The “Gato Macho” who named Mexico City’s gay district
The most famous Mexican artist you've never heard of was Mexico's greatest womanizer, once put his own semen on display, and gave Zona Rosa its name
José Luis Cuevas was born above a paper mill in Mexico City.
This was around1934. His first memories were of the street life below his bedroom window: mostly sex workers, dying men, and dead dogs.1
But by 1960 his work—colorless ink sketches of society’s outcasts, infirm, deformed, and mad—had completely revolutionized what Mexicans accepted as “art”.
He would be compared to Bosch and Goya.
He would be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and praised in The New York Times.
He would illustrate Kafka’s Metamorphosis (with himself as the bug) and become close friends with Borges.
Picasso would buy two of his paintings.
He’s all but forgotten in the rest of the world today. But in the latter half of the 20th century, el Niño terrible del arte mexicano had completely changed what it meant to be an artist in Mexico, in the process becoming the country’s most famous artist—not to mention its most infamous womanizer.
But appropriately enough, in between making a giant monument of a man pissing in Colima, and fighting off the advances of Marlene Dietrich, and having 657 extra-marital affairs, and being accused of being an anti-Mexican CIA agent, and putting his own semen on display, José Luis Cuevas—the man trying to forge a new artistic identity for himself and Mexico—also gave a name to the neighborhood in Mexico City that has provided a sense of identity for the LGBTQ community, and which is the subject of our letter today: Zona Rosa.
The man behind the pink zone
Like every successful artist, José Luis Cuevas was well-adjusted.
His detractors said he was vain (he made drawings of himself every day for almost thirty years). 2
They said he was a pathological liar (including about his age). 3
They said he was a hypochondriac, obsessed with sickness and death, especially his own.
And it was true: He spent his teenage years drawing the patients of La Castañeda, the psychiatric hospital where his brother worked and, well, I ask you, does this look like the art of a terribly balanced individual:
“My interest in the dying and the insane,” Cuevas said, “is my vision of modern life.”
Ahead of his time, this one!
Perhaps most of all, Cuevas was known to be opinionated—especially about other artists.
He thought Salvador Dali lacked imagination.
He called Diego Rivera a fraud.
He first came to national attention when he, age 19, published La cortina del nopal (The Nopal Curtain), an article in which he criticized the muralist style—Rivera’s style—that prevailed in Mexican art.
You know all those grandiose and colorful Rivera frescoes you see around Mexico City? In Bellas Artes? And the Palacio Nacional? And The Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market?
Yeah he thought those were shit.
“I have not wanted to become a Juan,” Cuevas wrote, describing the kind of people who blindly followed the nationalist, government-approved style of painters like Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. “On the contrary, I have fought against the Juans all my life. Against vulgarity and mediocrity. Against superficiality and conformity. Against the standardized opinions that are parroted over and over again.”
In other words, Cuevas’ work fought against the idea that he had to be like everybody else. Accordingly, he did not suffer fools.
But he certainly suffered the attentions of women.
Six hundred and fifty-seven of them, all affairs during the decades he was married to his first wife (whom he met, btw, while she was volunteering in that psychiatric institution).
He boasted about his liaisons in his book, Gato Macho, and encouraged his reputation in his column for Excelsior, "Cuevario", and on his radio show “Half an hour of Intimacy with José Luis Cuevas”.4
And of course, he boasted about how women flung themselves at him while he caroused in the bars and theaters and cafes of the neighborhood that he would christen Zona Rosa.
Too naive to be red, too frivolous to be white
Today, Zona Rosa is gay HQ.
You’ve got Vaqueros, the Western-themed bar. You’ve got El Almacen, with weekly drag shows. You’ve got El Taller, with their almost-nude dancers.
There’s also a popular speakeasy5, several super good South Korean restaurants, and my favorite spot: Antiques Center Plaza del Angel.
Big nightlife in Zona Rosa, too, of course. Mostly young club goers. Lots of street vendors, too, mostly around the Insurgentes metro station. Gives the area a raucous and youthfully rebellious vibe, kinda like St. Mark’s in NYC.
It’s also the headquarters for CDMX’s annual gay pride parade, or Marcha del Orgullo LGBT, which takes place on Saturday, June 24th this year. Second largest pride parade in the world, after NYC.
Here, enjoy this brief and highly amateurish video I took on Reforma at Pride 2022, featuring the lovely crew from La Mas Draga, the Mexican drag queen challenge reality show:
Officially, Zona Rose is part of Colonia Juárez, which is located just west of El Centro, the historic center of Mexico City (where Cuevas was born).6
Juárez was the first part of the modern city to be built beyond El Centro (we’ll cover why in a subsequent post). At the end of the 19th century, the up-and-coming neighborhood became a favorite getaway for the wealthy elite of Mexico City.
Accordingly, the architecture is wild.
