Chavela Vargas: Groundbreaking Costa Rican-Mexican lesbian singer

It’s officially Pride Month! Celebrated every June, it’s a time of year to highlight and celebrate the contributions and achievements of the LGBTQIA+ community. When it comes to LGBTQIA+ history, queer people of color are often forgotten in favor of a white mainstream narrative. As a result, people in the Latinx community sometimes don’t know much or anything about how queer Latinxs have advocated for LGBTQIA+ rights, or that we only became visible through people who were marginalized due to both their sexuality and ethnicity, but still stood up for us fearlessly. One of those people is Chavela Vargas, a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer who rose to fame for her radical interpretations of ranchera songs. Ranchera music is typically sung by male singers, but she was known for her stripped-down style and cross-gender performances that blended elements of femininity and masculinity, mimicking her appearance in real life. Later in life, she came out as a lesbian, cementing her place in the queer Latinx scene and in the hearts of ranchera fans in Latin America. Read on to learn more about Chavela Vargas, who crossed the boundaries of sexuality and gender to bring more visibility to the queer community in the Latinx diaspora and around the world.

Early life

Born in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rico, in 1919, María Isabel Anita Carmen de Jesús Vargas Lizano refused to conform to gender roles from an early age. From a young age, she preferred to wear clothing traditionally intended for men, such as ponchos, a style that was maintained into adulthood. Since there were strict rules at the time about what women could and could not wear or do, her parents decided to hide her from guests so that no one would see her rebellion against heteronormativity and femininity. After her parents divorced, she was placed in the care of her uncle and contracted polio, although she later attributed her cure to shamans. At that time, music was her refuge, so she often sang in the streets and even adopted a stage name: Chavela, a nickname for Isabel. Then, when she was 17, she decided to leave Costa Rica because she felt there weren’t enough opportunities for musicians, especially women. She also longed for freedom from her family to fully develop herself. Instead, she emigrated to Mexico, where the music scene had been growing and getting bigger for years. She would live there for the rest of her life.

Music career

About a decade after immigrating from Mexico, Vargas finally launched her professional career as a singer, musician, and performer. She became known for her ranchera songs, which were pretty radical for the time. Traditionally, ranchera is sung by men with a mariachi band, and all songs are written from a male perspective for a lover. The fact that she was entering a male-dominated genre said something. But in her performances, she took it a step further, singing it solo and without much fuss, using the guitar as her only instrument. And not only did she refuse to change the pronouns and address the lyrics to a woman, but she also slowed down the melodies to increase dramatic tension, inject some humor and sass, and make sure the audience knew exactly what she was doing. She often performed in Acapulco, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, particularly in the Champagne Room of a restaurant called La Perla. She became known for her blatant “masculinity”, regularly smoked cigars, drank a lot of alcohol and even carried a loaded pistol.

In 1961 she released her debut album Bohemian Nightor Bohemian Night in collaboration with José Alfredo Jiménez. He was one of the leading ranchera singer-songwriters in the ranchera scene in Mexico. One of the songs on the tracklist, “Macorina”, became one of their most famous, but also most controversial songs. It was based on a poem by the Spanish poet Alfonso Camín about María Calvo Nodarse, a Cuban sex worker in Havana known as “La Macorina” who enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. After meeting her once on the island, Vargas set the poem to music. The song would soon become one of the first and most famous erotic lesbian songs of its time.

Over the next three decades, she toured the world and recorded over 80 albums. She moved in social circles with many famous artists and intellectuals, including the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the writer Juan Rulfo, and the Mexican composer Agustín Lara. She claimed to have had brief affairs with Kahlo during her marriage to Rivera, and with the American actress Ava Gardner after the marriage of her American colleague Elizabeth Taylor.

Eventually, Vargas disappeared from public view in the 1970s after succumbing to an alcohol addiction that was exacerbated by her hectic lifestyle. She did not perform at all for 15 years and had to be nursed back to health by her then-partner, Dr. Alicia Pérez Duarte. However, their relationship was unstable due in part to Vargas’s temper and they later separated. After getting sober, she finally returned to touring and performing in Coyoacán, Mexico City in 1991. Overwhelmingly supported by her fans, she again performed on international stages in Latin America, Europe and the United States. At age 83, she made her debut at the legendary Carnegie Hall in New York, cementing her status as a prominent musician. In 2002, she finally addressed the rumors that had circulated throughout her life and, at age 81, came out as a lesbian in her autobiography And if I want to know my last day (And if you want to know something about my past). In 2007, she was awarded the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Latin Recording Academy. She has also received the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the Gold Medal of the Complutense University of Madrid and the Medal of Merit of the University of Alcalá de Henares for her services to music. In 2009, she was awarded the Distinguished Citizen of Mexico City by the state government.

Queer icon

Long before she came out, Vargas was considered a queer icon in the eyes of her fans and supporters. She chose to rebel against widely accepted notions of gender roles by dressing masculine, with pants, charro suits, sombreros, guayaberas, and ponchos. Her performance style, based on sensuality, also helped break down taboos about female sexuality, particularly in relation to lesbian relationships. This was all the more significant given the rampant homophobia throughout Latin America, where laws and societal conventions were largely determined by religious beliefs. Instead, she devoted herself fully to increasing queer visibility at a time when this was still a rarity and often demonized and/or criticized.

Although she stayed true to her authenticity, it was a constant struggle in an industry notoriously dominated by men. As a female ranchera artist who sang about lesbian relationships, she was often the subject of ostracism and hatred. She sometimes found it difficult to gain support from the mainstream industry, which she found disturbing and rebellious. However, the fans she had recognized themselves in her and expressed their support for her groundbreaking career, allowing her to continue to achieve fame and success.

“I opened my arms and said to the world, ‘Come here, let’s talk.’ And the world and I talked every night, and sometimes it rejected me,” she said El Pais in 2009. “It cost me bloody tears to move forward.”

Death and legacy

In 2011 she released her last album, The big moon, an ode to Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The following year, she was hospitalized for several weeks with breathing difficulties and died on August 5 in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Her funeral in Mexico City was attended by hundreds of fans who played her music and drank tequila, her favorite liquor, in her honor. Seven years after her death, she was inducted into the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco that honors LGBTQIA+ leaders for their notable contributions to their fields and the broader community. Today, more than a decade after her death, she remains an influential figure recognized for paving the way for queer musicians and empowering the LGBTQIA+ community.