Venus Rising

ProfileIssue: Pisces 07

Carmen Oquendo-Villar Films a Day in a Transgender Life at the Chicks Make Flicks Series in Boston

A still from BoquitaIn her films Boquita and Mizery, Carmen Oquendo-Villar documents the day-to-day lives of two different drag queens in Boston, giving the world a better understanding of transgender nightlife performers. Her work has been shown at film festivals, galleries, and museums around the world, and Boquita and Mizery were shown in Boston at the Women in Film & Video New England series, Chicks Make Flicks. The Chicks Make Flicks events feature the work of local female filmmakers every second Thursday of the month at 7 pm and include a discussion panel after the show.

Carmen Oquendo-Villar always had a passion for films, but for a long time she was more interested in watching them. While living in Boston she got the idea to document Latino transgenders in New York. However, a friend, questioned her as to why she didn’t want to make films where she lived. So, that is how she decided to film the documentaries in Boston.

Before making the documentaries, Oquendo-Villar was working in gender issues for a while but not as an activist. I was “fascinated by the trans community, but I can’t say that I understood it,” says Oquendo-Villar. She said the more involved she became, the better she understood the trans community. She found that if you look at everyday life, there are many things that are common to all of us.

Oquendo-Villar is working on her PhD at Harvard, focusing on media and politics in the literature department. Her film Boquita started off as a project for a basic filmmaking class she was taking at Harvard. Harvard doesn’t have a film program at the graduate level, but she was able to use the Film Studies Center at Harvard to make Boquita. She used a small crew of two people, filming and editing with the help of Richard E. Ruiz.

Boquita is the story of a transgender nightlife performer from the Dominican Republic called Boquita. Boquita, who currently resides in Jamaica Plain, MA, works as an AIDS prevention counselor at the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation (HOPE) in Jamaica Plain during the day and performs at various nightclubs in Massachusetts at night. In the film, we see her at home with her friends, at her day job, and getting ready for a show. She has conversations with other transgenders at her job, talking about relationships and other issues. And at home, she talks on the phone, watches television, puts on makeup, and hangs out with friends. Transgender is a different lifestyle than most people experience, but the film shows Boquita in a way that is humanizing -- as she does everyday things.

At the end of the film, Boquita is at home watching television and makes fun of a beauty pageant contestant on the TV, criticizing her style in a comical way. The inclusion of the pageant contestant is ironic because society lauds one type of beauty while it denigrates another. The documentary aims to show a “day in the life” of Boquita in a purely inspirational way. The film is a 10-minute short in Spanish with English subtitles.