Interspersed between homes and offices built in Mexico’s homegrown architectural style, Cemex Nouveau7, and sitting beside charmless steel facades housing e.g. Erotika Love Store, you can find examples of French Second Empire and Beaux Arts style buildings, complete with boxy Mansard roofs (despite the fact that it never snows here). This is one of Mexico City’s great charms—every block is a pastiche of Spanish colonial and northern European styles peeking from behind sub-tropical palms and fronds and leaves.
Between Juárez’s founding and today, the area now known as Zona Rosa was less Chelsea, more Greenwich Village: that is, it was home to artists and intellectuals and galleries, giving it a bohemian reputation. It was also home to prostitutes.
True to form, Cuevas didn’t like many of the artists and intellectuals. He absolutely loathed beatniks, who smoked (he didn’t), drank (he didn’t), and had mucho barba y poco talento. But he did like the prostitutes.
“They were my muses, at that time,” he would say.
And so, during one of his gallery showings in the late 50s, he told a reporter that his work was exploring “themes of zona roja (red zone) in this zona rosa (pink zone)” — by which he meant to suggest that the neighborhood was, more or less, prostitution lite.
That’s how Zona Rosa got its name.
Well, I mean, that’s how Cuevas said Zona Rosa got its name, anyway.
Cuevas told many stories in his life, many of those conflicting, and who knows whether that one’s true.
Another, more commonly referenced origin, comes from a similar quotation: "Es demasiado ingenua para ser roja, pero demasiado frívola para ser blanca, por eso es precisamente rosa.” Or, in other (English) words: It’s too naive to be red, but too frivolous to be white, for this reason it is precisely pink."
That quotation has been attributed to Cuevas, too.
And yet another potential origin story contends that Cuevas named Zona Rosa after Rosa Carmina, a famous Mexican actress. It’s said Cuevas admitted as much to the press on multiple occasions, though I confess I haven’t been able to find those interviews.
Regardless. To explore Zona Rosa, start at El Ángel de Independencia and head south and west, finally stopping at Fifty Mils inside The Four Seasons for the best cocktails you’ve ever had.
And, to explore the legacy of José Luis Cuevas you can visit his museum, which is located in an ex-convent hidden away on a side street in Centro. Entrance is 20 pesos, or about one dollar. Dominating the center of the museum is La Giganta: a 26-foot sculpture, half-man and half-woman, that Cuevas said expressed “sexual duality”.
An appropriate way to remember, I’d say, the progressive artist who gave the name to Mexico’s most progressive neighborhood.
To which we say: Happy Pride 🏳️🌈
The Moon Scar City Travel Guide
Every letter is a travel guide for the culturally curious. As we continue publishing, we’ll keep track of the places mentioned in our notion, which you can find here.
José Luis Cuevas: A Childhood, Artforum, 1968
"Algunos dicen que soy vanidoso porque desde 1955 me tomo una foto diaria, costumbre que sólo acabará con mi muerte, pero no entienden que lo que busco rescatar es la imagen decrépita del hombre que despierta con sus sueños terribles y la angustia que me provoca el paso del tiempo. Lo que más detesto de la condición humana es la vanidad, pienso que es abominable aquel que se dedica a darse importancia.” Entrevista con José Luis Cuevas / El ombligo de Cuevas, Reforma, 2000.
Excelsior, the magazine where Cuevas wrote columns for many years, argued in their obituary for Cuevas that he was actually born in 1931, and that he (Cuevas) only said 1934 out of vanity.
“A las mujeres les gustan los exitosos y, desde muy jovencito, por mi notoriedad, me volví atractivo, sobre todo para las mujeres cuarentonas de la alta burguesía que buscaban aventuras conmigo. Te aclaro que si hubiera pretendido a sus hijas, hubiera salido a patadas por la puerta de servicio. Ahora bien, nunca he iniciado los escarceos amorosos, siempre he dejado que la mujer lo haga; y bien aprendí de mi padre que "a las viejas" hay que cumplirles. ¿Sabes?” Entrevista con José Luis Cuevas / El ombligo de Cuevas, Reforma, 2000.
Handshake Speakeasy. But gawd I wish this trend would go away, I truly do. Stop pretending to hide my liquor!
The colonia (neighborhood) now known as Juárez was mostly shallow lake waters and swampland until the late 19th century, when an American businessman developed it into Colonia Americana—renamed to Juárez in 1906 on the birthday anniversary of Benito Juárez, one of Mexico’s most revered former presidents. You’ll notice that many of the streets in this neighborhood (where I live, btw) are named after European capitals: Roma, Milán, Hamburgo, Londres, Berlín, etc., and that is thanks to early resident and ex-consulate of Mexico Ricardo García Granado, who was celebrating the cities where his children had been born while he was performing his diplomatic duties.
Not an actual architectural style!