Mazatlan, Mexico. It's 11 a. La Calabasa and Estrella wake up first and pick their way, barefoot and scowling, across the broken concrete and hot dirt of the colony's common area. Tonight will be a rare moment to dream of glory for Mexico's sexual outcasts. So they immediately go to town for breast cups, panty hose, sponges and glue. The morning stretches into afternoon.
Others emerge from their battered one-room dwellings. La Bella prances out, her chest still tender from hormone injections three nights earlier. Abenamar takes the quiet time to talk about his life. He is 16, of high cheekbones, a sexually precocious scamp.
He has always known he is gay; so has his mother. But when he began sticking wads of paper in his shirt, pretending they were breasts, his junior high principal called home. At 14, Abenamar was making money in drag queen revues and working Mazatlan's streets. Now he's out here, in the colony. She just doesn't want me to be a drug addict. Almost all of them work around the corner, in Mazatlan's Zona de Tolerancia: four clubs on Calle Pino Suarez where prostitution is permitted.
Pino Suarez is an unpaved street southeast of town where steady traffic roils dust into a perpetual haze. One of the four clubs is La Fogata, with a milky-green facade and an interior decked in emerald palm fronds and gold pharaoh statues. Once a year -- tonight -- La Fogata holds what is now Mexico's longest-running drag queen beauty contest. La Fogata fills to standing room only as Mazatlan's gay community -- poor drag queens, middle-class beauticians, square professionals -- crams the club, and for one night is unified and at home.
This year, most of the contestants live in the joto colony around the corner. La Manica is a farm worker from Nayarit who's in love with a hotel security guard; La Daniela, 21, has been a joto since age 11; La Cindi is 15, on the run after stealing a lot of money from dangerous people; Abenamar is always flirting, aware of his good looks; his half-brother Martina is tall, leggy and even better looking. There are several more. Only one is over Hidden across Mexico, colonies like this one are way stations for legions of wandering jotos pronounced HOH-tohs -- young drag queen prostitutes who have emerged from Mexico's working class.
