Afro-Latina Rising

ESSAY by MISS MIRAGE, THEPASTELDOMINA

Imagine my shock in the winter of 2023 when a white British client—among a group of men I and other dancers were giving a group lapdance—growled at me from my position straddling his lap: “Are you Latina?” It was only in the past two years that I had begun to be recognized as Latinx by people from my own community; to be clocked by a white man in a strip club in Europe was flabbergasting. I was, however, a bit pleased. “Yes,” I smiled, and continued grinding on his lap before flipping myself over to twerk in front of one of his friends.

Latinx women feature heavily in sex work, whether we like it or not—I have heard it said in the club that the two most desirable ethnic genres of strippers are Colombians and Russians. As an Afro-Latinx woman, or as I have begun to say, ‘Blacktina,’ I have traditionally been excluded from the dominant narratives of who gets to be recognized as Latinx. That exclusion has come from both within and outside of the Latinx community, and has been made manifest at times over the course of my career in sex work.

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