Inside Latin Cuir’s Utopia

Zia Ravenscroft

The first Latin Cuirs event I attended was an erotic poetry night last July. I had no idea what to expect. The poster advertised live performance and earthly delights—two of my favourite things—–while also making it clear that the evening would be sex-work positive, queer and takatāpui only, and prioritised BIPOC. The dress code was “whatever makes you feel good”. 

I arrived in jeans and a gay-guy skinny scarf. A friend of mine attended in green lingerie and was dubbed the “tangata whenua Tinkerbell” by at least three people. We watched a spellbinding performance by Misty Frequency, listened to sensual, queer poetry, and paid deliberate attention to our bodies and the power they held. I left feeling genuinely hopeful about my place in the world, despite the state of it—welcomed into a space unlike any I had known before. 

Erotic poetry nights are a regular fixture for Latin Cuirs, alongside movie nights, sex-siren workshops, performances, protests, and workshops. The grassroots organisation supports and empowers Latino queer and wider migrant communities in Aotearoa through a blend of activism and art, always grounded in a Latin American focus. 

For Pride this year, they are inviting us into their “Cuir Utopia”, a series of events and collaborations with other artists. I spoke with my friend and Latin Cuirs co-founder Lilith Del Mar about pleasure activism, migrant rights, and the shape of our own queer utopias. 

Latin Cuirs was founded by Lilith and Belen Cupeiro, who met in Aotearoa and quickly bonded over social justice, sexual health, and queerness. Lilith told me that moving to Aotearoa was the first time she felt able to be fully open about her queer identity. Yet queer events here felt overwhelmingly white; it was obvious she was not the intended audience. At Latino gatherings, meanwhile, she would be met with homophobia and transphobia. 

She and Belen found themselves repeatedly forced to choose between two essential parts of who they were. They were tired of queer culture being presumed synonymous with white culture. Drinking wine together one afternoon—as many consequential decisions are made—they realised there must be other queer Latinos navigating the same fracture. “That's how Latin Cuirs started,” Lilith said. ”Two friends going, ‘I’m sick of this shit!’” 

The first official event was simply a movie night at Belen’s whare, an invitation extended to queer and Latino friends. Lilith had noticed that many minority-centered events were framed with an unachievable standard of perfection. When everything is ‘excellent’ and ‘iconic’ there’s a belief that everything has to be very polished, which isn’t realistic. Showing up as yourself, in whatever makes you feel good, is a core part of Latin Cuirs’ kaupapa. 

Since that initial movie night, Latin Cuirs has branched out, engaging in more social events as well as moving into activism. This intersection comes from seeing how disengaged people in Aotearoa can be with politics and the government. Latin Cuirs didn’t want to choose between having a good time or thinking about politics, they wanted to do both. 

“Sometimes we do protests, sometimes we do parties, sometimes we do poetry,” Lilith said to me. 

Her and Belen complement each other well. Belen is organised, practical, and better at networking. Lilith is more creative. 

They’re “a very good match for building something”, Lilith explained. 

There’s also a need for different kinds of events for different kinds of audiences. The party gays might not be as interested in watching a documentary on campus, and the film nerds might not be as interested in watching a cabaret at Ivy. Lilith told me that she felt like if you want to protest here, it’s just about being angry. There is a place for anger in protests, but in Latin America “...there is also a lot of joy because we’re celebrating the way we’re all coming together…” in support of a cause and of each other.

The system wants us to feel bad, but not everything is suffering, Lillith explains. Imagination and art has a huge role to play in how we engage in politics and make it more accessible. When we live in a world (as we do) in which things are one sort of way (as they are) it becomes hard to think of anything beyond that. The only way that we can build better worlds for ourselves is by imagining what these better worlds might look like and creating the steps to get there. 

Latin Cuirs is heavily informed by pleasure activism, which as a term comes from writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown. 

“Us feeling like shit, us being exploited, is not inactive. It serves the system. How can we incorporate more pleasure or enjoy ourselves more when fighting for our rights? If we only come from a place of hurt, that’s not sustainable and you eventually do burn out”, Lilith explained. 

Pleasure activism poses the radical question: what if we didn’t have to suffer more than we already fucking do? Latin Cuirs have had meetings at the beach. They try to cultivate a loving space where your basic needs as a human are met first before getting down to business. 

For ANTIFA’z, one of the events in the Cuir Utopia series, Lilith said they’re trying to organise a dinner for their performers to cook for them and get to know each other better. If the performer-organiser relationship is more transactional and impersonal, it’s only replicating the same systems that have us oppressed. Performers are also paid above the average rate in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. There’s pleasure in being able to buy groceries and pay your rent without worrying, just as there’s pleasure in doing your artform and knowing you will be paid well for it. Using our imaginations and focusing on pleasure in this way makes the fight more sustainable and recognises that we are all human beings and all connected. 

Cuir Utopia also draws from Afro-futurism, using imagination as a tool for survival. This is what Lilith and Belen already see already happening in Latin America. Lilith, through laughter, tells me that the British really fucked us over here as even our Pride events are more proper and sterile. She wants to “tell people they have agency, because when you realise you can do something you can actually make it happen.” 

