Walter Mercado, brujería, and the only TV in our house
A personal tribute — con mucho, mucho amor.

Imagine it’s the 1990s. A normal weeknight, in our normal Bay Area home.
The dinner table has already been cleared, preparations for the next day have begun, and my grandparents have retreated to their room AKA the only room in the house with a TV.
Normally, this is the time I would take advantage of the available phone line to join my friends on AIM. But, sometime between Telemundo’s racist novelas and the misogynist prime time news, this man makes himself at home:

I set my away message to “BRB” and plop myself on the floor in front of our only TV, right in between my grandfather’s rocker and my grandmother’s altar.
For these next few minutes, all the generations and mother-tongues and immigration-statuses of our family join together in agreement about something…anything…finally.
Who fights when Walter Mercado is on the only TV in the house?
Twenty years later, the fancy journalists describe him in elaborate obituaries as “an astrologer.” And sure, he read our horoscopes – but that was truly beside the point.
Walter Mercado used the familiar, seemingly innocuous Zodiac as a cover to bring people together. And he did so in such a way that you always felt he was speaking directly to you. Artistic genius.

How did he do it?
He mastered the ability to sound so familiar that the unfamiliar would slip by unnoticed.
He was Latin American, but not Mexican.
Devout, but not Catholic.
A witch, but not a woman.
There was a tenderness to his voice that had nothing to do with seduction or surrender. And we loved him for it. Or maybe, we loved that he made it so easy to love him…right through the pixels of our only TV.
Maybe it was more dangerous to be openly queer back then, and maybe it was popular to be homophobic, but it was certainly, wildly unpopular to hate Walter Mercado.
Which meant, over time, that it became wildly unpopular to hate otherness. To hate others. To hate ourselves.
Walter Mercado took a culture of persecution and turned it into a culture of reverence (or, if you wanna get real deep with it: a return to reverence…because, colonizers).

Walter Mercado didn’t just cloak himself in the most decadent of robes and adornments. He also sought to cloak the parts of ourselves, and the members of our community, that identified with him. He gave us the permission, and the protection, to break free from toxic masculinity and gender binaries:
<<Si tengo que ser un guerrero, entonces seré eso. Si tengo que ser suave y sutil, también puedo serlo. Rompí las barreras. Los niños visten de azul y las niñas visten de rosa… ¿Por qué? No, eso está en el pasado. Conformidad extrema de género, machismo y mujeres débiles y sumisas, no, no, no, no. Nosotros somos humanos; las personas tienen derecho a pensar lo que quieran. Sigo mi propio camino y soy quien soy. >>

I am a better person, a better artist, and a better mother because people like Walter Mercado and Juan Gabriel showed me what it looked like to reject toxic masculinity and cis-heteronormativity — in my grandparents’ language, in my grandparents’ room.
They’re why I never believed it was “some white sh*t” to refuse to settle for beauty without power, power without peace, or peace without justice. Eso es lo nuestro.
Yes, we have a long way to go where gender and race are concerned. Yes, I’m in my feelings right now and more than likely giving these white men way more credit than they deserve.

But, I really do believe that I would be una sin vergüenza if I did not acknowledge the impact that Walter Mercado’s life and death have had on my formation. Despite my Catholic upbringing, despite having the Terminator as governor, and despite María Mercedes, Marimar, and María la del Barrio — I somehow managed to make it to 33 with 2 sweet boys and (most of) my power and dignity intact.

Maybe Walter Mercado had something to do with it… maybe he didn’t. All I know is that the night he transitioned, I tore my apartment in two trying to find a picture of the only TV in our house. But I could barely see because the water in my eyes made everything so blurry.
Walter Mercado made everything so blurry.
For that, we owe him our gratitude for more than just reading our horoscopes.

