Transgender Faith Beneath The Border Wall
By: Julia Norza
Tags: Gender Identity, Religion, Border Wall, Mexico, Transgender

My family comes from Catholicism. It’s still very present, especially on my mother’s side — around me, veiled, quiet. I think it’s a habitual thing. And the reason, say, why this habit persist is that my family’s not from here, nor was I born here. We’re from Michoacán. In the states I’ve seen to the west, to the south of the country… Some states have more visible religious practices than others. In Mexicali there’s Catholicism, and other things too, like Christians, Jehova’s witnesses, adventist and mormon churches, there’s everything here. Even pentecostals. Well, in Michoacán, my family comes from a highly Catholic city, very habitual. That’s how it’s ingrained.

By the time I met my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, her brain was already a hole. I’ll never know the religion she practiced before she changed her last name and fled Europe. Perhaps to ask for more would be an unburial. All of my funerals have been Catholic, including hers.

My grandmother on my father’s side is 94 years strong. A scar rips from her left thigh to her ankle, white and severe like a torn nerve. Her heart barely works; her ears don’t. But she’s powered by the same oxen strength that once raised nine or nineteen children on a farmer’s stipend and freshly killed chicken soup. She has a habit of punctuating future proposals with “God willing”. During the four months we lived together, she would sit on the living room’s couch and list off the names of constellations I’d never heard before. The Steer, the Sailboat, the Mule. In the middle of the day, she’d point at the roof, with a finger so firm it shattered brick: “that’s the Sailboat”. Nighttime came with visits from a husband fifty years dead. She acted as nurse during his final years, after a series of strokes robbed him of motility. Dead or alive, she would recognize his dragging gait anywhere. I once shocked a friend by informing them I’d never had a supernatural experience: you just seem so spiritual. The fourth or fifth time my grandmother named a blank constellation, I found myself wishing I felt melancholy, wistful, exalted. Anything other than this profound rootlessness.

That’s the origin, in me, of this [Catholic] religion, but I wouldn’t say it’s something I practice. Now, has it had an influence on my life? Yes. Not the practice of this religion per se, but rather as a source of questions. And a source of answers too. I ask myself about belief all the time. I dialogue a lot with disbelief — now, what’s disbelief? Let’s say - Ale sighs. Let’s say it’s when we say: “I don’t believe in God, “I don’t practice this religion”… “but I do consider myself a spiritual individual”. Or, I don’t know, I believe in angels or in energy. Or I simply believe in something inexplicable, superior, a source from which everything originates and which is beyond our understanding. There’s different forms of disbelief: there’s the one closer to atheism, and the one closer to agnosticism. I’m less interested in denying the existence, validity, persistence and pertinence of a religion, than I am in doubting it. It’s a constant series of questions, all so that I can understand why it’s important to believe. In a country like Mexico, we’re talking about Catholicism —the opinion that [Catholicism] has a lot of objectionable qualities has become quite popular lately. There’s been studies and the like, regarding the Catholic church’s loss of validity as an institution — its functioning, its personages and its representatives — at least with certain population segments.

June 2019: The Vatican publishes “Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education”, thirty venomous pages decrying the purported dangers of teaching gender theory to children and adolescents. It is no coincidence that the Spanish translation of this document keeps the word gender in English. The Argentine-born Pope Francis is perfectly aware of the effect an accusation of “ideological colonialism” exerts on Latin American countries. Mexico is a series of concentric circles, nuclear families within nuclear families. Public bureaucracy is drowned in nepotism; in the private sector, you are not an employee, but a “member of our hardworking family!”. The greatest family is the Holy one Itself. Mary of Nazareth is the Mother of the Americas, and a mother wants only the best for her child. And if her most decorated living scion is so terrified of transgender individuals that he would compare gender theory to “nuclear arms”, well, he must know something that we don’t.

Still, it wouldn’t be surprising for the church to haemorrhage believers. This obstinate, bleached-sepulchre rhetoric is not the only factor at play. The global introduction of high-speed communication has granted worldwide access to ideas that transcend a commandant’s neuroses. And yet, on the exhausting, monumental occasions I go beyond the Vatican’s noise and into the quiet, I find my God in the distance, and I know it is Him I want to believe in. He is what I’ve always known. What else is there for me?

I do have a syncretic thing going on with certain beliefs. It reminds me of — and don’t put this in the interview. It reminds me of Walter Mercado, because of that new documentary about him.

Not too long ago, mentions of Walter Mercado would have made me laugh. Now he seems a genuine prophet. A man out of his time, an astrologer wielding androgyny and extravagance as twin forces, anticipating by decades the online witch-fashion craze. Of course, reality is more intricate than a Netflix tell-all. Mercado only spoke of his gender once, in a phone interview for Remezcla: “I have two energies, yin and yang”.

It seems very ad hoc. We’ve developed these personalities that draw from a ton of sources, philosophies and practices from all over the world. For me, making this syncretism, this pastiche into a constant thing, is a form of rebellion. There’s Catholics who get cleanses and [tarot] readings. They believe in angels, they do yoga and they chant mantras. In the country’s heart you can find Catholics seeking out paleros. These knowledges come from other cultures or even from the parts of our culture that don’t belong to hegemony. This amalgam, this pastiche, I think it’s a sign of our times. And there’s also this shyness, this lukewarm attitude towards your beliefs, whether it is syncretic or recalcitrant. Then what’s life for you, how do you live, how do you navigate the world; how do you build your personhood and identity?

It is tempting to imagine the border as a melting pot, where the proverbial “We” celebrate the beauty of human similitude. In the global media market, “We” in the border suffer, fight and join forces as one. That is how transgender individuals, who live in two borders at once, are forgotten. Just about every single pronoun in the Spanish language ends in a binary-gender o or a.

Between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, I didn’t really understand why people went to church. There was a very, very short period of time where I attended the San Francisco de Asis church, here in the San Marcos neighborhood. I went there maybe three, four times with my mother and sister. As far as I understand, my father had no religion. I can’t even say he’s an atheist. I’ve never had this conversation with him, he just seems to me as someone with absolutely no interest in religion. My family wasn’t the kind to attend mass every Sunday, but I remember baptisms, first communions, weddings, events that took us to church. The couple of times we did go, I found the church choir fascinating. I’ve always been — and I mean it when I say always, since I was a kid — always been fascinated by the intersection of music and religion. But I think the fascination this choir awokein me was more of an aesthetic one. I didn’t understand what was being said, or why. Why sing all that for something that wasn’t there. Why such vehemence, such passion? So, I started exploring my own relationship with devotion, and went to church alone a couple of times. I tried imitating what I saw other people do, communing, kneeling, closing their eyes to do who knows what. Well, we went through a very difficult period, economically. My dad wasn’t here. He went over to the other side to look for a job.

The “other side” is beyond the border, where the promise of abundance and prosperity is fulfilled. As far as I know, the people of the other side have no affectionate vernacular for our side. Nobody born there seeks to arrive here.