#30: Fiebre Tropical
On 70s lesbians, evangelical churches, and Spanglish
Good morning!
Last week, as an anniversary gift, Alanna gave me this book of portraits of lesbians in the 70s. I love it, of course, and I especially love this white-haired woman holding a large knife and pulling something out of the oven.
The portrait alone is good, but what really got me was the accompanying caption:
The energy here is incredible, especially when you consider that it’s coming from 1978. Naturally, I needed to learn everything I could about Dot Palmerton.
According to this archive of LGBTQ spaces in D.C., Dot took over the Capitol Hill Town House restaurant in 1978, renaming it Dot’s Town House Restaurant. This is presumably where the above portrait was taken.
In 1980, she took over the upstairs of a restaurant called Mr. Henry’s, just two blocks away. That upstairs room, built 15 years prior and designed specifically for an early-career Roberta Flack, was a gay hotspot through the 60s and 70s. Under Dot’s ownership, it became Dot’s Spot, and attracted a crowd that was “largely, though not exclusively, gay.”
For a mere $15, patrons got dinner for two (including sourdough bread, baked by Dot) and free entry to a two-set show, which seems like a phenomenal deal. And though the place closed in 1984, it is now my dream to sit in a room full of lesbians eating homemade sourdough and watching some cabaret.
— Becca
Fiebre Tropical by Juli Delgado Lopera
Fiction, March 2020
Someone on Goodreads described this book as “sort of a Miami-based Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” which was really all I needed to know before purchasing a copy. If you feel the same way, I’d understand if you stop reading this review right now and go buy your own.
The only other detail I knew before reading was that it’s written in a blend of English and Spanish, which the book jacket describes as “a groundbreaking rhythmic Spanglish.” But the voice here, with both the blended language and the narrator’s way of casually addressing the reader, is more than a detail. It’s funny, it’s sarcastic, and it’s a little bit dramatic. It feels like jumping right into the brain of a 15-year-old girl. And it’s what makes this book such a joy to read.
Rather than trying to write my own lengthy description of that voice, I’ll just give you the first paragraph:
Buenos días, mi reina. Immigrant criolla here reporting desde los Mayamis from our ant-infested townhouse. The broken air conditioner above the TV, the flowery couch, La Tata half-drunk directing me in this holy radionovela brought to you by Female Sadness Incorporated. That morning as we unpacked the last of our bags, we’d found Tata’s old radio. So the two of us practiced our latest melodrama in the living room while on the TV Don Francisco saluted el pueblo de Miami ¡damas y caballeros! and Tata—at her age!—to Mami’s exasperation and my delight, went girl crazy over his manly voice.
Francisca speaks this way throughout the book, kicking off her story shortly after arriving in Miami from Bogotá with her Mami, sister, and grandmother, La Tata. She’s miserable in her new city, loaded with teenage ennui, and it only gets worse when her mother plunges headfirst into an evangelical church. But while Francisca is at first resistant to the church, with all its fainting and Life Changing Testimonies and Jesucristo t-shirts, she’s quickly drawn in by the Pastor and Pastora’s daughter, Carmen.
Her infatuation with Carmen is ill-fated from the start, given that she’s extremely involved in a homophobic church. But the more compelling storyline here anyway is the one that revolves around this small matriarchy, and the “larger collective Female Sadness” passed down through generations. Flashback chapters to Mami in Bogotá in the 70s and La Tata in Cartagena in the 50s were standouts for me, and brought depth to their characters in the present day.
The plot does meander a bit in the second half, so you shouldn’t go into the book with the expectation that everything will all come together neatly at the end. It won’t. But Francisca’s voice and Delgado Lopera’s cutting observations about religion, immigration, queerness, and grief make it well worth reading, and kept me along for the ride the whole time.
As a final note, if you don’t speak Spanish, please don’t let that deter you from reading this book. Remember that great Bong Joon Ho quote about overcoming, “the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles”? The same applies here, except the barrier here is maybe having to look something up on your phone every 50 pages.
Queer points:
+4 for a female character who hides under her bed rather than speak to male suitors
+9 for a scene in which one character has an earring ripped out of her ear and another character tends to her by… sucking her earlobe?
Buy it from your favorite local bookstore on Bookshop