Although the municipality of Mexico City has been performing same-sex marriages locally since March, today, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. I can only hope that Mexico (and the United States, and everywhere else…) follow in the footsteps of the “Southern Cone.”

This evening, the LGBT community will celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in Mexico City. After members of Mexico City PAN (National Action Party) fought against the bill–politically supported by Mexican president Felipe Calderón–the Supreme Court dismissed six appeals coming from the governors of Baja California, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Sonora and Tlaxcala who argued that same-sex marriage law affected the principle of autonomy of the other states.

In spite of the triumph, some still speculate that the law will rise conservative reactions in other states, as it has happened after Mexico City government legalized abortion in 2007 which inspired 17 states to penalize those women who practice it and making D.F. some kind of island of lefty rights for women, and now for same-sex couples who probably will travel to Mexico City to get married.

However, the law requires that one of the members of the couple has to live in Mexico City for at least six months. Also, beware that today is the official day in which same-sex couple are allowed to petition a date to get married, which means that the actual weddings will start until March 12. If you are interested in getting married to a chilango or chilanga, you have to pay around 70 dollars (if you are marrying at the City Hall); if you are getting married at home you pay around 60 dollars, and if the judge has to go out of his or her jurisdiction you pay around 500 dollars. The good news is that massive marriages are for free, so you can expect a bunch of couples celebrating very soon. I guess that’ll be the case of Lol Kin Castañeda and Judith Vázquez, and Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, so expect more news on same-sex weddings. So far I haven’t known about any public gay male couples getting married, but promise to share the information if that’s the case.

The appointment today is at 5 pm at the Hemiciclo a Juárez (a.k.a HOmociclo a Juárez), very close to Bellas Artes and Hidalgo subway stations, right in front of Sheraton Hotel in Centro Histórico.

The same group that organized the march in defense of same-sex marriage last Saturday will host a series of lectures and debates next Tuesday and Wednesday regarding a series of matters:  human and gay rights, the separation between the Church and the State, the concept of family, and sexual diversity.

Activists and politicians closely involved in GLBT rights will speak during this event (including Rep. David Razú, who proposed the same-sex marriage bill). If you want to see the whole program you can click here.

Foro Derechos, ciudadanía y diversidad sexual, February 9th and 10th, 10 hrs., Comisión de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal, Av. Universidad No. 1449, Col. Florida, Phone number: 5229 5600.

After same-sex marriage was legalized last December 21st, conservatives in Mexico City didn’t wait long to protest and take action against this legal decision. Mariana Gómez del Campo from the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional is the leader of a campaign against same-sex marriage who argues, first, that Mexican constitution states that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Second, Gómez del Campo and her followers argue that adoption by same-sex couples is against the rights of children. Having total support from President Felipe Calderón, Gómez del Campo has been promoting her cause through the press. Also, in order to prove how right she is about how a family should be, she conducted a survey to ask if Mexican people agree or not with same-sex marriage. The results were not reliable since the sample was too small to be representative of a general opinion. However, it proved to be a tool to promote negative opinions regarding GLBT families within Mexican society.

While many same-sex couples are already waiting for March 4th, the day in which they could legally marry, those who have children are worried about the consequences of a possible backlash that Gómez del Campo is promoting. Some even ask themselves if the endless desire of DF government to become the most advanced bastion–if not the only one in the whole country–in terms of social rights will always mean a worse situation for the rest of the country. It has already happened with abortion: after Mexico City’s government legalized abortion in 2007, 11 states have changed their local laws in order to criminalize women who had (illegal and dangerous) abortions.

The fact is that next Saturday a march will take place in order to defend same-sex marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples. To be honest, I don’t really know who is organizing the march, in spite of having thoroughly perused their website. However, if you are interested in going, the poster above gives the information about the march. The tour will depart from the Ángel de la Indepedencia, and the last stop will be Calderon’s residency, Los Pinos.

In case some doubt that same-sex families do not exist in Mexico, you can click here.

February just started…with awful weather that includes wind and constant rains. However, stores all over Mexico City do not waste the opportunity to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day, offering colorful gifts for people in love. Meanwhile, the Chilango GLBT community is planning a march next Saturday to defend gay marriage and the right of adoption for gay couples in DF. Will Saint Valentine help a little bit in this matter?

Here, a huge teddy bear on the corner of Isabel la Católica and Regina, one of the newest trendy streets of Centro Histórico.

Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe after formalizing their union through the Ley de Convivencia in 2007, via La Jornada

Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe are a legendary couple in the history of Mexican culture and Mexican lesbianism. Rodríguez, a Mexican actress, playwright and social activist has a long career as an artist who experimented with opera, theater, cabaret, as well as other forms of popular theater such as a style of Mexican vaudeville called carpa. Felipe is an Argentinian singer and performer who has lived in Mexico as an exile after the dictatorship in Argentina began in 1976. She experimented with different rhythms such as tango and danzón, composing funny but witty songs about love and life between women.

