La Petróleo moves her hips sinuously like a palm tree, as she walks between the colorful terraces of La Palma street in Cadiz.
Low-heeled sandal, tight red lycra jumpsuit, high ponytail and earrings of fine jewelry, at her 78th birthday.
The adorable transsexual neighbor, an unrepentant devotee of the Virgin of La Palma and, above all, a folk artist, has redressed herself with the aura of a diva, despite the fact that she has been away from her for five years.
"Oil, beautiful,
to
the street for
you
," a neighbor yells at her, paraphrasing that viral moment of
Queen of Holy Tuesday
.
She turns, excited, greets, blows kisses and gives compliments before pulling the cord that she discovers a new change in the gazetteer of Cádiz.
The home of her beloved brotherhood, once Calle de San Nicolás, is now Via
Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora
.
And the folklore cries, dances and blurts out: “Cadiz loves me whole, not as a fagot, but as a person and as an artist”.
But La Petróleo —just plain or, at best, with the surname “de Cádiz”— (Cádiz, 78 years old), may be wrong.
Her neighborhood of La Viña wants her as is, without juxtapositions: an emblem of freedom and, at the same time, a living testimony of a humble vineyard that touched the skies of the group of national and international folk stars, the one that admired Rocío Jurado with a fandango and the one who cooked a gypsy cabbage —a typical stew from the province— for Lola Flores in Miami.
The two are usually recurring anecdotes that the artist keeps up her sleeve when asked by any journalist —which, lately, was scarce— who approaches her to interview her.
But the new street that the City Council dedicated to her and her artistic partner, La Salvaora (Cádiz, 71 years old) this past Thursday, has returned her to the spotlight.
And La Petróleo seems delighted.
In the absence of her friend, sick with covid, Tete — as her friends call her — shines for both of them and laughs nonstop.
"Look how beautiful she was here at 22 years old," she says, pointing to a painting of hers hanging in the living room of the house that she shares with her sister, Encarnación Casal, just after having discovered her path.
"I felt like a woman when I put on a bata de cola," she adds with a smile.
Petróleo is not very up to date with what each letter of the group represents.
For her, a generic “faggot” encompasses everything.
But she launches, between laughs, a message for young trans: “Now there are many of us, because we should all have the right to live free.
But to some I would tell them not to be too ordinary.”
La Petróleo dances and sings during the opening ceremony of the 'Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora' street together with the mayor of Cádiz, José María González 'Kichi', this past Thursday.
Michael Gomez
Petroleum does not grant licenses for sadness.
He only becomes solemn to promise that he has led a good life: “I have always been happy.
There were families who kicked the fagot out of their houses, but my mother always supported me.
They stopped her to tell her what I was and she always said: 'You don't need to tell me, I'm here to support her'.
But the journalist Raúl Solís knows well that "behind the glitter there is a lot of misery."
Attracted by that life of chiaroscuro, he dedicated a chapter of his work
About him The double transition
to the artistic couple from Cadiz.
Although Petróleo says, at the same time, that "with the Franco regime there was curtain cloth", but that they never got involved with them, Salvaora already told Solís about those suffocating years of the dictatorship in which they could only "dress as a woman at night".
The two artists met in 1963 at Bar la Constancia, a stop for sailors and dissidents from the LGTBI community in Cádiz.
"We used to go out at night when we couldn't," recalls La Petróleo.
They were hard years, also economically.
Daughters of humble single mothers, they made up with the red powder of crushing bricks and used chewing gum as false nails.
But the fortunes of Petróleo and Salvaora began to change with the arrival of democracy.
A doctor helped them by prescribing their first hormones that would allow them to pave the way for "the conquest of their own identity", as Solís points out.
The artistic takeoff came with
Las Folclóricas Gaditanas
, a flamenco group made up of three transsexual women and two gypsy guitarists, a true revolution that toured many Spanish tablaos in the eighties.
It is in those honeys of the great show business, immortalized as flashes in the paintings that decorate her living room, where La Petróleo revels with pleasure.
“In Miami we made $1,000 a week.
For less we were not going to cross the pond! ”, She exclaims, while she energetically slaps on the table.
From that American dream, which lasted more than two years, the artist remembers Domingo, her “great love”.
“He was very good, but he died, life…” adds the artist, without going into details.
La Petróleo and La Salvaora remained active until the first decade of the 2000s, already as local singers.
There was no gala that the first one did not miss, including the one she organized to raise funds to fix the church of her beloved brotherhood in La Palma.
“Until, five years ago, performing in Madrid I suffocated and fell.
They told me I had asthma and I already left it, "summarizes the singer.
With the withdrawal, Petróleo was left with a pension of 700 euros and an entire neighborhood, La Viña, to travel as the institution that it likes to be, weathering the Cadiz joke, giving hugs and compliments to those who claim them.
Always, yes, in the morning.
"That night I already lived for many years," she exclaims sitting at a table on a terrace, with five other ladies who cheer her on endlessly.
“She is always on the corner near the church,
show
.
She has told me about her life, when it was a crime to be like her, those races to get out of the way, you see what she has fought for.
It is a flag of bad times”, says Francis Lucero, older brother of the brotherhood of La Palma that she idolizes.
In La Viña there seems to be unanimity that the street to the artists —which adds to the tribute that the City Council paid to both in 2016— was a necessary gesture.
“It deserves a place in the neighborhood.
She has been very excited that it is close to the church, ”adds the brother.
So close that now Petróleo and Salvaora give name to the mailing address of the temple to which the former never misses a morning to pray.
On Thursday, dressed as an artist, she was not sure if she should go in, but in the end she decided.
Exultant, she stood before her virgin and her Christ, she opened her arms and exclaimed: "Being with you, happier still, because I love you madly, thank you for this day, my mother!".
La Petróleo pays homage to the Virgin of La Palma in the church of the same name in the La Viña neighborhood, moments after the Calle de las Artistas Petróleo y Salvaora was inaugurated in Cádiz.Miguel Gomez
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