El Santo Joto

In Bracho’s El Santo Joto an unholy trinity of Latinx queers grieve for a generation lost to AIDS and expropriate a day of remembrance for their very own: “December 12th, Juan Rodríguez Day.” This is the historic day that La Virgen de Guadalupe was said to have made her second appearance to a young Indigenous Mexican man, Juan Diego. However, in El Santo, this day memorializes Juan Rodríguez, a student activist in the 1980s who led the first national HIV prevention campaign for trans and Latino gay men. Rodríguez’s death from AIDS, like those of Sylvester, Reza Abdoh, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Assoto Saint, left us a generation without leaders. The modes of recollection among the three santos are distinct, but they are connected in their defiance of theological debasement and in their affirmation of all that is unseemly and unholy, if not also illegal.