During the nineties Felipe and Rodríguez opened El Hábito, a bar in Coyoacán, and the restaurant Teatro La Capilla, where protests against the government and the church in the form of cabaret always had a venue. Rodríguez and Felipe supported independent cultural groups and projects, and always committed themselves to political causes of national interest, but focusing in gender and GLBT issues. In 1991 they got married in a symbolic ceremony as a protest against the Catholic Church, and as a display of public support for Mexico City’s Leyes de Convivencia, the law that preceded this year’s gay-marriage bill. Unfortunately, Felipe and Rodríguez decided to retire in 2005. El Hábito is now run by a lesbian performance group, Las Reinas Chulas, under the name El Vicio.

Today Rodríguez and Felipe, after the good news of gay marriage in DF, wrote an open letter to La Jornada that Macha Mexico considers important to translate here:

Happy 2010 in a city that is a little bit more egalitarian!
Due to the lack of laws in this matter, we did not have other option than to live 30 years as simple lovers; but now that we finally have the same rights and obligations that every one else, Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe would like to announce our upcoming marriage in Mexico City.

We also want to adopt two homeless girls in order to give them the education that they never had, they are: Mariana Gómez del Campo and Gabriela Cuevas [homophobic members of the conservative PAN party]. In spite of how difficult it is to reeducate an adult, we think that with patience and love everything is possible.

To Onésimo Cepeda and company, we ask them: and the kids raped by Maciel, who will they call father, who will they call grandfather, who will they call saint pedophile?

To all those who have not done it yet, we wish you that you come out of the closet this 2010 and enjoy your life more fully.

Long live equality!

Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe

same-sex marriage = gay tourism = $$

Mexico City tourism minister Alejandro Rojas is planning for the increase in gay tourism that he says will result from the city’s recent decision to legalize same-sex marriage. Last Wednesday La Jornada reported that Rojas is looking forward to the influx of capital that will result from gay-marriage-related tourism and calls for greater tolerance from the city’s religious communities, suggesting that the Catholic Church has its own problems to deal with.  Rojas says that the city will be investing 100 million pesos into a new gay-friendly hotel in the Zona Rosa and will support the development of other businesses that cater to the GLBT market.

The article makes no bones about the economic motives involved, mentioning that increases in gay-tourism have been the natural result of legal gay marriage in other cities in the world, spawning gay-friendly “bridal” boutiques, wedding venues, beauty salons, and hotels. The author cites statistics claiming that 15% of global tourism is gay tourism. What do they call us again? D.I.N.K.’s: Dual Income, No Kids. So that‘s why we’re such a profitable subset of the population to tap into…

This all makes me wonder about the effectiveness, the limits, and the ethics of using gay spending power to open people’s minds about gay people and gay marriage, especially in the context of tourism from the “First World” to Mexico. Does politely taking the money of a white gay couple from north of the border translate into politely receiving your gay son’s boyfriend at a family dinner? And, as Anahí pointed out to me, the only gay people benefitting from this 100 million peso investment are those that can afford to stay at a luxury hotel in the Zona Rosa. I have always found Mexico City to be a very gay friendly city, but I say that as a white American who has never had to go to a local junior high school, hospital, or police precinct.

I hope that the passage of this same-sex marriage bill means that Rojas is correct, that Mexico City will become a truly “gay friendly” city, one in which all GLBT people can live and visit with safety, dignity, and joy.

Hello my name is homophobic.

If you want to see an ugly reminder that not everyone is happy about the Mexico City assembly’s decision to legalist gay marriage, head over to Blabbeando, where Andrés reports about Televisa host Esteban Arce using his morning show as a platform for his sixth-grade level homophobia. Arce has all the class of Bill O’Reilly as his berates the invited psychologist for suggesting that homosexuality is normal. Because, you know, sexuality is about procreation, plain and simple! How could anyone possibly be born with a sexual orientation that isn’t about making babies?

When I am in Mexico, I am almost always so immersed in my gay community that I honestly forget the intense homophobia that is still far too present in mainstream Mexican culture. Thanks to Andrés for bringing our attention to this asshole’s hateful agenda.

Click here for Blabbeando’s full post.

The Mexico City local assembly voted today to allow same-sex marriage, 39 to 20. The city had already passed a domestic partnership (leyes de convivencia) bill in 2007, but that was considered a symbolic victory at best, since it provided no more rights to same-sex couples than those already permitted under the law. This same-sex marriage law, which D.F. mayor Marcelo Ebrard is expected to sign into law, looks like a much more sweeping measure, and will allow gay couples to adopt children, be covered under health insurance plans, and to apply for bank loans as a couple.

