La Petróleo flexes her hips like a palm tree as she walks among the colorful terraces of Calle La Palma in Cádiz. Low heeled sandal, tight red lycra jumpsuit, high ponytail and fine jewelry earrings on her 78th birthday. The delightful transsexual neighbor, unrepentant supporter of her virgin from La Palma and above all folk artist, has disguised herself again with the aura of a diva despite five years of retirement. “Oil, nice, for you on the street,” a neighbor yells at her, paraphrasing this viral moment from Reina del Martes Santo. She turns excitedly, greets, blows kisses and compliments before pulling the string revealing a new change in the Cadiz Gazetteer. The home of his beloved brotherhood, once Calle de San Nicolás, is now Via Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora. And the folklore screams, dances and blurts out: “Cadiz loves me completely, not as a fag but as a person and as an artist”.
But La Petróleo – simply, or at best with the surname “de Cádiz” – (Cádiz, 78 years old) can be wrong. She wants her La Viña neighborhood to be as it is, without any juxtapositions: a symbol of freedom and at the same time a living testimony of a humble vineyard that touched the sky of the group of national and international folk stars, the Rocío admired Jurado with a fandango and the one who cooked a gypsy cabbage – a typical provincial stew – for Lola Flores in Miami. The two are usually recurring anecdotes that the artist keeps up her sleeve when asked by a journalist – which has been rare lately – who approaches her to interview her. But the new street that the city council dedicated to her and her artistic partner La Salvaora (Cádiz, 71 years old) last Thursday has put her back in the limelight.
And La Petróleo seems pleased. In the absence of her friend, who is suffering from Covid, Tete – as her friends call her – is beaming for both of them and laughing non-stop. “Look how beautiful she was here when she was 22,” she says, pointing to a painting of her that hangs in the living room of the house she shares with her sister Encarnación Casal shortly after discovering her path . “I felt like a woman putting on a bata de cola,” a smiling third. Petróleo is not very familiar with what each letter in the group represents. For them, a generic “faggot” encompasses everything. But between laughs he sends a message to young trans people: “Now there are many of us because we should all have the right to live freely. But I would say to some not to be too ordinary.”
La Petróleo dances and sings during the opening ceremony of the “Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora” street together with the Mayor of Cadiz, José María González “Kichi” last Thursday. Michael Gomez
Petroleum does not license sadness. He only gets solemn to promise he’s lived a good life: “I’ve always been happy. There were families who kicked the fags out of their homes, but my mother always supported me. They would stop her to tell her what I was and she would always say, “You don’t have to tell me, I’m here to support you”. But journalist Raúl Solís knows full well that “there is a lot of misery behind the glitter”. Attracted by this chiaroscuro life, he dedicated a chapter of his work The Double Transition to the artist couple from Cádiz. Although Petróleo says at the same time that “the Franco regime had curtain fabrics” but that they never engaged in them, Salvaora Solís was already recounting those stifling years of dictatorship when they could only dress “as women in the night.” “. The two artists met in 1963 at Bar la Constancia, a station for seafarers and dissidents from the LGTBI community in Cádiz. “We used to go out at night when we couldn’t,” La Petróleo recalls. Those were tough years, also economically. Daughters of humble single mothers, they dressed up with the red powder of crushed bricks and used chewing gum as fake nails.
But the fortunes of Petróleo and Salvaora began to change with the arrival of democracy. A doctor helped them by prescribing the first hormones that would pave the way for them to “conquer their own identity,” as Solís points out. The artistic breakthrough came with Las Folclóricas Gaditanas, a flamenco group made up of three transgender women and two gypsy guitarists, a revolution that toured many Spanish tablaos in the 1980s. It is these show business beauties, immortalized as sparkles in the paintings that adorn her living room, that La Petróleo revels in with pleasure. “We made $1,000 a week in Miami. We wouldn’t cross the pond for less!” he exclaims, banging the table vigorously. From this American dream, which lasted more than two years, the artist remembers Domingo, her “great love”. “It was very good, but life died…” adds the artist without going into detail.
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La Petróleo and La Salvaora remained active into the first decade of the 2000s, already as local singers. There was no gala that the first did not miss, including the one he organized to collect donations for the repair of the church of his beloved brotherhood on La Palma. “Until five years ago I choked and fell while performing in Madrid. They told me I had asthma and I’ve already moved on from it,” the singer summarizes. With the withdrawal, Petróleo was left with a pension of 700 euros and a whole quarter, La Viña, to travel as the institution that is happy to survive the Cádiz joke, giving hugs and compliments to those who they claim. Always, yes, in the morning. “I’ve lived this night for many years,” she exclaims, seated at a table on a patio with five other ladies cheering her on endlessly. “She’s always on the corner near the church talking to everyone, but a lot of people don’t really know her, they’re just watching the show. She told me her life when it was a crime to be like her, these races to get out of the way, you see what she fought for. It’s a flag of bad times,” says Francis Lucero, older brother of the Brotherhood of La Palma, who adores it.
In La Viña, there seems to be a consensus that the road to the artists – which adds to the tribute the city council gave both in 2016 – was a necessary gesture. “It deserves a place in the neighborhood. She was very happy about the proximity to the church,” adds the brother. So close that now Petróleo and Salvaora give the postal address of the temple, to which the former never misses a morning to pray. On Thursday, dressed as an artist, she wasn’t sure about going inside, but in the end she made up her mind. Exulting, he stood before his Virgin and Christ, spread his arms and exclaimed: “To be with you, even happier because I love you madly, thank you for this day, my mother!”.
La Petróleo pays homage to the Virgin of La Palma in the church of the same name in the Barrio de La Viña, just after the Calle de las Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora was inaugurated in Cádiz. Michael Gomez
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