Tito Vasconcelos and Dark Camp Drag

            In her introduction chapter on the immense variety of Latin American performance artists, Fusco identifies a recurrent theme that we have come across in our previous readings on performance artists, particularly those who have identified with the Black Atlantic Diaspora: “It seems to me that the necessary antidote to facile interpretations of cultural difference,… [as it] attempts to impose a single form of syncretism as a moral imperative, is to encourage awareness just how much of the experimentation in Latin American visual art, literature, and theater in this century has adjudicated between national and regional influences and international vocabularies, and to demonstrate how these experiments cannot be reduced to any single formula.” However, she points out some important cultural forms that have inspired many Latin American performance artists, including sainete criollo, the Mexican carpa, and Caribbean cabarets. (6-7)

            Of the list of Latin American performance artists she selects, one of them who intrigues me is the Mexican drag performer Tito Vasconcelos (his campy last name plays with the popular Christian phrase/song, "Vaya con Dios," but means "Go with Jealousy" instead of "Go with God," and most likely was taken from the influential writer/philosopher, José Vasconcelos, who was involved in the Mexican Revolution during the 1910s). Fusco describes Antonio Prieto’s analysis of Vasconcelos’s type of drag performance as “dark camp” – “the kind of camp that is grotesque, ‘displays an almost sadistic delight with cruelty.’” Prieto also says that this kind of drag performance was successful against the highly heteronormative-dominating society of Mexico as exuding a kind of “symbolic terrorism.” (11) Today, the use of dark camp has become more accepted, and even fashionable, in many drag communities in urban cities of the U.S., especially following the legacy of American drag queens from the 70s and 80s, such as the brazen and twisted work of Divine and John Waters. Could this type of dark camp performance still have value of agency today, after it has passed through the processes of commodification and popularization?