Trans/Bolero/Drag/Migration: Music, Cultural Translation, and Diasporic Puerto Rican Theatricalities

[...] here it is the androgynous Caetano, who years before had openly declared his attraction to a young, sun-drenched, male Bahian surfer in his song "O leàozinho" (The Little Lion), the same Brazilian singer whose large musical production is marked by ambiguity and sexual/gender games, as César Braga-Pinto (2002) has observed; the same Caetano who sang in English, with Lila Downs, in Julie Taymor's 2002 film Frida, in which the grande dame of female masculine androgyny Chávela Vargas also appeared.2 In "Cucurrucucú," Caetano sings of a lover's lament for his absent love, crying, suffering, singing, moaning, passing through hunger, and finally dying of "mortal passion," after which his soul turns into a bird-love and death, tied together by the musical form.