Butchlalis de Panochtitlan - 'The Butch Stars of Pussyland' (2002-2010), Los Angeles based queer performance ensemble mapping what it means to be butch, queer, and latino.
Butchlalis de Panochtitlan is a sketch-driven performance ensemble that maps Los Angeles on racialized female masculine bodies, as both characters and caricatures. The BdP are not drag kings, but butch dykes/transgender butches/genderqueer speaking subjects that are not trying to pass as men; instead, the BdP explore the in-between space of female biology and testerone-taking transexuality and the identities and neighborhoods these subjects claim and are claimed by. Their bodies of work include themes of home belonging, queer family, butch-femme relations, brown butch socialities and aesthetics.
Queer meets punk meets Chicano history meets all kinds of identity politics by Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. Mari Garcia, Raquel Gutierrez and Claudia Rodriguez make up Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, a theater outfit that styles itself as "genderqueer" and "multi-genre margin walkers." They weave through a gallery of real and fictional characters and seminal moments in Eastside L.A. Chicano life—especially centered on the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, the rise of the gay civil rights movement and the early days of the Reagan administration. Proudly butch, the members of BdP redefine "macha."
Sketches include Working Class Butch Latina/o Identities (City Terrace); Interracial Desire (Montebello); Family Guilt-Latino Queerness (East Los Angeles); Bar Culture/Softball Culture (El Sereno); Gentrification (Silverlake, former home of immigrant transvestis); Class/Classism (all of LA Metro); Sexual Awakening (West Hollywood); Suburban Renditions of Queer Subjectivies (Bell Gardens). The BdP includes longtime cultural activists, performance poets and co-founders of Tongues Magazine, a Los Angeles-based queer arts journal and organizing project—Raquel Gutierrez and Claudia Rodriguez.








