Emmanuel "Babelito" Ortega and Justin "FavyFav" Favela are "Latinos Who Lunch."
This weekend they travel to Los Angeles for RuPaul's DragCon.
“It is a big conference where different drag queens around the United States and around the world – I think there are a couple of international ones. They get to have a booth. They get to meet people,” Ortega said.
They also have panels on everything from drag performance to starting a drag career.
Sunday at 3 p.m., Ortega and Favela will be presiding over a panel discussion, which will also be a live "Latinos Who Lunch" podcast the panelists will be Alexis Mateo, April Carrion, and Cynthia Lee Fontaine
They are all Latinx drag queens and they'll be talking about issues connected to that community.
Favela said he watched "RuPaul's Drag Race" before coming out and now he's part of the drag event.
“I have to pinch myself every time I think about me secretly watching “Drag Race” at the computer lab at UNLV and now I’m hosting a panel with the same drag queens I was watching back then. It’s incredible,” he said.
And as for the term "Latinx," Ortega and Favela said that it is a word that made its way up through popular culture as a way to get away from Latino for male and Latina for female.
“There has been some sort of controversy around that term because it seems to be more inclusive of younger generations as opposed to older generations but it’s part of the popular imagination,” Ortega said.
But it is a term that has not made its way to Latin America. Each region, country, even city in Latin America has different terms for queer people and level of inclusivity and acceptance, they said.
As far as inclusiveness of Latinx in Las Vegas, Ortega and Favela say there are spaces but they would like to see more. They said in other cities have more dedicated clubs and bars.
Emmanuel Ortega, co-host, Latinos Who Lunch; Justin Favela, co-host, Latinos Who Lunch
