For example, Nina Flowers was eliminated from All Stars Season 1 for portraying La Lupe, which RuPaul warned would go over viewers’ heads. The so-called “Latin Queen edit” tends to show Boricua queens set to stereotypical salsa music at their loudest and most incomprehensible, opting for gags highlighting the language barrier, or moments when it becomes obvious that their cultural touch points don’t line up with the show’s American sensibilities. RPDR’s otherwise groundbreaking inclusion of Puerto Rican queens, a nod to Latinx influence in drag ball culture, has not always been particularly sensitive.

Trans women, black queens, Asian queens, and big queens have all struggled with the show’s implicit bias, and Latin queens - specifically those with strong accents or those who speak English as a second language - are no exception. RuPaul’s Drag Race, often held up as an example of positive mainstream queer and racially diverse representation, has also inadvertently created an insider and outsider culture. The show's first first-generation Mexican queen, who centered her immigrant identity and treated herself as nothing less than a superstar, had lost spectacularly in front of the world.īut before her elimination, Valentina’s run revealed some ugly truths about the social world of RuPaul’s Drag Race - the abuse, anti-blackness, and anti-trans prejudice the fandom continues to struggle with the illegibility, rarity, and threat of Latinx excellence on mainstream television the tenuousness of racial and ethnic solidarity between queens of color and their fans and the show’s double standard concerning who gets to define themselves as exceptional.

For many of us Latinx fans of the show, there was a sharp sense of loss at Valentina’s exit - her unapologetic Latinidad made her presence feel extra defiant and joyful in a political moment marked by grief and anxiety over DACA threats, ICE raids, the border wall, virulent racism, and anti-gay hatred targeting Latinxs, and especially Latinx queer people.

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