), and in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ issue on borders (http://hemi.nyu.edu/journal/3.2/eng/en32_pg_oquendo_villar_pic_harrison.html). While doing this workshop I met Diana Navarro, the leader of transgender sex workers in Santa Fe, Bogotá. Ever since 2005 Diana and I have been in contact. My work in Colombia led to an invitation by Diana to use my films (Boquita and Mizery) to stimulate dialogue with her peers about ways to prevent police misconduct against this often-targeted population. This year I received a very special invitation from her to make a documentary about her community. Santa Fe is one of the toughest neighborhoods to film in Bogotá. Only insiders or invited guests can film there, given the types of activities that happen therein and the strong paramilitary presence. During my two-week visit to Santa Fe in August 2009, Diana began the process of guiding me to better understand the logic of this barrio and the characters that populate its streets, as well as the social interactions, stories and dramas that unfold there. In this 2-week period I worked with Susan Meiselas, Lorie Novak and Julio Pantojas in a photography workshop, completing a photographic portrait of Diana in her home. I am currently working with Diana to launch a media advocacy campaign to prevent violence against this population.

The organic development of these projects points to why I need to engage with these stories. My artistic practice has altered not only the way I understand the communities I’ve been portraying, but it has profoundly transformed me. Originally drawn to performance because of its sparkles and glamour, I have learned to look into the everydayness of glitter and the hard work that makes up faces. Having learned so much from doing these portraits, they are nevertheless my way of confessing how much I do not know about those portrayed.