ABSTRACT
La lotería mexicana is a game beloved throughout Mexico and Mexican-American communities in the U.S. Its popularity has extended to other areas of Latin America, especially Central America, as well as other Latina/o communities in the U.S. Through culturally meaningful images and their oral descriptions, the game both reflects and maintains Latin American and Latina/o identities anchored in traditional Western sociocultural constructions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. However, as it is embedded in Mexico’s complex history of Spanish colonization, revolution, and struggle with U.S. imperialism, la lotería mexicana is also used as vehicle to contest national promises of equality broken on both sides of the Río Grande. While iconic lotería images are often reproduced to celebrate Mexican or Latin American heritage without questioning their conservatism, some artists build their own inclusions and criticisms into the game in response to social injustices. By creating alternative mythologies, these reiterations work to empower those who have the deck stacked against them, either by modifying the cards or by creating new ones. Similar to the way regional Mexican versions of the game honor indigenous and African roots and expand their presence, queer loterías work against the heteronormative roadmap of the original. This chapter will provide a brief sociohistorical context of the game and review the role of lotería in popular culture; especially contemporary re-imaginings that are instrumental in questioning heteronormativity. Finally, it will examine how Lotería: A Novel by Mario Alberto Zambrano performs Latin American immigrant intersectionality. The various queer lotería adaptations examined here open up possibilities of resistance against heteronormative expectations and social injustices that limit life chances.
