Tortillas and Trannies at Dallas Taquerías

"Pistol-whipping" dick jokes, littered with chingas and pinches, spill from the glossy lips of an eye-poppingly beautiful woman in a rat-a-tat rhythm that keeps time with her hips as they shake to the beat of a Selena Gomez song. Colored lights above the corner stage whir back and forth, accentuating her dance moves at a taquería in East Dallas.

Danny Fulgencio

Danny Fulgencio

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Get a look at the shows in this video by Danny Fulgencio.


Check out our slideshow for more photos.

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More About

• Los Altos
• Karina Duarte
• Gabriel Duarte
• Food and Cooking
• Eating Out

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The restaurant, one-room Los Altos de Jalisco on Abrams Road, is decorated with beer flags and framed pastoral scenes leading back to a galley kitchen, where the cook is better at flirting with the waitress than reheating tortillas. It's a sleepy place during lunch hours, when, if more than one table is occupied, it's a rush. But that's not uncommon among the scores of tiny taco shops across the city. The only thing that makes Los Altos stand out from other taco joints is the white delivery van parked outside. Pasted on its sides are colorful ads for weekend drag shows.

Somehow, the brightly made-up images of women who were once men don't attract much of a lunchtime clientele. At night, it's a different world.

The woman on stage this night is Gaby Duarte, one of the most acclaimed acts in the small DFW transgender and drag show (called travesty shows) circuit, who can pack a restaurant from wall to wall.

The short, olive-skinned 35-year-old Salvadoran native, born Gabriel Duarte, claims her popularity is born from her true audience. "I perform for the babies," says Duarte before she dons a wig and takes the stage. "It's very family friendly." Two transsexuals—Duarte and the bulbous, grizzled-trucker-voiced Chantal—join drag queen Cesar Martinez (aka Karina Duarte) to lip sync hits of Latin American female pop sensations and chug beer given to them by mustachioed men in denim and cowboy hats.

There are men from Durango and Chiapas, Colombia and Chihuahua. They are thin, muscular, chunky, single, married— and clearly fascinated by the show.

Offstage, Duarte, who has been featured on Spanish-language TV network Univision, chats frankly about how donning her first dress at age 16 led to her stage career—and a garage filled with $150,000 worth of outfits. Duarte says travesty (or sometimes "tranvesty") shows became her calling when, more than 15 years ago, she was asked if she wanted to perform at a Hollywood gay club's amateur night.

"It felt right and was fun," she says. "So I did it again."

The same frankness fills her act. Within minutes of taking the small elevated stage, she is peppering her jokes and anecdotes with foul language. A toddler dances near the stage, clutching a dollar bill for Gaby. It's 10 p.m. on a Sunday. Duarte works her way to the girl, picks up the tyke and gives her a peck on the cheek as the little one stuffs the wrinkled note into Duarte's cleavage. Hefty Chantal also homes in on the babe.

The irony here is as ample as the fake breasts Duarte got in 1993: Latin American culture is stereotypically homophobic, so chock full of machismo that any perceived threat to masculinity is often met with violence.

Or that's how it used to be.

"Our culture is changing," Carlos Cortez, the DJ and master of ceremonies of the show at Los Altos, says nonchalantly before displaying a photo of his son born the previous week.

Latin American culture is indeed experiencing a paradigm shift. In Mexico City, the city council in 2009 voted to legalize gay marriage. The Holy See and many conservative Catholics bristled at this decision, but it's too late. Businesses have already dug in their claws. As one local restaurant manager told me, "It's a way to promote ourselves. It doesn't matter if it's through women who were once men. Things are slow during the day."

Not all the shows at local taquerías feature transvestites and transsexuals; there are the usual mariachis, but musicians don't bring in the revenue sexy performers do.

Some of the jokes at Duarte's Los Altos performance might stretch the boundaries of what's considered family friendly, but at El Parral in Carrollton, another establishment where Duarte shimmies and shakes and mouths lines into a microphone, that isn't an issue. There are no kids at a recent show there, which features Vegas-showgirl headdresses and PG-13 wit.

Sandra Cavalli, headliner of the La Catharaita show on Thursday nights at El Parral, struts across the floor. Her shtick involves direct interaction with the audience, such as caressing a shoulder and begging a married father-to-be to be gay for her. Cavalli walks the line between grotesque humor and vaudevillian zinger. Equally risque is her onstage "sister" Camilla Cavalli, a young male performer transitioning into womanhood, a 5-o'clock shadow juxtaposed with nascent breasts and long black hair, who hikes up her skirt to reveal a cleanly shaven thigh and gyrates to the cumbia blasting over the sound system.

A man in the audience, sitting with an attractive female date, whistles and catcalls during the numbers. He even bends over and digs his butt into a performer's crotch and is ignored as if he were part of the bedazzling act pushed along by the DJ at the back of the stage, ready to add a prerecorded rim shot to a cheesy punchline. As Duarte and Cavalli both said on separate occasions, "What we do is comedy."