The first event of the Cuir Utopia series, ANTIFA’z, is a masquerade, cabaret, and party on the 14th of March co-produced with the performance artist and sex work activist Vixen Temple. 

It draws heavily on activist and drag queen Carmen Rupe (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Hauā, Ngāti Heke-a-Wai), particularly her famous balcony and the discreet teacup code she used to signal information to sex work clients. When Rupe lived in Wellington in 1967, she opened a late-night café called Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge, which also functioned as a sex work venue. 

In her system of signals, a cup placed upside down on a saucer indicated that a client was looking for a cisgender woman. A cup on its side signalled interest in a transgender person, while a saucer placed on top of a cup indicated a desire for someone of the same gender. A cup placed upside down on a saucer signalled a client was looking for a cisgender woman, a cup on the side of the saucer indicated a transgender person, and a saucer set on top of a cup meant a desire for someone of the same gender. 

Throughout history, queer people have always found ways to dress up and find community. Antifaz means a mask in Spanish and contains a double meaning of being anti-fascist. In the middle of the Cuir Utopia announcement poster, there’s an image of two people kissing, one of them wearing a mask. This image is from the first official pride parade in Argentina, where a lot of people wore masks for safety. Lilith tells me about attending Latin American festivals and carnivals where even though you might be wearing a mask or disguised, you feel like you can be transformed into someone more yourself. 

On the 20th of March, Latin Cuirs are also hosting a poetry night with the takatāpui art collective Utu Ā Matimati. Like the one I first attended, it’s at a secret location, entry is by koha, and there are limited spaces with priority given to BIPOC. Teirangi Klever, the 2025 National Poetry Slam Champion, and Vixen Temple will both be featured performers. 

The last event in the Cuir Utopia series is a film screening of the documentary El Laberinto de las Lunas, or The Labyrinth of the Moon. This will be held right here on campus on the 22nd of March in collaboration with the Latin American and Spanish Club. The film is about trans motherhood, trans childhood, and the labyrinths of identity. Lilith promises me I will cry as she describes it to me.

Lilith moved to Aotearoa seven years ago, when she was 24. She came to join her wife and remembers feeling like she “came from a completely different planet.” 

She says that being a migrant from the Global South is a completely different experience to being one from Europe, and it’s hard to fully understand without being one yourself. Migrating was an overwhelming and confusing process, as well as a confronting one for her growing awareness of migrant’s rights. 

Initially, Lilith could only move here on a visitor’s visa. She had applied for a partner visa and had to submit extensive proof to Immigration that they had spent a required amount of time together in a committed relationship. Lilith and her wife had been together for five years, but were still denied this partner visa. Despite these initial challenges, Lilith says that she feels a lot safer here as a woman. What really shocked her was how relaxed people are here and she describes the way she walks in Te Whanganui-a-Tara as “so carefree”. 

One of the flatmates in the first shitty flat she lived in was from Chile and friends with Belen, which is how Lilith first met her and other Latinos to form a community with. Her own less-than-ideal experiences with migration cemented migrant issues as an essential component of Latin Cuir’s activism. 

“Migration is a many-headed monster,” Lilith tells me. 

Looking into how migration is structured reveals a lot about the wider system. Immigration New Zealand is within the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment instead of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which makes a lot of sense given the current government’s tendency to treat real humans like a business. 

If you’re not a migrant, you’re not encouraged to learn about migrant rights and issues, but how those in power treat migrants is indicative of how they want to treat every other minority and eventually everyone. Applying for a visa is a very invasive process and puts the person applying for it in a vulnerable position where they can be exploited by employers or abused partners and have nowhere to go. Lilith discussed with me that Immigration often won’t do anything about this or support them getting onto another visa that removes them from an abusive situation, which is “a very inhumane way to treat people”.

A big project she has in mind for the future of Latin Cuirs is working on resources and information about tikanga Māori, te ao Māori, and the indigenous history of Aotearoa for when you get a visa. 

“When we arrive here we are encouraged to assimilate into the Pākehā world, and at no point in the migration process do we learn anything about Māori.” 

Lilith also wants to do more political activism, more work to affect the system, and more work on migration rights and reforms. We talk about how up until very recently, your HIV status affected your visa, and currently people on visas aren’t allowed to do sex work under the Prositution Reform Act which only puts people at further risk for exploitation and trafficking. 

Lilith recommends everyone learn more about activism in the Global South, “because we make things happen with not a lot of resources.” She says there’s a lot of theory and knowledge there that people in Aotearoa have never heard of. 

My final question for Lilith is asking what her own personal Cuir Utopia would look like. She tells me that it would look like: everyone being more comfortable with their sensuality and their body and being able to recognise the sensual power within themselves, something we bond over as disabled people. It looks like a world where the hierarchies of who gets to be desirable don’t exist. There would be a lot of cats everywhere, and a lot of empathy. 

“Often we lose empathy, for many reasons,” Lilith says, citing loss of empathy and human connection as the source of a lot of troubles. A better world is possible—–we just have to imagine it. 

Follow @latincuirs on Instagram to find more about their Cuir Utopia events and support their mahi!