Curvaceous challenge to tradition

The hour is late, and the dimly lighted streets around the Arlequin Theatre are empty save for prowling cops, wary taxi drivers and the ineffable aroma of fresh corn tortillas commingling with diesel fuel. But the striking blond with killer legs and linebacker shoulders is just warming up for the evening.

Striding through a backstage door in a modest blue skirt, matching blazer and 3-inch heels, Jacqueline Aristegui -- better known by her stage name, Libertad -- is besieged by a quartet of middle-aged fans who’ve been waiting patiently for 20 minutes. Though you’d think she’d be whipped after back-to-back performances of “Violines y Trompetillas” (“Violins and Little Trumpets”), a middlebrow sex farce, Libertad greets her visitors like long-lost cousins: “Mucho gusto, mi amor, felicidades!” Then she dashes off an autograph and flashes a toothy smile for an impromptu video group portrait.

Could this really be the most controversial woman in Mexico -- not counting President Vicente Fox’s lightning-rod spouse, Marta Sahagun?

What few in her native country dispute is that Libertad -- a former L.A. resident who in a previous, hormonally befuddled life was the male soap-opera star Armando Palomo Suarez -- has embarked on what she wryly calls “mi nueva realidad.” That “new reality,” the result of a 1997 sex-change operation in the United States, has made the 42-year-old actress Mexico’s most famous transgender person. The question is how Mexico will handle this startling transformation.

Until two months ago, it appeared that Libertad’s gender switch wasn’t going to be any big deal, certainly not a cause for front-page national news. But on the night of April 23, federal agents took Libertad into custody in the city of Puebla, about two hours southeast of Mexico City, where she’d been performing in a touring version of “Violines y Trompetillas.” She was charged with falsifying documents by identifying herself as a woman named Jacqueline rather than a man named Armando on a voter registration credential -- a federal offense. On June 8, a federal judge found Libertad guilty as charged.

In the weeks since she was detained, Libertad, who maintains that she is legally a woman, has been sucked into a legal imbroglio that could reshape the future of sexual rights in this socially conservative, staunchly Roman Catholic country. If an appeals process, expected to take six months, does not negate the judge’s decision, Libertad likely will be facing a four-year probationary sentence or even prison time -- in a women’s prison, that is.

“The authorities are negating that I am a woman, but they put me in the Reclusorio Femenino,” Libertad says, referring to the Mexico City lockup where she was held for 22 hours after being picked up in April. “So am I a woman or not?”

That question, according to Mexican authorities, is beside the point. Palomo-Aristegui wasn’t charged with swapping genders, they say, but with trying to pass her/himself off as one person when her/his legal identify was that of another. “We don’t have any racist or discriminatory intentions against anything or anyone,” says Ernesto Prieto Ortega, director of the Civil Registry of Mexico City, which maintains official records and authenticates personal data on millions of Mexicans. “We don’t have any opinion. We comply with the law.”

But Libertad and her supporters argue that the real issue in her case is that the Mexican government doesn’t want to recognize transsexuals as a group or cede them any legal rights. “I feel as if I were a criminal,” Libertad says, “and I’m not a criminal.”

A homebody offstage

If she didn’t exist, Pedro Almodovar might have had to invent her for one of his outrageous, gender-skewering melodramas. But there’s nothing self-consciously over the top about Libertad. Spend a few hours in her company and you’ll witness no diva histrionics, hear no gushing reminiscences of fabulous parties or scandalous dish about fellow celebs. Apart from a tendency to refer to herself in the third person, Libertad is about as un-campy as they come.

She adores American country music. When she lived in L.A., her idea of a hot date was a trip to Disneyland or Universal Studios. With her big-boned amiability and soft-spoken earnestness, she recalls Roberta Muldoon, the former Philadelphia Eagles tight end turned transsexual in John Irving’s novel “The World According to Garp.” And her own life story is as much the stuff of fiction.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as Armando Palomo, she was one of Latin America’s most familiar TV faces. Palomo cut a dashing figure in Spanish-language telenovelas like “Rosa Salvaje” and “Entrega Total,” at one time commanding upward of $10,000 per month, a hefty paycheck in the Latin entertainment world. These roles were juggled with a busy stage career -- Cornelius Hackle in “Hello, Dolly!” was a personal favorite.

A big chunk of the money that Palomo-Libertad made from telenovelas went for her sexual makeover. Another part helped pay for her home in the southern hills overlooking Mexico City, which she built in 1985. Libertad shares her digs with a feisty Chihuahua, Putty, three Dobermans (Rommel, Ikram and Kurt), her mother and her 94-year-old grandmother. She says she spends much of her time at home, sitting out on her terrace, looking at the mountains, writing, thinking. “I’m a little bit reserved. I like very much to be in my own space. I’m not much of a partyer.”

Perhaps, but she’s also no wallflower, or pushover. It takes what Mexicans call huevos -- literally “eggs,” but you can use your imagination -- for a young woman, let alone a man or former man, to walk down the streets here in a tight-fitting skirt or a hot pair of pumps. Libertad recalls one particularly unpleasant encounter with a group of taxi drivers outside Mexico City airport about four months ago.

“They began to make jokes: ‘Ay, can you believe it!’ ‘Go out with me!’ I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ You’re not going to educate them; you’re not going to change them. But when I entered for the last time they shouted at me, ‘Goodbye, maricon!’ -- a slang term for homosexual.

While a group of policemen stood by laughing, Libertad turned on the men. “I said to them, ‘Who are you calling maricon? I want to know who is the most brave of you who wishes to get into a fight with me outside of here?’ ” According to Libertad, there were no takers.

