WGSS Spring Colloquium, "A Timely Revelation: Trans Temporality, Crip Time, and the Testimony of Irina Layevska Echeverría Gaitán"- Colloquium for Faculty and Graduate Students

Born in 1965 to Communist parents, the transgender and disability rights activist Irina Layevska Echeverría Gaitán was a child of the Mexican counterculture and leftist movements that emerged in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, Echeverría Gaitán participated in leftist organizations and guerrilla struggles throughout her life, modeling herself after Che Guevara’s “New Man” in her youth. At age 34, she began her transition from a man to a woman, adding a new layer of defiance to her militancy. This article explores the alleged expulsion of Echeverría Gaitán from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) for “gender betrayal.” Scrutinizing her delayed accusation that the EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, personally expelled her from the movement, this article seeks to reconcile the belated nature of her accusation with a limited archival record and contradictory evidence. It does so in order to understand how discourses of tolerance and solidarity continue to be deployed by leftist movements and actors to maintain an international image of progressivism while failing to confront rank-and-file conservativism. Examining her controversial and unverified expulsion from the EZLN, a movement that has been widely praised for its progressivism, I hope to place Mexican trans and crip/disabled studies in conversation with those from the Global South on the question of temporality and the medicalization of disability. Scholars straddling the geopolitical topographies of North/South have begun to challenge the geographic privileges within which trans people and those with disabilities are located and question how the emphasis on trans death and a non-disabled future often reproduces the systemic violence experienced under colonialism, dictatorship, and neoliberalism in Latin America. Deeply researching Echeverría Gaitán’s claims and allegations rethinks our understanding of the timing of oral histories and testimonio, along with recognizing the deeply-held grievances of some revolutionary subjects toward celebrated figures of leftist movements such as Subcomandante Marcos.