Carmelita Tropicana, photo by Carlos David
“Carmelita Tropicana can be a beast. In the past, she has been a horse, pig and even a bear. In short, we can describe Alina Troyano’s performance persona, Carmelita Tropicana, as a queer assemblage… This queer assemblage is always becoming.” José Esteban Muñoz 2013 Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana’s “With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? / Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha?”
As a writer and performer, I have straddled the worlds of performance art and theater. I use irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. By performing hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas, as well as numerous animals, insects, and fantasy creatures, I challenge historical and narrative authority. My work addresses political issues and looks at the intersections that exist between ethnicity, sexuality, gender, race and class.
Carmelita Tropicana has received a United States Artists Fellowship (2021), CLAGS, Center for Lesbian and Gays Studies José Muñoz Award (2021), Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), Creative Capital (2016) Anonymous Was A Woman (2005), and Obie (1999). Her writing has appeared in many anthologies, most recently in Animal Acts, Performing Species Today ((University of Michigan Press, 2015). A collection of scripts, short stories and essay appear in her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures (2000) was published by Beacon Press.