Exiliado: Santa Gloria!
Gloria Estefan was from Gibraltar. She had to be. Not only did she look like the embodiment of a cool early 90s Llanita with her big curly hair, sequined top, hoop earrings and mahogany lipstick, but she also looked like one of my aunty’s sisters. This is what I thought when I was seven years old and completely obsessed with her. There was nobody else like her on the radio or on the television.
Then there was the language. That ease of bilingualism I had only heard in one other place, my hometown. It felt secret and thrilling, the way she marketed English songs for England and Spanish songs for Spain. It felt like the only ones who could complete the puzzle were us Llanitos.
In 1993 she released Mi Tierra, an album entirely in Spanish that spoke of her longing for a home she had only briefly known, and it wasn’t Gibraltar. I left her behind for a little while, and fell in love with her again when she released gloria! in 1998. By this point, I had watched VH1’s Behind The Music about her repeatedly. I had also watched Too Wong Foo and The Birdcage.
Everything came together in my 13 year old head and it was fabulous. Displacement, borders, longing for home, exile, drag queens, Miami, and disco music. I wasn’t into football or whatever Llanito boys were supposed to be into growing up. Instead, I had the safe space of the CD player in my room, and the movies I could watch on television. It was a covert operation, because nothing was explicitly said. Movies just happened to be playing.
Gloria was just Gloria, even if she was singing about ‘mi amor mi buen amor mi delirio’ and I was thinking about some boy from school. And when ‘Oye’ came on and everyone danced, I had the extra secret knowledge that this, with its music video clearly set in a Miami gay bar, was one of the queerest anthems going.
In many ways, the experience Gloria Estefan had was very Gibraltarian. The fence at Guantanamo looked like the fence at the border between Gibraltar and Spain. The stretch of water between Cuba and America separates two very different worlds, as it does between Gibraltar and Algeciras across the bay, and a bigger stretch of water to England. We both occupy a similar third space, somewhere with the ability to switch between languages and a singular culture not understood by either place we are sandwiched between.
Then came the Latin explosion of the late 90’s, and to the Gibraltarian it didn’t feel exotic. To have Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin on our screens and radios was the closest thing we had to a global national icon. Here we had people who finally understood us, even if they did live thousands of miles away. Our bilingualism was relevant and desirable now, only we understood the lyrics to all the songs. And we got the culture these artists came from, the large Catholic families with the undercurrent of sensuality, the love of food, the cultural importance of a good beach, and the striving for nationhood.
We talked about them like they were friends or family. They were El Ricky and La J.Lo, or La Jennifer Lopez. Here was a name that sounded very Gibraltarian. Women talked about her body with reverence because finally, they saw some of themselves worshipped by millions of people, someone who wasn’t tall and blonde and skinny and who was perfectly comfortable with it.
And what I found in all these artists was desire. An understanding that I could go out into the world as myself and that people could embrace it. The complexities of the fetishisation or simplification of an entire culture aside, I had a foundation placed within me that I could be successful on my own terms.
The song ‘Mi Tierra’ has followed me into adulthood. I often get emotional listening to it. There’s no real translation that does the word ‘tierra’ justice in English. Gloria Estefan sings about a homeland, a past, a culture and a people she’s barely had access to. I ran away from Gibraltar as fast as I could when I was 18, but through the years it’s had a hold on me. She sings ‘la tierra donde naciste no la puedes olvidar, porque tiene tus raíces y lo que dejas atrás.’
I think of what it meant to me, to see these singers on the television and to hear the words they sung when I was younger. I think of the representation and the culture that has been denied to us as Gibraltarians through the years, and how we have sometimes been the architects of our own demise, so desperate to fit in and belong somewhere that we have left aspects of ourselves behind.
I think about struggle. The evacuation across the world during World War 2. The struggle to get people home and to have a say in how we lived our lives. The border closure. The constant political struggle. I also think about all those LGBT people in Gibraltar who never had a story, who never had access to singers like Gloria Estefan, or films like The Birdcage, to give them hope that one day things would get better.
When I listen to ‘Mi Tierra’, I not only think about the struggles of the past, but the hope for the future. Where a Gibraltarian can bring our culture to the world through song, or film, or fiction on a global scale. Where we are not just a piece of land to be fought over, or a blank canvas in which to set a crime story with no Gibraltarian in sight. Where Queer Llanito voices don’t feel afraid to speak up about the things they have gone through, and how it is just as valid as everyone else’s experience.
For now though, we still have Gloria.
