Maricas Unidas Argentinas (MUA; roughly "United Argentine Queers" in English) was a small clandestine mutual aid group formed in Buenos Aires that operated between the late 1940s and the 1950s, in an environment of intensified persecution of LGBTQ people in Argentina. The term marica is a Spanish-language slur comparable to "faggot" or "sissy" in English, and at the time was used by people who today would be read as effeminate gay men and those who would be considered trans women or travestis, before those concepts became widespread. MUA emerged as a mutual support network for those detained in the Devoto prison, where homosexuals (defined as "amorals") were sent in a context of intensified persecution.
Knowledge of MUA first emerged in the 2010s through testimonies by one of its founders, Malva SolÃÂs, and its existence was further substantiated in the 2020s with the rediscovery of a feature devoted to the group in the sensationalist magazine Ahora. While SolÃÂs places the group's origins around 1948, the Ahora chronicle maintains that it was in 1957. This means that the group predates Nuestro Mundo, often considered the first LGBTQ organization in Latin America, by at least 10 years, and has forced a more complex understanding of the history of the movement. It has been described as the first documented act of trans activism, and possibly the first LGBTQ organization in Argentina.
Before the concepts of travesti, transgender and gay became established and widespread in the second half of the 20th century, Argentine maricas or locas constituted a group situated at the intersection of what is now understood as gender identity and sexual orientation, and included both people who today would be read as effeminate gay men and those who would be considered trans women or travestis.
In the discourse of the Argentine press, the police and the state in the mid 20th century, male homosexuality was framed as a moral and social problem and categorized under the label of "amorals" (Spanish: amorales). Although grounded in earlier repressive practices and discourses, during the government of Juan Domingo Perón the persecution intensified and began to be articulated more explicitly as a state policy, culminating, between late 1954 and early 1955, in large anti-homosexual raids (razzias), conceived as the police expression of a campaign promoted by the Ministry of the Interior, within broader debates on the prophylaxis law, prostitution and public morality.
Repression manifested both in mass arrests and the transfer of detainees to police facilities and to the Devoto prison, as well as in a public staging of punishment through sensationalist press coverage that displayed the detainees. The 1940s and 1950s are remembered in LGBTQ history in Argentina as the time that systematically inaugurated the persecution of gays and travestis, whether or not they engaged in prostitution, leading to prolonged periods of detention. Nevertheless, incarceration also fostered the formation of new community ties among maricas, who were confined in a homosexual ward, where they even developed their own argot, carrilche (which within the slang itself means marica), allowing them to communicate without being understood by the police or by other prisoners.
Although short-lived, MUA has been described as the first documented act of trans activism, and may possibly be the first LGBTQ organization in Argentina. Its existence only became known in recent years through the accounts of Malva SolÃÂs (1919âÂÂ2015), considered "the oldest travesti in Argentina", and through her autobiography Mi recordatorio (2010), an interview conducted by researcher MarÃÂa Soledad Cutuli in an article published in 2013, and the documentary Con nombre de Flor (2019), directed by Carina Sama.
In 2022, the first graphic testimony about the group was rediscovered, consisting of a cover story from the sensationalist magazine Ahora dated November 1958, which made it possible for historiansâÂÂpreviously skeptical of exclusively oral accountsâÂÂto acknowledge its existence and inaugurated an even greater level of complexity in studies on the origins of LGBTQ movements in Argentina. The accounts of SolÃÂs and the report in Ahora present several discrepancies, including the date of the group's founding: whereas SolÃÂs places it around 1948, the magazine situates it in 1957.
This means that the formation of MUA predates by at least ten years that of the group Nuestro Mundo, often cited as the first organization of the LGBT movement in the history of Argentina and of Latin America as a whole. According to SolÃÂs, she and other maricas came together to support one another in the face of street persecution and the experience of incarceration. The organization was fundamentally mutual in character and provided assistance to those detained in prison through emotional support, clothing and food, as well as after their release, when many found themselves evicted from their boarding houses and dismissed from their jobs. By contrast, the sensationalist account in Ahora not only falsifies some of the names and ages of the maricas of MUA, but also accuses them of stealing money from churches in order to squander it on alleged orgiastic parties.