Provocative, personal, and deeply interested in the possibilities of pleasure, is Traición Latin America’s most forward-thinking party? Tom Faber interviews the Mexico City collective

In his raunchy memoir, Pillar of Salt, Salvador Novo — an openly homosexual intellectual, broadcaster, politician and entrepreneur who could be described as Mexico's Oscar Wilde — details an apartment he decorated in 1921. Nestled amongst the pre-Columbian knick-knacks that found themselves en vogue a century after Mexican independence was a small religious idol with a difference. This one had a massive ass. Christened ‘El Polencho' by Novo, the figure took pride of place on the polymath’s headboard. Underneath the icon was a gourd full of Vaseline, lubricant for his nightly rituals.

Almost a hundred years later, a reincarnation of El Polencho can be found behind the decks at Traición, one of Mexico City’s most-hyped parties. El Polencho is, in the words of Traición co-founder Alberto Bustamante, “an anal sex deity and transexual goddess.” The idol looks at home once more, lording it over a space where people happily experiment at the fringes of culture, politics, and desire.

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For Bustamante, the Mexican capital is a city with a party culture, not a club culture. Roving between the faded decadence of colonial mansions, abandoned swingers bars, and the offices of political publications, the best parties in Mexico City eschew traditional club spaces. “Nightlife is in a constant shifting state,” Bustamante says, “always emerging, but never established.”

It was on this ever-changing circuit that Bustamante met the Traición’s other founders. Given that he’s creative director of the future-focused NAAFI collective, it made sense Bustamante took up a curatorial position within Traición. Lucia Anaya, a promoter, is in charge of operations, while Diego Jimenez Labora, who runs two major festivals, deals with partners and sponsorships. Then there’s Pepe Romero, an avant-theatre expert who took on the party’s secret ingredient, its outre performances.

Traición grew to fill a void; queer people were slipping between the cracks of Mexican nightlife. The city has a major LGBT presence, from activism to drag balls - a recent article from the London School of Economics argued LGBT people have greater legal equality in Mexico than in the United States - but most gay parties skewed towards hard techno, the male body and male sexuality. Anyone whose interests diverged beyond those rigid norms had no place to call home. “Fuck,” Anaya thought, “we don’t have a place to hang out. It’s not like you have a mythic gay bar here where you can go and meet people you really like.”

Back in 2015, they set out to make that mythic space a reality. Traición means ‘treason’ or ‘betrayal’ in Spanish. One of their first acts of treason was to hold the party on Sunday afternoons, traditionally a Mexican day for family and rest. Once a month, the extravagantly-dressed crowd would be greeted by a new iteration of Salvador Novo’s beloved 'El Polencho,' commissioned from a fresh illustrator.

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On these intimate Sunday gatherings, Traición serves as a queer community centre, with music, performance and the occasional talk. But the event can also shapeshift: this year they filled the dome of a major festival and threw a Pride party with 1000 ravers, where SOPHIE played alongside performers from Brazil, USA and Colombia. Traición music policy ranges from reggaeton to the global bass sounds associated with NAAFI to international house talent - upcoming parties feature Tama Sumo and Eris Drew.

Whoever is behind the decks, wherever the party takes place, one thing is certain: there will always be performance. These are diverse: transgender mermaid performer Lia La Novia splashed in a paddling pool making dolphin noises, while Manuel Solano, blinded by AIDS-related complications, blindfolded the audience while telling them vividly about the first time he had sex after losing his sight.

Some performances were more provocative. At Festival Ceremonia, Traición hosted artist Rafa Esparza, who entered the dome with two long braids, wearing only black straps and a huge concrete effigy of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue over his face. To the dembow beat of reggaeton, he raised ceramic religious figures - Jesus, Mary and various saints - and smashed them against the goddess on his face, shattering Mexico’s recent history against the immutable ancients. This display caused a stir outside of the festival and was reported in national news - with one site reporting incorrectly that Esparza had been rubbing the figures against his genitals before destroying them.

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Pornoterrorista, a Spanish performance artist and activist, has performed twice. At Traición’s women and femme-only sister party, Tortilla (a slang term for lesbian in Mexico), Pornoterrorista demonstrated a live on-stage fisting. At her other appearance, she inserted a microphone inside her vagina and invited the audience to slap her stomach. Anaya says it sounded like a drum. “You do not want to see the face of the guy who rented us the microphone,” she says, laughing. “I was like - ‘she put on a condom, calm down!’”

The performance aspect is not just to provoke and titillate. It pushes boundaries, making everyone share, Bustamante says, “a trauma or pleasure moment. It creates intimacy and complicity between all the audience.” And what happens after the performance is just as important: “The dancefloor articulates and the party liberates itself.”

At Festival Ceremonia, the Traición tent was one of the only spaces among 30,000 attendees with no corporate sponsor. “We were the bastards, not even a condom brand wanted to support us,” Anaya complains. They were told that there is an acceptable face of LGBT support for businesses, and Traición are ‘too radical’.

Yet for all their extreme aesthetics and challenges to social norms, Traición run a sleek operation. They sell merchandise and organise international collaborations. Their social media and branding are on-point. Anaya uses terms in conversation like ‘content creation’ and ‘market diversification’. This is not the image you might expect from a radical queer art collective. It is partly explained by the need to hide their extreme side from the public eye, to avoid censorship or trolling.

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But there is another layer of transgression at play - what Bustamante describes as a move away from the idea that queer expression must be DIY, resourceless and improvised. “I want to make the party globally-appealing and sophisticated and enjoyable,” he says. “It’s still hard to get sponsorship for queer subjects in Mexico City, in a society which is free in many ways but still conservative in others. We were aware from the beginning that if we presented the party as something extreme and radical we would never get the status and opportunities that we’re looking for.”

Traición is about visibility and radical thinking, culture and community, but also legitimising queerness and showing it creates cultural value. It is about proving, as Salvador Novo did a century ago, that you don’t have to sacrifice your social status in order to lead a provocative personal life. The Traición team, and their legions of fans, can hide their anal sex god and their gourd full of Vaseline in plain sight.

Written by Tom Faber

Photography courtesy of PJ Rountree & Dorian Ulises Lopez

A part of Contemporary Scenes, a BR series uncovering underground collectives, artists and subcultures from across the world