INTERVIEW of MISTRIX VIOLETA with PENELOPE DARIO
IMAGES by MARIA LA SANGRE
Mistrix Violeta Felíx has brought her rich cultural background to the small but mighty city of Boston, where she provides a kinky release valve for a historically repressed population.
Latin culture is known to be permeated by the overt sexualization of women and the chauvinistic displays of “macho” masculinity, but what happens when a Puertorican-born domme subverts gendered power dynamics and catholic austerity? When Mx Violeta isn't putting her clients in bondage and teasing them with medical equipment, she is working with local organizations to help update archaic laws that harm sex workers in one of America’s oldest cities. Petit Mort’s Editor-In-Chief Penelope Dario picks Mx Violeta’s brain about how she balances her past present and future while bonding over their coincidental parallels as women who emigrated to Boston in the face of political and ecological instability in Latin America.
PETIT MORT (PENELOPE DARIO)
I'm curious—were you born in Puerto Rico, or did you come here when you were older? This issue we're focusing specifically on Latinx sex workers and that cultural influence in sex work. I feel like Latin culture itself is a very sexualized culture, and I think there's parts of that I can appreciate, and there’s a certain level of pride in that. But there's also the other side of it, where it's very fetishized. Latin women especially are very fetishized and hyper-sexualized in the media and carry that stigma. Becoming a dominatrix with a Latin background: what does that mean to you? I also feel like there's this culture of submission, but also matriarchy in Latin America, where the women are almost topping from the bottom. The women are “submissive to the men,” but everybody knows they run the household.
MISTRIX VIOLETA
I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I lived in Puerto Rico until I was 22; in 2017 I had to leave because of hurricane Maria. So I'm a climate refugee. Navigating the United States as a Puerto Rican, which is a colony, I [have to] engage with the colonizer and live in the colonizers land. When I started, I was very informed. I still held a lot of that wrath from what just happened, and was a big influence for me in the beginning. I was also very inspired by Mistress Velvet and their ideas on reparations. I'm not saying it's directly the same. And inspiration does not mean the actual reproduction, but there was a parallel in that I am putting the colonizer back in its place. That mentality that I had in the beginning, I've shifted a bit over time, because keeping that thought process is not healthy for the long term.