Working Trans in Jaime Cortez’s Sexile/Sexilio

Adrift at sea between Mariel Harbor, Cuba, and the United States, drowning in gloom and not yet lifted by expectation at the beginning of the second phase of her odyssey, Adela Vázquez, protagonist and testimoniante in Jaime Cortez’s Sexile/Sexilio, sits with the wounds and heartbreak of Cuba, the homeland that curtailed her possibilities of becoming someone she could love, the patria that expelled her and visited violence on her body to make clear Adela’s nonbelonging. Days before the scene where she utters the words above, Adela paid a taxi driver to get her to the stop where a bus would