The son of a bullfighter, Libertad says she first realized she was “a strange boy” around age 6 or 7, when she secretly began dressing up in her parents’ clothes when they weren’t around. What particularly anguished her throughout adolescence, and later drove her to see a psychologist, was that she still felt attracted to women. Married and divorced once, Libertad now has a girlfriend.

Despite money, a home and a thriving career, Palomo still clung to the dream of becoming a woman. But it wasn’t fulfilled until Palomo decided to move to Los Angeles in 1995, following a short stint making soap operas in Venezuela. While living in Eagle Rock and later in San Diego, Palomo completed the long and expensive sex-change process. Since her identity switchover, Libertad says she has been able to put to rest another dream that haunted her for years, of being chased by a shadowy figure and taking refuge in a tree filled with black butterflies. For a long time the vision frightened and puzzled her. Now she has an interpretation:

“A butterfly in a stage of its life is a worm that has to crawl on the ground, as I crawled for many years of my life, until one day I had the opportunity to take myself much further in order to be born a cocoon, a chrysalis. This chrysalis was the United States. For me it was a cocoon in that I was preparing a new self that I would leave to fly, and this new self now is called Libertad.”

A media circus

If Libertad were an obscure transgender hairstylist, or a transsexual hooker turning tricks on Insurgentes Avenue, instead of a well-known actor with poise and personality to burn, few Mexicans probably would care one peso about that new self. Instead, the Mexican media have flocked to her case, though Libertad says not all the attention is welcome. Many reporters ask questions like: What bathroom do you use, the men’s or the women’s?

“They want a circus,” Libertad says. “One day they present women joined at the head, the next a cow with five feet and the next Libertad!”

But since the news of her legal battle went public, gay- and human-rights advocates have rallied around her. Mario Arteaga, a human rights lawyer and organizer of a June 26 Gay Pride Parade that drew tens of thousands to Mexico City, says that while one or two other transgender Mexicans have entered the public eye, Libertad’s case is “bringing a light to a very strong set of problems in which many women live.”

Libertad, who marched in the parade as an invited guest, contends that she’s fighting not only for transsexuals but also for gays, lesbians and others who don’t conform to Mexico’s prevailing norms of macho men and deferential women. “If I lose, I don’t just lose for me. It’s like being Negro in a country of pure whites, or it’s like being a dwarf in a country of tall people, or it means being a thinker in a country of fools. This is the worst, that we are in a country of fools, of closed people, and the worst that you can be is to be a thinker.”

Some ordinary Mexicans believe that the government’s actions against Libertad are a pointless distraction from glaring social problems like corruption, drug trafficking and a recent kidnapping epidemic. “Her private life isn’t important to us, it’s already known that he is transsexual. They should leave him in peace,” said Ramon Valadez Garcia, 47, a clothing seller, after attending a performance of “Violines y Trompetillas” with his wife and three sons.

As for her fellow entertainers, they appear to care more about Libertad’s acting chops than her hormone count. Following her sexual makeover in December 1997, Libertad at first was hesitant about returning to her homeland and considered searching for acting jobs in the United States. “Mexico is a very difficult place, there is a lot of machismo, they are going to attack me, they are going to hurt me, I shouldn’t be here,” she thought at the time.

But in 2000 an actor friend, Carmen Salinas, lobbied her to take over a principal role in a play, “Aventurera,” which turned into a succes de scandale once the public got wind of Libertad’s gender switch. Since then, even a major Mexican TV network has been willing to cast Libertad as a woman. In the popular telenovela “Entre El Amor y El Odio,” (“Between Love and Hate”) her character, a deranged nurse, even had a romantic relationship with a man.

“As a human being, she has gained the affection of those who work with him/her, [for] the respect and professionalism as an actress that she has demonstrated,” says Alberto “El Caballo” Rojas, the veteran Mexican comic who costars with Libertad and Alejandro Suarez in “Violines y Trompetillas.”

And while he personally doesn’t put much stock in the idea of transgender rights -- “It seems to me that there are other problems that are much graver and urgent that need to be legislated” -- Rojas does allow that, “from the simply human point of view, it seems more respectable what Armando Palomo did than what the soldiers in Iraq did with the prisoners.”

Self-assured persona

As another recent performance of “Violines y Trompetillas” breaks up, Libertad waves ta-ta to the stragglers and lopes out the door to her VW Rabbit. She is heading across town to “Un Lugar Con Libertad” (“A Place With Liberty”), a cabaret bar on South Insurgentes Avenue, a slightly down-market version of the Sunset Strip.

The crowd is a fizzy cocktail of straight and gay, businessmen in suits and transvestites in an array of can-you-top-this ensembles. A Cuban waiter fetches drink orders. A singing cowboy with glistening pecs warms up the crowd with traditional Mexican romantic music, followed by a female blues singer belting out, inevitably, “I Will Survive.”

Finally, around 1 a.m., accompanied by a blast of dry-ice fog, Libertad takes the stage, blond-tressed, red-lipsticked, fish-netted and topping it all with a ‘30s-style beaded dress and matching choker. After years of trying to be something that she wasn’t, Libertad says, “I don’t have the desire to be two people.”

But as she works the narrow room, laughing and joking, sharing her microphone with audience members, ad-libbing about her legal trials, dropping her range from a silky tenor to a rumbly baritone, you wonder if a single name will suffice for such an oversize personality.

Two assistants hold up a large cloth. A strobe light flickers across the stage. Libertad turns her back on the audience and performs her latest metamorphosis. When she faces the crowd again a few seconds later, she is wearing a double-breasted man’s suit and slicked-back hair, every inch the Latin lothario -- by way of Marlene Dietrich.

“Behold the black butterfly!” her presence seems to declare. With a wink toward the front row, Libertad breaks into a new song. What evolutionary stage comes next is anyone’s guess.

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Times researcher Froylan Enciso in Mexico City contributed to this report.