Marginalized voices
“¡Cuéntamelo!,” a rereleased collection of oral histories by seven LGBT Latino immigrants, might have Juliana Delgado Lopera’s name on its cover, but, save for an introduction and some scene-setting details, Lopera very wisely cedes the book to her subjects.
Lopera, of course, deserves considerable credit for the hours spent interviewing, transcribing, translating and condensing these histories, but the most difficult task — and one she manages well — is letting a sense of who each of these individuals are come through on the page. Readers meet people like Mahogany Sánchez, a trans woman who emigrated from Nicaragua in 1973 with her family and says, as she went through puberty, “I wished so intensely to have a feminine figure that my breasts hurt,” and Nelson D’Alerta, a gay man who emigrated from Cuba in 1980 and talks about his alter ego, Catherine White, as though she’s another person altogether. “She’s too much. I love her, but sometimes she’s too much.”
All of the people Lopera highlights came to the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s, bringing with them stories from, among other places, Cuba and Peru.
“¡Cuéntamelo!” began as a piece for SF Weekly back in 2013. Lopera initially transcribed the oral histories of four LGBT Latino immigrants only to find out that four was not nearly enough to meet the demand for a marginalized community that doesn’t always see its stories faithfully told. The first edition of the book came out a year later, but Lopera, who was self-publishing, was only able to gather the money for 300 copies. All of which sold out on the first day.
Now, with the backing of Aunt Lute Books — which calls itself a “multicultural women’s press” — Lopera has managed a wider run with an updated foreword that notes these stories are coming out at a particularly important moment, after the election of Donald Trump, who has made targets of immigrants and LGBT people. These Latino immigrants, then, are doubly affected, and their stories seem more urgent than ever.
The book is reversible, one side in Spanish, the other in English, to make the stories as accessible as possible. This recent edition also includes a number of older photographs of Lopera’s subjects that help add texture to their already vivid oral histories.
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost