Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that expands how we tell stories about nature in a way that considers ancestry, colonization, migration trauma, and other issues.

“So after coming out, I went to Mexico, which is where my mother's from, and spent most of my time there interacting in queer communities and queer spaces. And it just made such a huge difference. It was, again, such a flip from what I had seen in the US where so much of queer media and queer representation is mostly white, right? And creates this idea that the queer community automatically means the white community and Thankfully, I think that's shifted a lot. I think shows like Vida that came out recently and just a ton of other movies that are coming out lately and books by Latinx queer writers are really shifting that. I think this generation coming up now will have so much more representation to look at. But for me, I think what was most healing and most necessary at that time was to go back to Mexico and to see for myself what queerness looked like under a Mexican context. How it was different than what I had seen in the States, how it might more feel like home.

And also really unpacking the history behind queerness and Latinx culture is how it had always been there, right? This idea that it was invented recently or something that just came out of nowhere is completely false. And really understanding the way indigenous communities in Mexico had interpreted queerness, had words for queerness. There was a word that I learned, patlacheh, which is a Nahuatl word that meant women that were in love with other women. And had been used for a really long time. So learning that history of transgender communities in Oaxaca that were called muxes. Just knowing that there was always terminology for this. These ideas always existed.

A lot of writers of color have talked about this. James Baldwin had a similar experience when he went to France, you know, that was the most American he had ever felt. And I think this is the case for a lot of people who have a marginalized identity in the United States.”

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