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Susana Peña, iOye Loca!: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 2013) pb 280pp. ISbn: 978-0816665549
Reviewed by James Wilkey
Charting sexuality can be tricky business. The inherently personal ways that individuals classify sexual identity, experience and expression make the subject prone to lengthy bouts of contextualisation and clarification that can leave a reader lost and undermine a work's effectiveness. Although Susana Peña's extensive background in Cuban-American sexuality and expression grants her a strong pedigree to tackle the challenge, the basic structure of iOye Loca!: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami ultimately undermines an otherwise intriguing work.
The book analyses the evolution of homosexual identity and expression among Miami-based Cuban Americans following the 1980 Mariel boatlift. In particular, the author focuses on the cultural impact of gender transgressive gay Cubans, whom Peña classifies as locas, who were transferred en masse to the US as part of the boatlift. The author suggests that locas adopted and flaunted a particularly visible effeminacy as a kind of quiet resistance to the state-sponsored homosexual persecution of the revolution. When in 1980, this exact kind of gender transgressive homosexuality began being targeted for removal from Cuba, gay men suddenly found themselves indirectly encouraged to adopt or exaggerate...