The Devil in the Toilet

The life and suicide of Chicana film star Lupe Vélez have been the subject of many fantastic speculations and retellings, the most famous of which imagines her dying facedown in the toilet while vomiting up her last supper. In this article, I throw myself headfirst into the vertiginous uncertainties and mythologies surrounding Vélez as a public figure. In order to excavate the cross-generational queer assumptions and attachments through which she has been remembered and re-cited, I look to the 1960s underground film Life, Death and Assumption of Lupe Vélez, by José Rodriguez-Soltero, and the 2012 performance/film Fuck My Life from artist Xandra Ibarra. These works are examples of what I call recuperative re-citations, built through acts of empathetic queer/trans engagements with Vélez’s excesses. This process produces the potential for connection and healing through acts of embodied citation and storytelling. When we understand suicide as agential queer performance, Vélez’s death becomes an opening for radical expressions of pleasure and empathy based in shared pain. Exploring the various iterations of her early death and mining the complexity of her humanity, queer scholars and artists of color facilitate the assumption of Vélez as both saint and devil of queer Brown femininity.