tatiana Censored

TATIANA DE LA TIERRA: A Commentary Censored by El Informador*

Dante Medina

She’s 43 years old and feels like she’s 5; she was born in Colombia with the face of a gringa; at 7 years she went to live in the U.S., and at 24 she no longer spoke Spanish.

She just had a pig implanted in her left arm in Cuernavaca. A female pig, of course, a newborn from Germany, born of a macrobiotic mother. It is her new love, the one that will save her from lupus.

tatiana de la tierra is a lesbian.

By the time she was 24 she “was a slut” and “felt like my life was shit.” She had a boyfriend who was a witchy pagan, space engineer and photographer. She was the daughter of a factory worker and a maid—migrants who exported washers and dryers to Colombia, which her mother smeared with mud to make them look used so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. Going back to the boyfriend, he showed her a photograph of a fat lesbian and tatiana said to herself, “I want to be her lover.”

Back then all she knew is that she liked women, “but I didn’t know how to be a lesbian”. With the woman in the photograph, her first lover, she was initiated into a homosexual adventure and baptized herself forever as tatiana de la tierra.

Now she is a librarian at University at Buffalo, and she collects texts and testimonies about Latin American lesbianism.

She writes in English, Spanish, and Spanglish.

She was just in Mexico City at the 6th Latin American and Caribbean Lesbian Feminist Encuentro, which finished last Saturday with a party where everyone decorated a Christmas tree with bras and took pictures of each other’s tits.

She published the bilingual Para las duras and will present today, in Spanish, Pintame una mujer peligrosa, 8:00 pm at Hidalgo 907. She reads her poetry in a captivating way, as if singing.

tatiana is conscious that after the xenotransplantation in Cuernavaca of the hypophysis of the German pig, she will inaugurate the epoch of being a new transgenic being—the lesbian pig. Which is why she says, after the lesbian gathering in Mexico City and now at the Guadalajara Book Fair, “after the pig and the lesbians, I want a simpler life.”

tatiana has another attribute: she is my friend.

29 de noviembre de 2004, Guadalajara, mexico. Censored by El Informador.

* Dante Medina quit writing his column for El Informador after this was censored.
Translated into English by tatiana de la tierra.