The same-sex marriage law will only affect Mexico City, and no other states in Mexico, but it’s a start! I wish I was in Mexico City tonight. If you’re there, upload pictures of the festivities!

everyone's using this image, but how can I resist?

Special thanks to Monika Fabian for being the one to bring this to my attention.

American, Canadian, and European Union citizens must realize the tremendous privilege we have in being able to travel all over the world, often without restrictions or even a visa. Until a few years ago, Americans didn’t even need a passport to cross the Mexican border. The same is certainly not true for Mexicans trying to visit the United States. Indeed, several of my Mexican friends are unable to visit me in New York despite my enthusiastic invitation. Although they have no intention of immigrating, they can’t get a tourist visa because their jobs in Mexico aren’t considered “good enough” to prevent them from staying in the United States. Similarly, the privileges that American ex-pats living in Mexico experience, learning from living in a foreign country, earning money legally or picking up odd jobs here and there, don’t extend to Mexicans living in the United States, who face impossibly long waiting lists for green cards and other means of legal residency.

Any American who has ever bought a product made by inexpensive labor in Mexico or otherwise passively benefited from NAFTA should realize that “free trade” and the gap it has widened between Mexico’s rich and poor contribute to increasing immigration from Mexico. (For a good book about the blended economies of Mexico and the United States, check out Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration by Douglas S. Massey, which is available through Macha Mexico’s tiendita.) More specifically, any tourist to Mexico has to realize that much of what she enjoys about Mexico—the strength of the dollar against the peso, the picturesque “quaintness” of impoverished villages—is a part of the same economic landscape that forces many Mexicans to emigrate north.

In light of all this, I believe that any American tourist to Mexico should support reforming immigration laws in the United States to create more pathways to legalization. I feel particularly strongly that the queer people and women who make up the primary audience of this blog, who have themselves experienced what it is like to feel invisible, to feel underrepresented in the country in which you live, need to add their voices to the growing chorus of those calling for more just immigration reform.

Although I believe that the United States needs broad immigration reform across immigrant populations, as half of a bi-national lesbian couple and as the teacher of many undocumented high school students, I can recommend two good places to start: the DREAM Act and the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).

For those who don’t know, the DREAM Act is a piece of legislation that would create pathways for undocumented minors to legalize their immigration status independent of their parents’ status.  In the years I have worked as a high school teacher, I’ve had the privilege of meeting many students whose immigration status prevents them from receiving the financial aid they desperately need to attend college, despite being some of the brightest and hardest working students I’ve taught. The DREAM Act allows undocumented young people who arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and who have been living there for at least five years to gain permanent resident status by finishing two years of college or military service, during which they can work through federal work-study programs. Although the DREAM Act has been slowly gaining support since it was first introduced (under a different name) in 2001, there is no guaratee that it will pass. To learn more about the bill and the issues at hand, as well as how your senator is likely to vote, visit the DREAM Act Portal, an online community for undocumented students. To get involved in helping pass the DREAM Act, visit dreamact2009.com.

The other piece of immigration legislation that is close to my heart is the Uniting American Families Act, which, if passed, will allow American citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their same-sex partners for visas, the same way heterosexual people do for their spouses. Even though some states allow same-sex marriage, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government (including the Department of Homeland Security, which handles immigration) defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, leaving bi-national gay couples in an unfortunate position. This is an issue which has received a lot of press recently, such as the feature article in this month’s issue of the Advocate, and the well-publicized case of Shirley Tan, the California mother of two who has had her deportation delayed only by private emergency bill. (Tan’s testimony in front of the senate judiciary committee can be read here.)

Organizations such as Immigration Equality (formerly the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have done a lot of excellent work pushing for the passage of the UAFA (as well as advocating for GLBT people in many other areas of immigration, including assylum cases and the recent repeal of the HIV travel ban). Making a donation to either of these organizations is one way to show your support for bi-nation gay families (like ours).

However, there are many other ways to get involved. Currently, New York senator Chuck Schumer is drafting comprehensive immigration reform legislation, which he says will be finished by Labor Day. It would be a wonderful thing if the Uniting American Families Act were included in this comprehensive legislation. Now is an excellent time to write to senator Schumer as well as your local senators and representatives and express your support for bi-national gay families. A good template for writing your letter as well as more suggestions for how to get involved can be found on the Immigration Equality website.

Of course, neither of these specific bills deals with the larger issue of immigration reform, which is desperately needed as neo-liberal policies (as well as domestic economic policies, such as farm subsidies) continue to undermine the economies of developing countries such as Mexico. I encourage those readers with the privilege to travel the world and reap the benefits that globalization has offered them to educate themselves about the causes of immigration and to use their voices to support fair immigration reform.