The Past Presents: Lala Queen
Interviewed & Edited by Tommy Clift in 2023.
The Past Presentsis a series highlighting artists fromthe denver undrgound magazine, Worldview’s predecessor. These are some of Mariella’s words directly from the conversation.
When we talk about representation for the Latin community in queerness, it’s kind of like, “We gave you this, you should be happy.” Like when we see Latin people in queer love stories, they’re always in a relationship with a white person. They can never be in a successful happy relationship together. We don’t see ourselves celebrated in queer culture enough. There is such beauty in the Latin queer community, but it’s just that it doesn’t get the same light that everything else does. I’ve gotten way more critique from the white cis gay men than I have from a queer BIPOC person ever.
Finding Drag:
I’ve always wanted to be extra. Growing up, I always wanted to have attention and things like that. Now, I’m learning that I don’t want any attention (laughing). My mom used to say when I was growing up that she wanted me to be an actor, but I always tell her that she should have been more specific. But there’s a love that I had for growing up around my mom and my grandma, and my tías, and channeling that into its art.
I grew up here in Denver, my family is from here. My parents pretty much raised us in the same five-mile radius of where they grew up. So my whole life was basically in Westwood Denver, which was very much the ghetto. My parents were from here, and my grandparents pretty much had lived in the same area their whole life. My grandparents, their love stories started, not far from where I grew up.
The house that we grew up in, was actually the house that my grandparents built in the 50s. And then we bought that house in the 90s. 36 years here in Denver. It’s definitely grown. It’s changed, some things for the better, some things for the worse.
So even though Denver was a big city, I lived in a small neighborhood area pretty much my whole life until probably into my 20s when I got my first apartment in gay Cap Hill, which was an experience in itself, coming out of this area that was predominantly Latin, that was predominantly families that we were raised in that area. Then going to Cap Hill and starting my drag career, it was a huge change.
When I first started watching drag, it was right before the premiere of season one of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Nina Flowers was still performing at Charlie’s VIVID on Sunday nights. So we would go and we’d watch her. And then seeing her on TV—it was incredible. Not only were we seeing a drag queen on TV for the first time ever (even though it was Logo), we were seeing a Latin drag queen on TV.
We were seeing a very powerful, very strong, very qualified Latin drag queen on TV. It was huge. And so we got to watch her throughout the viewing parties and things like that. And I think that’s what really made me feel like, well, damn, I can do this. A lot of times for drag entertainers when it comes to Latin drag entertainers, we often get a certain stereotype about us or certain edits about us, like Chichi Rodriquez from To Wong Foo—very that. All throughout RuPaul’s drag race, we’ve seen Puerto Rican queens who play up that they can’t speak proper English—judges constantly making jokes about them—who are very qualified, very amazing queens who don’t get the credit that they deserve. But seeing Nina like that. It was a moment where I felt like I could do this.
